Up Close With Michelle Gomez
THE MARVELOUSLY WICKED MISSY TRADES THE COSMOS FOR THE BERKSHIRES
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
Photos by Gregory Cherin
August 2026
There’s so much that Michelle Gomez loves about where she lives. The love affair started with weekend trips skiing with her family at Butternut and Catamount. It was only a matter of time before she and her crew made the Berkshires their full-time residence. Now, the seasoned actor has happily settled in Great Barrington with her husband (actor Jack Davenport), their 16-year-old son, and two dogs (one with a personality like Bill Murray). She traded life in Greenwich Village, where her community existed within a six-block radius, for this rural enclave in the westernmost part of Massachusetts, where her community continues to expand. “The thing I enjoy the most is that all the things we had in the city, we can do here, but ten degrees cooler,” says Gomez.
She can walk into town in less than 15 minutes. Most Saturdays, this passionate backgammon player brings several game boards to Rubiner’s and sets them up in the café for an informal and lively session with friends. In the summer, the backgammon boards move from the café tables to blankets spread out by the Green River. Gomez not only appreciates the outdoors, she also enjoys going to movie theaters and live theater, dance performances and music venues, eating great food and getting together with good friends.
I can’t help but bask in the glow of Gomez’s Berkshires; it reminds me of how magical this place is. The rolling Scottish accent and melodic lift in her voice as she describes her home make the region sound even more enchanting. Her accent is very much a trademark of the friendly Scots—and very much in contrast with many of Gomez’s on-screen characters. A prolific actor both here and across the pond, she is celebrated for her sharp comedic timing and knack for playing delightfully unhinged, eccentric villains. (“I don’t know why; I’m a pussycat!”) She’s best known for her iconic role as Missy in Doctor Who and as the terrifyingly brilliant Madame Satan in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Somehow, she makes these wicked characters appealing, thanks to her unapologetic charm, razor-sharp wit, and skill at bringing them to life.
Gomez and Davenport have never acted together, but they're prepared to break their rule and share the stage for the first time—in Great Barrington. Because of their love of The Triplex Cinema, they have agreed to take part in a staged reading of His Girl Friday for the nonprofit movie theater on Saturday, September 19, at Barrington Hall.
Gomez recently workshopped Adin Lenahan’s Imposters with the off-Broadway organization Page 73. She plays the dual roles of Xenia Romanov/Mama Varshavskij in the sweeping tragicomedy about two warring Jewish sisters caught in the events of the Russian Revolution, the Holodomor, and the Holocaust. The play is expected to premiere in the fall in New York. She’s also poised to workshop a new play, Feverish, by Steve Yockey, based on the tragic Greek myth of Phaedra.
And catch Gomez this fall on the big screen in the dark comedy The Incomer, which will have its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 13 and released in the U.S. on September 25. Set on a remote island off the Scottish coast, the film won the coveted NEXT Innovator Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
“It’s a beautiful story told by Louis Paxton,” says Gomez, settling into a chair in her kitchen after pouring me a cup of coffee. “It’s refreshing and it’s funny, but it’s also very touching. I think the reason why it’s doing so well is because it’s a tender tale about the human spirit connecting, no matter who we are or where we are.”
Destined To Act
“If I had to choose a moment where I felt like being an actor was a calling, I must have been eight years old,” says Gomez. “We’d gone to see a production of Kiss Me Kate at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow. I felt like the people onstage were talking to me. It was such a brilliant production, and I had never seen anything like it in my life. I caught the bug.”
Gomez was born in Glasgow; her father, keen on photography and originally from the Caribbean island of Montserrat, was of Portuguese ancestry. No one in her family was in the creative industry, so young Michelle was treading on unknown territory. What she did have was their support.
“I really was a clown when I was younger,” Gomez says. “I loved to make people laugh. I wasn’t intending on being a comedic actress, but I was always drawn to it and especially to the comedian Marti Caine. I saw her on a show called Opportunity Knocks—this beautiful woman, a tall, willowy, redhead in this gorgeous gown came walking down the stairs on the show and sat on a stool to sing a song. As soon as she sat, the stool fell away from her. It looked completely real. I was probably 12, and I thought, this is the funniest thing I’d ever seen. At that point, Lucille Ball also came onto my radar. I was watching lots of old movies, and I was hooked.”
