I jumped at chance to be older woman
Julie Graham was hooked by role of grieving mum who meets kind young man with very dark secrets
In the tense new thriller Penance, running over three nights this week, Julie Graham, as Rosalie, faces every parent’s nightmare, when police arrive late at night with the shocking news that her son Rob has drowned while travelling in Thailand.
The tragedy of losing a child can bring a couple closer but for many the trauma tears them apart.
It’s soon apparent that there are serious issues within the marriage of Luke (Neil Morrissey) and Rosalie.
And Julie, whose long list of credits include At Home With The Braithwaites, William and Mary and Benidorm, loved the chance to act out the couple’s fractured relationship with Neil, who’s an old pal.
She said: “I’ve known Neil forever. Because we know each other so well we had a shorthand, which is nice. And as we are playing a husband and wife with a tricky relationship, to have that shorthand was great.”
Rosalie and her daughter Maddie (Tallulah Greive) find some comfort at a bereavement group, where they meet Jed (Nico Mirallegro), an orphan now mourning his beloved grandmother. He quickly becomes a rock for the family but as his interest in Rosalie grows, it appears that the seemingly saintly Jed isn’t all he seems.
“Yeah, it gets a bit mad,” said Julie, who in real life married second husband Davy last October and is mum to teenage daughters Edie and Cyd. She’s not giving away how the suspenseful story pans out but she does admit that just reading the first script was enough to get her hooked. She said: “I rang my agent and said ‘Yes!’ Parts like that don’t come along very often for women of my age. They’re rare.” Despite being a TV stalwart for several decades, Julie worries about what the future holds, careerwise. She said: “Work has definitely trailed off since I hit 50, there’s no doubt about that. And I don’t think it’s to do with me personally, I think it’s to do with opportunity. “I’m sent scripts and if there’s a woman over 50 in it, there’s only one. There’s one part and we are all up for it. So it’s limited but I’ve hung on in there. And I am very grateful for all the opportunities I get.” There’s a twinkle in her eye as forthright Julie makes it clear that the acting industry still needs to wake up to the potential of women of her age. She said: “There are still a lot of dinosaurs in the business, there needs to be an Ice Age, so we can get rid of them all, so the new generation can come up. It’s getting better, there are more women writing, commissioning, behind the camera. It just needs to speed up a bit or I will be too old to capitalise on it.”