Jenna’s a far Cry from the Queen
She’ s distraught mum in missing baby thriller
JENNA Coleman has wowed audiences in Doctor Who and as Queen Victoria.
But her next role will easily be her toughest – as a mother whose newborn son vanishes in BBC1’s The Cry.
Jenna, 31, stars with Aussie actor Ewen Leslie, 37, in the fourpart thriller adapted from a novel by Helen FitzGerald.
They play married couple Joanna and Alistair who fly from Glasgow to Australia with their baby so he can attend a custody hearing from a previous relationship.
Jenna says she was hooked on Jacquelin Perske’s scripts. “It felt like walking a tightrope, racing page to page, unsettling, unknowable, and thrilling.” When the book was published in 2013, a reviewer described it as “utterly harrowing, completely plausible, constantly nerve-shredding”. In the story tiny Noah cries incessantly during the 16-hour flight to Melbourne, then he vanishes from their hire car, sparking a huge police hunt. Alistair is cold while Joanna descends into a hell that borders on insanity. Their lives are changed forever, proving the catalyst for a journey into the disintegrating psychology of a young woman, and exposing the myths of motherhood. BBC drama boss Piers Wenger said The Cry will prove to be “truly unmissable” when it airs this year. We can hardly bear the tension...