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Demelza heads into DEEP SPACE
Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson on playing an alien drug addict in sci-fi thriller Intergalactic
Eleanor Tomlinson’s barely been seen since she lit up the screen as Demelza Poldark in five series of the hit Cornish drama. And each time she has, the role’s been a world away from the fiery 18th-century redhead that launched her career. There was unhinged Mary Durrant in the 50s-set Agatha Christie adaptation Ordeal By Innocence in 2018, and sci-fi heroine Amy in the BBC’S The War Of The Worlds the following year. But Eleanor’s latest role is surely her most offbeat yet.
Part-alien, part-human, Candy Skov-king is a drug-addicted criminal in Sky’s new sci-fi thriller Intergalactic, which follows a group of space-travelling female convicts. Eleanor’s signature red curls have been replaced with blonde dreadlocks, her face is covered in green scales and – the pièce de resistance – her tongue is long and forked.
Needless to say there isn’t a corset in sight, but Eleanor insists she wanted a complete change of direction. ‘I needed to find a project that would allow me to jump from period dramas to something totally different,’ she says, speaking from the show’s set in Manchester. ‘I needed a breath of fresh air and a chance to shake things up a bit. And I certainly didn’t want to be a redhead – I think we’ve seen that somewhere before!’
She says she had a ball playing Ross Poldark’s wife, but in a sense she was a victim of the success of a show that attracted an average eight million viewers an episode. ‘I feared being typecast, famous for just playing that role and only being offered similar parts,’ she says. ‘It’s not that I didn’t like Poldark, I did, a great deal, and I learned so much from it. But I had to break away for my own sanity. That’s why Intergalactic seemed a good choice. Drugs, aliens and a futuristic setting... it’s so different!’
The eight-part series, set in 2143, imagines a world radically different from the one we occupy now. Earth has suffered ecological collapse and old London lies in siltcovered ruin. The Commonworld, a global confederation of governments riddled with corruption, calls the shots, with much of its business conducted from New London, a shiny metallic city built on stilts above the old metropolis.
The last 122 years haven’t been all bad news on Earth though. The discovery of a new type of fuel called New Aurum that makes it possible to travel faster than the speed of light has allowed intergalactic space travel to take place, and thus the colonisation of distant planets. Eleanor’s character Candy is aboard the Hemlock, a spaceship carrying a group of female prisoners from Earth to a penal colony deep in space where they’re due to serve out their sentences. Candy faces several years behind bars for trafficking drugs, but in the first episode the prisoners carry out a mutiny and redirect the Hemlock towards Arcadia, a planet where they’ll be safe from the authorities on Earth. Also on board the ship is political prisoner Dr Emma Grieves (Natasha O’keefe, who played Tommy Shelby’s wife Lizzie Stark in Peaky Blinders). Grieves and her knowledge of New Aurum are key to the whole series. ‘She’s at the core of the story in the sense that without her, life cannot continue to exist,’ explains Natasha. ‘She knows that mankind may not survive without her, and the people around her know that too, which is why everyone wants a piece of Emma.’
None more so than Dr Benedict
Lee (Craig Parkinson, who was corrupt cop ‘Dot’ Cottan in Line Of Duty), the leader of the world government. He, along with Parminder Nagra’s character Rebecca Harper, the government’s head of security, watch the Hemlock’s progress across space on a big screen back in New London. ‘Lee wants Grieves returned to Earth safe and well so that he can experiment on her,’ explains Craig. ‘She holds the key to this wonderful new power source New Aurum. If he can untap what makes her tick it will become available, he’ll be a hero.’
The drama visits Candy’s home planet, the snow-covered Skov, in episode five, and viewers will learn more about her descent into drug addiction. ‘We discover how she abandoned her family, got in with the wrong crowd and couldn’t face going home out of shame for what she’d become,’ explains Eleanor. ‘She’s a bit mad, a bit bonkers, a woman who takes so many different kinds of drugs and is constantly looking for her next hit. But I hope people will be rooting for her. She’s certainly no goodie-goodie, but she’s trying to better herself.’