Gomez attended Shawlands Academy in Glasgow and trained in acting at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (formerly known as the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama). She taught drama in a program to stamp out bullying in schools, written for the Strathclyde Regional Council. Then she was cast in a play that won the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1992, Paula McGee’s Play, Boy. It was her first professional appearance. Her part was a prostitute who suffered a lifetime of abuse. “I taught for five minutes, then we won the award, and I never looked back,” says Gomez. “My training has been on every job I’ve done. I guess that’s how I’ve learned, and how I think we all learn in this business. With each job you do, you hone your skills, and you keep moving forward and developing with each play, or with each new script.”
With some 60 credited film, television, and voice acting roles throughout her career. Playing Missy from Doctor Who from 2014 to 2017 was very special for her. She calls the character “the gift that keeps on giving.”
“She gives a lot of love, that girl,” says Gomez. “There are Missy fans no matter where I go. Yesterday at Guido’s, we were getting milk, and I was commenting on this guy who was wearing a Knicks shirt because we were all talking about them, obviously. I said, ‘Go, Knicks!’ He very casually turned around and said, ‘Go, Missy!’ She’s been one of the most universally loved roles I’ve ever had to play. She has fans everywhere I go, even Guido’s.”
The Road to the Berkshires
Actor/director Jayne Atkinson-Gill first met Gomez doing an in-home reading of a play and was immediately drawn by her authenticity and humor. Atkinson-Gill told Gomez that she lived in this place called the Berkshires, just a few hours’ drive from New York. That intrigued Gomez. “Wait, you’re working in New York and living where?” That opened up the possibility for Gomez not to live full-time in the city.
“We were living in Greenwich Village, and we have very full lives,” says Gomez. “We basically live on planes, or sets, where there’s a lot of stimulation, and then you’re living ina big city, so there’s no respite. I remember looking at Jack one night and said, ‘This is a really expensive way to watch the telly. I think we’re done. We’ve ticked the box.’ We lived in New York for 15 years or so, and we were ready for a completely new adventure.”
She and Davenport made up their minds that Great Barrington was where they wanted to live and looked at a few properties but didn’t like them. Their real estate agent suggested a house that was a little more than their budget allowed. “He knew exactly what he was doing,” Gomez says, smiling, “and the minute we walked in the door, it felt like this house hugged us.” They made it work and bought the home from Martin and Anne Albert, with whom they’ve become friends—a first in their property-buying lives!
“When she called me about moving to the ’Shire, I was thrilled,” recalls Atkinson- Gill. “I had also met her husband, Jack, and felt that there could be a very nice connection between all four us as actors and as parents.I felt that the artistic community here would embrace them both wholeheartedly!”
As I walk through Gomez’s house, I feel the love and see the talent that went into making it theirs. She designed and furnished all the rooms, saying that if she had another profession, it would be interior decoration. “Just for myself, though, not for others,” she adds. “I love building moments throughout the house, where they lift your spirits, little vignettes everywhere. But I had nothing to do structurally; Martin and Anne did all the hard work.”
The home was built at the height of the Arts and Crafts movement, a design philosophy that originated in Britain asa reaction against mass industrialization. It championed traditional craftsmanship, the integrity of materials, and simple, functional forms inspired by nature. Gomez was drawn to the house’s whimsical magic and was delighted at how it kept surprising them. Dark rooms opened up to brighter ones, and each floor gets lighter and lighter, more and more beautiful.
My eyes are immediately drawn to a chair in one of the rooms, which I’m told was created out of steam laminated white ash. The work of art was created by Berkshire-based Tommy Sronkoski (@origami_tommy), whom Gomez considers part of the family.
Her favorite room of their 1904 house is the library, which she designed for Davenport. It’s the first time he had a room with enough shelves to put many of his books—or at least half of them. She pauses by a drawing hanging in the space between two red lamp shades. “That’s ‘Big Titty.’ I just grabbed it in Williasmburg one day,” says Gomez. Although she couldn’t name the artist of that work, she shows me a portrait in another room that her goddaughter, artist Emma Jaeger, had created. Gomez then takes me upstairs to peek into Emma’s room, a joyous splash of color that makes you want to smile. “She had this shitty old chest of drawers, and she just painted in red and white—and look, it’s gorgeous,” Gomez points out proudly. “I’m just drawn to young talent; I never had a mentor myself.”
Populating the interior didn’t take long at all, Gomez says. They brought everything from their part-time house in Sharon, Connecticut, and it all fit together quite nicely. Thankfully, the Great Barrington house was in excellent shape when they bought it from the Alberts, who did an extension for an expansive, modern kitchen.
