Depending on your point of view it was the romance of the century or a scandal that threatened the very fabric of British society.

The relationship between Edward Prince of Wales and American divorcee Wallis Simpson remains a hot topic to some within the Establishment, and has provided rich pickings for dramatists through the years.

“There’s no one definitive view of Edward,” explains James D’Arcy, who plays Edward in W.E., the new film directed by Madonna. “And that’s immediately liberating. To massively generalise there are two views, because one exists predominantly in America which is that there was this extraordinary love affair.

“And the other one predominantly exists in Britain, which is that the man absented himself from his duties to his country. And both of those stories are true. So, as in all of our lives, it’s complicated and that helped me a lot as there is no definitive image.”

Madonna, who has been fascinated with the story of Edward and Mrs Simpson for years, complements their 1930s experiences with a parallel modern tale set amid an auction of their possessions, featuring a young woman (Abbie Cornish) who is similarly in thrall to Wallis.

Andrea Riseborough starring alongside D’Arcy in the flashback scenes, and both actors speak with admiration for their director’s knowledge of her subject and dedication to her craft. They also have a sympathy for the sometimes reviled characters they were playing.

“The story that Madonna wanted to tell was very clear,” 36-year-old D’Arcy explains. “There was a lot of material and I read all of it, and it’s all contradictory. Whatever you want to say about them, I will find the page in the book that suggests that that’s the truth.

“But ultimately I can’t play all of those books. I must have read 15 of them and there are some elements of this which are just not truthful. I’m over six foot and he’s not. And he doesn’t sound anything like I do in the film. You can go online and hear him abdicate, and he sounds very weedy indeed, and it’s unexpected because you see these pictures of this young man and he was very beautiful and he was the most photographed man in the world at the time.”

What was it like to be directed by someone who herself is the most photographed woman on her generation?

“Once you start talking to a human being they become a human being,” D’Arcy says in a matter-of-fact way. “They stop being a poster or a video or some part of history. Particularly as I wasn’t talking to her about her life that she is very well known for in the public arena, we were talking about this film. She’s not big on small talk, Madonna, so we talked about the work we were doing though we did have a laugh, as it happens.”

Although she is only a rookie film director, D’Arcy got a sense of the incredible drive that has served her career so well over 30 year.

“There’s a scene where I played the bagpipes, a tune called I Enjoy Sporting With My Brown Haired Lass. I went to see a wonderful piper and he said he couldn’t teach me to play the bagpipes in six weeks. It was impossible. “You start with the chanter and you play that for six months, and then you do the bags for a few months, and then you put them together and after a year you might get a bit. But, he said, ‘what I can do is make it look like you can play the bagpipes,’.

“So I emailed Madonna and said that, and she wrote back and said ‘just because somebody says you can’t doesn’t mean you have to listen to them. I said to this man, John Angus, ‘look, here’s the email, what do we think about that? It’s really a gauntlet thrown down’. And we did it. I played three minutes of bagpipes, with all three pipes going, which we could have plugged up. “It was sort of amazing, and it did somehow sum up how it was working with Madonna. There was no space for the word no. It was always ‘challenge yourself to do more than you think is possible’. That’s exciting.”

Exciting – and yet the scene was cut from the finished film. But D’Arcy sees the funny side.

“It doesn’t affect what I did and how I felt about it. The self-esteem that you get from doing something like that remains, so that’s something great for me to take away from it.”