WHY SOPHIE WON’T SETTLE FOR SECOND BEST
Peaky Blinders actress SOPHIE RUNDLE stars as a plucky English mail- order bride sent to wed an American pioneer for Sky 1’s gritty new period drama Jamestown. She tells Daphne Lockyer how she relishes being at the centre of the show from the team who bro
We chat to Peaky Blinders actress Sophie Rundle aboutelirshing her laetst vintage turn – as a madil-eorr bride in pioneer-era America
Sophie Rundle is posing cheerfully for the camera, lying on a patch of lawn in the grounds of a historic riverside house in south-west London. She gives a happy wave, ‘All good, down here,’ she laughs.
Although she later confides that she isn’t entirely comfortable with the pomp and glamour of a magazine photo shoot – ‘I’m not a model and I’m not one of those racehorse-type Hollywood actresses’ – the camera loves her nonetheless.
Every outfit looks just right on her, including a stylish leather jacket and gown. ‘What a lovely change,’ she says. ‘I normally dress like a 14-yearold boy.’
On screen, of course, it’s another story. The 29-year- old Rada-trained actress has climbed into both the clothes and the skin of a wide variety of characters. These include Ada Shelby in the popular BBC Two period gangster drama Peaky Blinders and Honoria Barbary in the BBC One series Dickensian.
Her CV brims, too, with roles that celebrate the extraordinary power of ordinary women. In the ITV series Brief Encounters she played Steph – a browbeaten mum- of- one who finds financial and sexual freedom after becoming an Ann Summers saleswoman – and in ITV’s The Bletchley Circle she was Lucy, part of a team of brilliant female Second World War code-breakers who become super-sleuths at the end of the conflict.
Her current role in the Sky 1 drama Jamestown is firmly in the same camp. Set in 1619, the eight-part series from the makers of Downton Abbey tells the story of three women – Alice (Sophie), Jocelyn (Naomi Battrick) and Verity (Niamh Walsh) – who play paid-for brides, shipped across the ocean from Britain to Virginia in the US, where they are to marry and produce children for the male settlers of America’s first English colony.
It’s a world of pig manure, mud and makeshift shacks in which the men have not clapped eyes on a woman for 12 years. ‘On the surface, it’s a male- dominated world,’ Sophie says. ‘But it’s the indestructibility of these incredible women that is the backbone of the drama.’
Here the actress opens up about life on and off screen…
Filming Jamestown in Budapest for six months felt like summer camp. There was a lovely cast of 16 actors and we got along so well. We sat on each other’s balconies drinking red wine and putting the world to rights. Now we’re in a WhatsApp group called the Jamestown Honeys.
The Jamestown set was so convincing. It had been raining for a few days before we started filming and when we turned up we were knee-high in mud. There were pigs and goats everywhere, too, which meant the whole place smelled pretty ripe. It definitely helped us enter the Jamestown world immediately.
Alice, Jocelyn and Verity are the original mail- order brides. Women were shipped over to Jamestown and labelled ‘Maids to Make Wives’. It was as if their future husbands had gone through the equivalent of the Argos catalogue and paid for women to be delivered.
The idea of being among a boat-load of women pitching up to be greeted by a bunch of wild, sex-starved men is terrifying. Niamh, Naomi and I talked about what the brides would have gone through. Imagine embarking on a voyage, not even knowing if you’d make it to the other side of the Atlantic, or what might greet you if you did.
The women would have needed their feminine wiles… or they’d have been lost to the men. But these are amazing, strong women. They are from different walks of life, but have essential things in common: they are clever, quick, brave – and loyal to each other.
I’m fascinated by female relationships. I reject the myth that women are bitchy and competitive with one another. In my experience the absolute reverse is true – I love the women I am close to.
Loyalty, support and ‘the sisterhood’ are there in spades in Jamestown. The women bond instantly and look out for each other, just as the three of us did off set, too; now we are really close friends. There was none of that ‘she’s got nicer costumes, better lines’ nonsense. There again, I have never encountered that in my profession.
The three of us were carefully cast. It’s more than having a blonde (Jocelyn), a brunette (Alice) and a redhead (Verity): the characters are also totally different personalities. Alice’s strength is underpinned with gentleness; Verity is as feisty as her flame- coloured hair, and