Lydia: I felt a total Req after filming...
THE star of BBC1’s spooky new thriller Requiem has told how making the disturbing sixparter left her an emotional wreck.
Lydia Wilson, who was Ripper Street’s Mimi Morton, plays young cellist Tilly Gray.
Her world falls apart when she realises her mum (Joanna Scanlan) has lied to her about who she is for her entire life.
But before she can begin to ask questions about it, her mother takes her own life – in particularly grisly fashion.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that Lydia, who appears in almost every scene of the series, found the project tough going.
She says that playing grief-stricken, traumatised Tilly took its toll. She tells us: “I didn’t realise that, until I had a week off in the middle of filming. “During that week, when I wasn’t so vulnerable, I remember thinking, ‘Why am I crying?’” Particularly difficult were scenes she filmed alongside Claire Rushbrook, who plays the woman who might turn out to be Tilly’s birth mother, Rose. Lydia, 33, says: “Claire can reveal her soul in a scene. I don’t know how she does it. “In one scene with her she was so emotional, I just couldn’t stop crying and ended up in the toilet.”
The eerie, uncomfortable drama takes viewers from London to remote Wales, where Tilly believes she is a missing girl called Carys, who was snatched as a toddler 23 years earlier.
No Offence star Scanlan, who doesn’t last long, warns that while Requiem is “thrilling and intelligent” it is also packed full of horror.
“It’s very scary,” she says. “Don’t watch it alone or in the dark.”
Downton star Brendan Coyle, who plays a troubled retired policeman, agrees. “Requiem is like The Omen,” he says. “It preys on our faith. I watched the first episode in the dark and I was terrified. I hope we scare the bejesus out of viewers.”
With multiple suicides, musical hauntings, smashing mirrors and plenty of things going bump in the night, we think it will do just that.
Tune in on February 2... if you dare.