INTRIGUING, COMPELLING, SHOCKING... ALL THE THINGS YOU WANT
That’s Suranne Jones’ verdict on Save Me Too, the follow-up series to dark people-trafficking drama Save Me that left fans begging for more
Like most of us, Lesley Manville has had to deal with some trauma in her life. She’s been through two divorces, the first from Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman, the father of her cameraman son Alfie, and in December 2018 she lost one of her two sisters. But she’s not sure how she would deal with the problem her character Jennifer Charles is faced with in Save Me Too, the follow-up series to the acclaimed Sky Atlantic drama Save Me that aired in 2018 and also stars Lennie James and Suranne Jones.
After years of marriage to a successful businessman, Jennifer discovers her husband is a paedophile who traffics young women.
‘It must have been like having the rug completely pulled from under her when she discovered that,’ says Lesley, best known for her role as Cathy in hit BBC sitcom
Mum. ‘One second she’s married to Gideon and everything’s fine – the big house, holidays, a circle of friends – the next she discovers he’s a paedophile.
‘How anybody navigates that kind of life shift I don’t know. I know we all go through certain things, we deal with death and divorce and break-ups and loss, but that’s a pretty big one.’
Gideon Charles, played by Ade Edmondson, made a brief appearance in series one. In a memorable but disturbing scene in the final episode, we saw him trying to sell a girl to a group of prospective buyers in a London snooker hall. Among them was Lennie James’s character Nelly Rowe, who was frantically searching for his missing 13-year-old daughter Jody and believed the girl for sale might be her. Nelly failed in his attempt to buy her but he did find another girl, Grace, who had been abducted and sold into sexual slavery.
Buoyed by that success, Nelly is convinced he can find Jody and tracks down well-spoken Jennifer at the start of series two in an attempt to find her evil husband. ‘He ambushes her in a shop and puts pressure on her to reveal where Gideon is,’ says Lesley. ‘She’s furious but she really doesn’t have much choice but to help him.’
Lesley was headhunted for the role because Lennie, who created the show, thought she would be ideal. ‘I saw Lennie at last year’s
Royal Television Society Awards. He was going off to get his picture taken and he cheekily walked past me to say, “I’ve got something for you.” I said, “Well, send it then” and he did. He then phoned from America and said, “I don’t want to put pressure on you but I’ve kind of written this with you in mind.”’
The role of Gideon was also written for Ade Edmondson. We see him briefly in the opening episode of the new series, but far more prominently in the second when Gideon is on trial for sex trafficking. Ade, married to Jennifer Saunders, says he had no qualms about playing such a vile character but accepts that other actors might have run a mile from the role.
‘I think some actors don’t like to feel tainted by association and I understand that,’ he says. ‘But I took it as a challenge. I had to
‘I don’t want to do what TV is expecting’
invent a legitimate path to what he had become. I wanted to play a dark character who was real and fully formed – not just a twodimensional villain – and I thought Lennie James was the person to write that.’
Some of the most intense scenes in series two take place between Gideon and Jennifer. ‘There are a lot of guilty silences and a lot of suppressed hostility, which is inevitable,’ says Ade. ‘The pair of them are stuck in this kind of nightmare of her still having a vague relationship with a bloke she now completely despises, and him stuck begging for help from someone who knows he’s lied to her systematically for many years.’
Save Me Too, like Save Me, is very much Lennie’s project. He wrote five of the six episodes in series one, and has written episodes for this new series too. He admits to receiving some criticism for not giving series one a happy ending, a conclusion in which Jody would have been found safe and well and been reunited with her estranged father and her mother Claire (Suranne Jones).
‘To be perfectly honest, that was never something that was going to happen,’ says Lennie. ‘I made it very clear when I first pitched the story that Nelly wasn’t going to find her after the first six episodes, partly because I felt that was what television expects and I didn’t want to do what television expects and give the story a neat happy ending.’
Lennie – best known as police officer Tony Gates in the first series of Line Of Duty and Morgan Jones in US drama The Walking Dead
– is equally clear on the tone of Save Me Too. It may deal with the hideous subjects of child abduction and sexual slavery but it doesn’t need to show them on screen.
‘I’ve got no interest in being gratuitous,’ says Lennie. ‘There’s much more power in talking about it than actually showing it. In episode two of the new series, when Gideon Charles is on trial, when you’re hearing a young woman describe what’s happened to her rather than showing it, that’s extremely powerful.
‘I don’t have any desire to put an actress through such an ordeal, let alone the audience. But this is grown-up telly for grown-up people. It’s a grown-up subject. It’s the story I want to tell and I believe that audiences can take it.’
Suranne Jones is mum to a four-year-old son by her writer husband Laurence Akers, but says she too had no qualms about appearing in a drama that deals with child cruelty. ‘It is upsetting because Lennie doesn’t pull any punches,’ she says. ‘The way he writes is quite brutal. But it wasn’t a reason for not signing up, and it was nice to come back to this crowd and finish off the story ‘You always hope the ending will be good. Lennie has written a really brilliant ending to this second series. It’s intriguing and compelling and a bit shocking,’ she says. ‘All the things you want.’ n Tim Oglethorpe Save Me Too, Wednesday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic. All episodes will be available on Sky and Now TV after this.