COOKING UP TROUBLE!
HER NEW TV DRAMA SERIES HAS ALL THE INGREDIENTS OF A WINNER
During her threedecade-long career in the entertainment industry, Maria Doyle Kennedy has played some very memorable characters, from Queen Catherine of Aragon in The Tudors to Outlander’s Jocasta Cameron.
While the garbs she wears in her new series Recipes for Love and Murder look a lot less elaborate than her perioddrama costumes, the actress says the audience shouldn’t let the clothing fool them.
Because it takes much more to prepare to play a contemporary character than just chucking a wrap dress on and getting a blow-dry.
“It’s really wonderful to put on a beautiful costume and suddenly you’re walking around feeling like a queen,” Maria tells New Idea in a chat over Zoom from her home in Dublin, Ireland.
“But with the modern characters, there is just as much thought and effort into making sure that the tiny details are just as right,” she adds.
When it comes to really tapping into the person she’s portraying, Maria likes to let her shoes do the talking.
“The best advice I got from another actor when I was starting out was to find the shoes your character wears and try walking around in them, which I thought was a joke,” Maria reveals with a laugh.
“But it’s true because as soon as you put their shoes on, it affects everything – from how you stand and carry yourself to how you perform their daily tasks.”
Recipes for Love and Murder, which is based on the bestselling series of books by Sally Andrew, is like watching a fun cross between Agatha Christie and Julia Child.
It was a project Maria knew she wanted to sign up for straight away.
“I was being sent all these scripts for projects about serial killers and all the ways they were disposing of women, so when this came, it stood out like a jewel in a sea of crap,” she explains. “I read through the whole season in one night. I couldn’t put it down.”
In the show, the actress plays Maria Purvis, a recipe columnist who finds herself doubling as the resident agony aunt “Tannie Maria” due to budget cuts at her newspaper.
When a person who wrote to her for advice turns up dead, Tannie Maria begins to dabble in solving murder mysteries.
While Maria admits that her culinary skills aren’t quite in the same league as her character’s, she understood that showing she knew her way around a kitchen would be key to landing her dream role.
“This all happened during lockdown, so I couldn’t meet [with the director] and had to film a few scenes at home and send it in,” she explains.
“So I did the dialogue but then I had my husband shoot me in the kitchen chopping up an onion, and I thought, ‘This will really have to bring it home,’” she adds with a giggle.
Maria and her husband, musician Kieran Kennedy, moved to South Africa for several months for filming, which was her first trip to the African continent.
“I don’t think it matters how long you visit there, you’ll only just start to scratch the surface,” she says.
“It’s a beautiful country, with a long and complex history, but the most beautiful, warm welcoming people in the world.”