Street to desert
Katherine Kelly’s new drama
She welcomed her second child just last year, but having enjoyed some time off, Katherine Kelly is now back, poised and ready for action in the reboot of Strike Back. She tells Gemma Dunn of her joy at playing a baddie – and a ‘non-typical’ one at that
KATHERINE Kelly may have bid a fond farewell to Corrie back in 2012, but hers is a career that goes far beyond the famous cobbles.
Despite taking an initial break from the small screen – “I’d done about two years of solid crying. I turned down a lot of jobs, brilliant jobs, thinking I just need to give my body a break” – the actress has since earned her stripes in a whole range of hit TV dramas.
Take her stint as the aristocratic Lady Mae Loxley in Mr Selfridge, for example, or her ruthless portrayal as editor-inchief Maloney for The Field Of Blood. Then came harrowing missing child drama Guilty; The Night Manager; Doctor Who spin-off series, Class; and, of course, her run as the stony-faced DI Jodie Shackleton in Happy Valley.
It’s a list that has undoubtedly silenced industry snobs that question the prowess of soap stars outside of their realm - in her case, brash barmaid Becky McDonald (nee Granger). Kelly puts her success down to a willingness to take risks with parts that, in the most part, are wildly different.
“I look back and think pre-Coronation Street, the five years that I had since drama school, it was always the reason that I got the gig,” notes the RADA graduate, 37, whose theatre credits include Othello and the 2012 National Theatre revival of She Stoops To Conquer.
“Because you get a job at the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] and you get the lead in the tragic show of the four, but then you would have to be in the other three, which means that you had to be able to sing and ...” she tails off.
“Now it’s probably a bit of both, really. A lot of it is my wish to do it all, and if it’s very different I find that really appealing.”
Is playing a terrorist’s wife enough of a diversion, then? Kelly, who readily admits that after many “shiny shows” her “stamina is back for something really gritty and real”, can next be seen in the sixth series of Sky One’s Strike Back.
Joining an all-new cast, the Barnsley-born star takes the part of British baddie Jane Lowry who, as a committed wife to the man behind some of the worst terrorist attacks on the West, masterminds her own husband’s brutal escape from prison.
With her loved one Omair Idrisi (Don Hany) consequently dangerous and on the run, Section 20 – now comprised of Sergeant McAllister (Warren Brown); US special ops soldier Samuel Wyatt (Daniel MacPherson); Lance Corporal Gracie Novin (Alin Sumarwata); and Captain Natalie Reynolds (Roxanne McKee) - is reinstated to clean up the mess over a 10-episode run.
Tasked with covert military intelligence and highrisk operations, the resurrected unit embarks on a lethal manhunt across the Middle East and Europe that will uncover a vast web of interconnected criminal activity.
As the team journey across the Middle East and Europe, they uncover a deadly conspiracy which threatens to overwhelm them all and change the face of modern warfare forever.
For Kelly, Strike Back – the hit series based on the the novel of the same name by Chris Ryan - simply ticked all the boxes.
“I’ve always wanted to play the baddie, so what better fun than playing a baddie with a gun and basically superhero powers?” she states, deliberating whether fans will recognise her in the guise.
“[Though] I was a bit worried when I did say ‘yes’ to the job because, I said to Jack [Lothian], the writer, ‘I hope it’s not like Jaws: it’s really scary until you see the fish, and now the fish is here and it isn’t really scary.’
“But, actually, what I like about this, as well, is that she never looks like your stereotypical baddie. She is an enemy that you just can’t quite figure out.”
She elaborates: “She’s not really written like a female, particularly. They could’ve easily made [her a] man if they wanted to, but they made the choice of making them female, which is really irresistible.”
Is Lowry a bit of a Bond villainess?
“She’s a bit more of an enigma than that,” she muses. “She has that and the sequences where she is absolutely that G.I. Jane, Lara Croft look with a machine gun in the hand, but then there’s scenes when she is pleading for her life and for her love.
“Sometimes I felt like I was in a romantic comedy or a tragedy.”
Of the high-action stakes, she reasons: “I’ve always done loads of stuff, because I always seem to get characters that love to throw a punch.”
Not that she would turn down the offer of a stunt double.
“I’m not one of these actors that go, ‘Oh I want to do it all,’ because I just think, ‘But look how good they are!’ No matter how much I try and train for two weeks I’m never gonna look like she does, so why would I not let her do it for me?
“From my Coronation Street years, I was so used to having to do it for myself that to me having someone – a professional – I’m like, ‘Yeah, do it!’ I’ll sit there in my chair with a can of Coke and watch her.
“But Strike Back, they love you doing it yourself. They must have a very good insurance package,” she says with a laugh, admitting she had no prior knowledge of how to fire a gun.
“I had to do a lot more than I thought and actually that gets strangely addictive as well after a while.” And her next move? “I definitely need to raise the children a bit,” Kelly quips, having taken a year off with her first child and six months with her second.
“I don’t want to hand them over completely, so I need to be at home for a while.”
Strike Back premieres on Sky One and NOW TV on Tuesday, October 31