Juliet Stevenson On ‘The Letters,’ Mother Teresa, Her Doubts About God [EXCLUSIVE]

Interview by Erik Meers

British actress Juliet Stevenson stars as Roman Catholic sister and missionary Mother Teresa in William Riead‘s The Letters, which explores the truths of one of the most beloved religious figures of the modern day.

JULIET STEVENSON ON ‘THE LETTERS’

Throughout her life, Mother Teresa confided solely with a priest named Father Celeste van Exem, telling him of her deepest doubts and fears as they pertained to her faith and her relationship with God.

“Everyone thinks of Mother Teresa as someone who is the embodiment of Christian faith, but in fact she felt abandoned by God for many decades, and this caused her a lot of pain and a lot of loneliness,” Stevenson told uInterview in an exclusive interview. “She talks about God as though she’s talking about a husband or a lover. I think few people know that about her and that sits at the center of the film.”

Juliet Stevenson as Mother Teresa in ‘The Letters’

In addition to delving into the darker moments in Mother Teresa’s faith, The Letters also shows the religious sister’s determined dedication to helping the poor. Though she no doubt found the missionary work rewarding, she also found it taxing, in that her good needs were met with an intense degree of attention that had been foreign to her.

“She became a very public figure, very famous for the Christian identity that she had,” said Stevenson, speaking about the pressure Mother Teresa was under. “That must have caused her a lot of private anguish.”

Stevenson noted, however, that Mother Teresa became skilled at managing her own public image, a talent of hers that’s not often appreciated.

“She was very quite worldly and quite political in lots of ways,” Stevenson said with admiration. “She wasn’t always entirely truthful about things; she knew how to play the press. I mean, I think she was very good at her own PR, in a way, and she had to be in order to achieve what she needed to achieve.”

Stevenson, who got a sense of the overwhelming nature of the type of slums in which Mother Teresa helped the poor of India while filming The Letters, regards the Nobel Peace Prize winner for a number things in addition to her savviness.

“She was partly very uneducated, she was partly highly sophisticated, she was very, very tough with her sisters, with her young nuns. But she had to be, they had a lot of work to do – but she was also gentle and compassionate to the destitute,” said Stevenson. “She’s a whole mix of things and that’s really the revelation.”

The Letters is currently in theaters.