JUNO TEMPLE

little Birds Tuesday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic and Now TV

1

My character Lucy Savage is an American heiress who has been married off to English aristocrat Hugo Cavendish Smythe (played by Hugh Skinner), who she doesn’t know is gay. But she goes on an amazing journey of self-discovery and you can see that in the clothes she wears, which go from tight and boned – the most uncomfortable clothes I’ve worn – to looser and less pink, while her earrings get bigger. 2

We shot for about eight weeks in Tarifa in Spain which stood in for Morocco’s Tangier, where impoverished Hugo lives. Tarifa still has a lot of original Moorish architecture and it was beautiful. It is at the edge of Spain and one evening, when filming in a ruin, you could feel the wind from Africa – we had a surreal sense of being on two continents at once.

3

The cast and crew were from all sorts of nationalities – for example Yumna Marwan, who plays dominatrix Cherifa, is from Lebanon and Raphael Acloque (as aristocrat Adham Abaza) is French. We’d go for dinner and five languages were spoken. It was like going to the school of life; I treasure that time. 4

The attention to detail is astonishing, even the rubbish on the floor is old-fashioned. The layers the designers bring to a set are incredible. The napkins in the café were prettier than ones now!

5

I have some sex scenes, but I don’t get nervous – I’ve done a few before. There is a fashion now to use intimacy co-ordinators to ‘choreograph’ such scenes, but we didn’t need one. It’s between the actors to make sure they both feel comfortable. It’s based on trust.