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CRYING GAME
In a dramatic departure from her role as the strait- laced queen, Jenna Coleman plays a devastated mother whose baby disappears
Jenna Coleman reveals how she immersed herself in the role of a grieving young mother for her new thriller The Cry
This is a heart- stopping journey where you feel a surge of hope before plunging into a bottomless pit of despair which eventually threatens every shred of your sanity. And you know this emotional roller coaster will never end until you can hold your precious baby in your arms once again.
Such is the unbearable pain, one would imagine, suffered by young mother Joanna and her husband Alistair in the gripping new BBC psychological thr iller, The Cry. Adapted from Helen FitzGerald’s novel of the same name, the four- part drama tells the story of how a tragedy tears them apart when their newborn baby is abducted from a small coastal town in Australia.
Joanna is played by Jenna Coleman, who won critical acclaim for her portrayal of Queen Victoria in ITV’s per iod drama. A key aspect of this series is the intense public scrutiny the couple – in particular Joanna – undergo. ‘What’s interesting is she doesn’t behave in a way you’d expect someone whose child has just gone missing to behave,’ says Jenna. ‘You’d expect outpourings of emotion. So why is she not grieving? Or why is she not grieving in public? Is it because she’s in shock? Maybe she’s a liar – or she’s just odd. There’s a constant double-bluff.
‘ This was really challenging to play. It was like walking a tightrope all the time and so emotionally intense because you’re telling a lie within a lie, like Russian dolls. I watched the TV drama Liar for inspiration just before filming.’
When we meet on set, Jenna’s wearing jogging bottoms and minimal make-up to create the drawn, permanently exhausted look of many new mothers in the first few months after giving birth. ‘It’s an emotional marathon,’ she says. ‘The scene where the baby goes missing is the kind of thing that makes the blood run cold. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.’
The tragedy unfolds af t er Joanna and Alistair travel from their home in Scotland to Australia with their newborn baby Noah to visit Alistair’s mother and to gain custody of Alistair’s daughter Chloe (Markella Kavenagh) from his Australian ex-wife Alexandra (Asher Keddie). ‘ The story is about the aftermath of the baby going missing – it happens almost as soon as they arrive in Australia,’ explains Jenna, 32. The life- changing event puts the couple to the ultimate test as the truth about their baby’s disappearance is uncovered.
Jenna, who’s back on the BBC for the first time since leaving Doctor Who – where she played assistant Clara Oswald – in 2015, says The Cry couldn’t be more different to her role as Queen Victoria. ‘There are no corsets or nursemaids here,’ she smi les. ‘ I spend a lot of time in my pyjamas or joggies. As a friend said to me about being a new mum, “You wake up, have no make-up on, find a minute to brush your teeth, make a cup of tea, the tea gets left on the side, you try to run a bath. Then you fall asleep, wearing the same clothes, wake up and do it all over again.”
‘As I’m not a mother myself, trying to capture the reality of the early stages of motherhood was a real challenge for me. I did give myself a bit of a hard time thinking, “I don’t know exactly what this feels like.” Then I thought, this is the same as any other acting job – I don’t actually know what it’s like to be Queen Victoria. So I spent time with a midwife and some mothers. Lots of my friends are mothers and they sent me indepth emails about the day-today details, such as what it’s really like having had two hours sleep, or what your hormones are doing and the reality of just trying to get your bag and keys and take the baby out of the house.’
The series director Glendyn Ivin also sent Jenna out into the streets of Melbourne with a pram to see how people would treat her as a young mother. ‘It was really good except for a couple of people who came up for photos and when they looked inside the pram, there was just an empty bottle of water in there! I then had to explain why the director made me do this, so I got myself in a hole. What’s more hilarious is that the muslin cloth on the pram to protect the baby from the sun was held on with massive prop clips, so that was a bit of a giveaway.’
‘Then I went into a shop and they recommended some post-natal face cream, which I didn’t have the heart to explain I didn’t need so I just bought it and left. People treat you so differently as a mum – cars slow down when they’re driving near you, Joanna and Alistair standing in front of his mother, daughter and ex-wife for example, so it made me see the world from a different perspective.’
But there are dark sides to Joanna, too, which made the role even more challenging. ‘She’s definitely flawed. When we meet Joanna she’s dealing with post-natal depression, and that’s where it starts,’ explains Jenna. ‘There are the most beautiful things about motherhood, but also your identity is completely different, especially for Joanna, a teacher, since she was very independent before. We see her at the start of the series with her best friend Kirsty, going out and getting drunk. Then suddenly her life is vastly different. During those early days of motherhood, we see how much time she spends on her own in the house, exhausted.
‘She goes to the darkest depths a person can be pushed to. Did she really want to be a mother? It was definitely something the husband was more ready for. And obviously there’s the post-natal depression, but I don’t think she particularly realises that’s what she’s going through because the baby’s only three months old. A lot of people I spoke to said, “God, I didn’t actually realise I had post- natal depression until a year on.”’