Gomez, Davenport, their son, Harry, and their dogs, Dylan (aka Bill Murray) and Mabel have been living full-time in the Berkshires for a year and are blown away by people’s warmth and openness. “We’ve already got a sense that we’re part of a community here,” Gomez says. “It doesn’t feel like we’ve been here only a year, weirdly. It feels like we’ve come home, finally.”
It helps that Gomez is “pretty front-footed,” as she puts it. “I’ve learned quickly as an actor that you have to have a shorthand with people. In our business, you get into a company of people, and you’re all working towards an end goal, and so you can only do that by feeling connected. I think that’s just a muscle that I’ve exercised in each new place that we’ve lived in. I’ve always been quite friendly.”
The Villain Reemerges
Is it a challenge for an actor to live in the Berkshires? “The thing about becoming an actor, which I didn’t appreciate when I was eight years old, was that you are literally running away to the circus,” says Gomez. “I never get to work where I live; I am always either packing or unpacking a suitcase, so it doesn’t matter where I live. I used to think you had to live in London, you had to live in LA, you had to live in New York as an actor. It turns out, you don’t.” Gomez also is open to the idea of doing theater right here in the Berkshires. What a novel idea: to wake up in her bed and go to work nearby!
How does she tap into the psyche of the villains she so aptly portrays? “Many people who have played villains have said it’s the most fun role to play, and it’s true,” she says. “You get to be naughty and wicked and say things that you would never get away with in real life, right? But also, I want to know why are they the baddies? Why are they villains? What happened to them? What made them mean and cruel? And then my job is to try and make that cruelty interesting. Somehow, you want to go for a drink with Missy rather than the Doctor, right? And you know she’s going to be more fun, for sure.”
“I’m still pinching myself that I get to do this,” she continues. “I go back to the girl that was in Glasgow, who just thought that this was beyond the realm of possibility. And then, slowly but surely, you build a career. This industry is really tough. My nickname is ‘The Roach.’ There’s one agent that I worked with many years ago, and I asked, ‘Why am I called The Roach?’ And he said, ‘Because you keep getting crushed like a bug out there, but you just keep coming back.’”
Gomez doesn’t take offense in having been called that. In fact, that’s how she has gotten to where she is in this industry.
“For every one job, I’ve probably done 20 self-tapes. I call them self-harms, actually, because it’s grim,” she says. “You slap that smile on one more time and go for it, and then you never hear anything back. Whereas before, you would build a relationship with a casting director, and it was a bit more connected. Now, oftentimes, you learn 12 pages and then just fling it out into the ether. That’s the part that’s made this tough business even tougher. For young people, I think that level of rejection is what will determine whether they’re going to make it or not. You’ve just got to keep showing up, no matter what. I would not recommend it unless you have a really thick skin, and you’ve got to really, really want it.”
Motherhood and Spousehood
Did becoming a mother change her work in any way? “Becoming a mother actually made me more ambitious, bizarrely,” Gomez says. “It made me more efficient with my time and more discerning about what I said ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to, and what I am going to be able to put up with in a professional arena. When you have kids, suddenly your priorities change, and I think it makes you a better actor, a better person. You’re more focused and less likely to put up with crap.”
How is it being married to another actor?“It’s been amazing because you know you’re with somebody that you have a shorthand with who understands what it is to get up at 5 a.m. and drive two hours and then have to be in the chair for two three hours. Jack understands the ins and outs of the business,” says Gomez. “And we’ve been lucky because we’ve dovetailed most of our jobs so one of us is always home. That also means that we have spent a lot of time apart as a couple, but I think that’s been the success of our marriage.”
“We’ve been together 30 years next year, andI think that’s mostly because we never really see each other,” she continues, half-joking. “It keeps it fresh. My mom always said to me, ‘Don’t marry a nine-to-fiver, because you’ll always hear the key in the door and your heart will sink.’ Now I’m really excited—and he’s coming home in a week!”
And she isn’t short of doing things at home while he is away. Gomez loves the outdoors and working in her garden. The day I visited her, she had been planting earlier in the morning. On her knees digging into the rich soil, she said she paused, looked around, and released a big, happy sigh. She felt herself relax, which is one of the things she loves most about the Berkshires. “I enjoy listening to the different bird songs and waiting for things that are planted to come up. Have you seen my garden in the back? We’ll never need to go to Guido’s again.”
For some reason, I doubt that. Guido’s is a place where she not only shops, but she also runs into familiar faces. It’s one of the things she loves about the Berkshires: the community of friendly people. And that community most certainly includes this charming Scottish actor, gardener, mother, and backgammon enthusiast.
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