Has the experience put Jenna off motherhood? ‘No, but it’s opened my eyes to the realities of it. And it’s shown me what a lot of my friends are experiencing at the moment.’
In one excruciating scene, we see Joanna grappling with her constantly crying baby during a 25-hour flight from Glasgow to Australia. It’s that journey every parent dreads, says Jenna. ‘You’re trying to pacify your baby to control the noise amid complaints from other passengers, in what is also a painfully claustrophobic atmosphere.’
How was that to film? ‘Like that, really,’ she laughs. ‘ We filmed at Maidenhead in an aeroplane that was turned into a set. And we were all on it for two days, shooting for 12 hours in chronological order. So, it really was like going to Melbourne. But with no destination.
‘We had six-week-old twins playing Noah. Their mother has six children and she was very relaxed on set. As they are twins, we were able to interchange the babies for filming. One has more hair but we just put a hat on him. And a lot of the crying is added in afterwards.’
Joanna’s husband Alistair, a political spin doctor, is played by Australian Ewen Leslie, 38, who won critical acclaim after starring opposite Nicole Kidman in Top Of The Lake. He says the drama touches on ‘the myths of motherhood’, including the relation-
‘She doesn’t behave how you’d expect a mother to’
ship with his on-screen mother, Elizabeth, played by The Crown’s Stella Gonet. ‘There’s a point in the series where she says that when Alistair was born she didn’t really feel a close connection with him. So I think in many ways she felt as a young mother what Joanna is feeling as a new mum.
‘Alistair’s doing the best he can to make it as easy as possible for Joanna. But she doesn’t have much suppor t – her parents passed away when she was young and he’s incredibly busy with a high- pressure job so it’s not a great situation for her.’
Ewen feels that Alistair will come in for some harsh criticism. ‘For sure, he’s a love rat. But all the characters are very complicated. Do I like him? I probably wouldn’t want to have a beer with him but I don’t think he’d want to have one with me either.
‘For inspiration I read Winners: And How They Succeed by Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alistair Campbell and watched The Thick Of It. I also tracked down people who worked as political advisors for certain prime ministers and got an insight into that cutthroat world. The fun thing about playing someone who is absolutely in control is that you then get to make them unravel too.’
The Cry is bound to attract compar isons to the disappearance of three- year- old Madeleine McCann, who vanished from her bed in a holiday apartment in Portugal in 2007, sparking what has often been described as the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history.
It will also bring back memories of Azaria Chamberlain, the twomonth- old Australian girl who disappeared during a family camping trip in 1980. Her body was never found. Her parents, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain, said she’d been taken from their tent by a dingo, but Lindy was convicted of murder and spent more than three years in prison. She was released when a piece of Azaria’s clothing was found near a dingo lair and new inquests were opened. In 2012, 32 years after Azaria’s death, the Chamberlains’ version of events was officially supported by a coroner.
Author Helen FitzGerald admits both incidents were in her mind when she wrote The Cry. ‘ The feeling going round my head was: could a couple survive that? Lindy Chamberlain was the big crime story of my youth – a lot of women said she was guilty as sin.’
But there were other events that inspired her, she says. ‘I fell in love with a Scots Italian when I was 23 and moved to Glasgow. Part of the deal was that we would go back to Australia every year. I got it in writing. Stupid me, really, because then we had to travel on that bloody trip every year. And the biggie was when my daughter Anna was born because I was very depressed after her birth.
’It was the middle of winter, and I was in a top-floor flat in Glasgow and it was a bit of a shocker for me without my family. So, we went back to Australia with Anna when she was about ten weeks old and she cried the whole way. And I felt like Joanna does in the story, where we were very judged, quite rightly, but I didn’t deal with it very well.
‘I remember I’d prepared, overprepared, and planned for this so much. I had little outfits and little presents for her even though she was only tiny and couldn’t even open them. And it was on that trip that breast-feeding went wrong for me and I just gave up. I just sat there for 21 hours trying to breastfeed with a lot of women saying to me, “You shouldn’t give up.”’
But what ended Helen’s post- natal depression? ‘It was going on that trip to Australia. Strangely, I didn’t know I had it, actually. And it’s only now I look at it and think, “Oh, I didn’t want to go out of the house, I didn’t want to see anyone.” I felt that heaviness that comes over you. No joy in the world. I didn’t really connect with my daughter at all until she was nine months old. The trip to Australia was a huge thing actually. Just going over to family and getting some sunshine and coming back feeling reinvigorated.’
As for Jenna, she is looking forward to being reinvigorated herself by filming the next series of Victoria. ‘What’s so nice is that you go back and time’s moved on. So, suddenly the children are going to be older, and there’s a sense of the family growing. It’ll be very nice to jump back to something completely different after such an intense drama.’ The Cry begins on Sunday 30 September at 9pm on BBC1.