SAVE ME TOO: The yellow puffa is back, back, back.
THE YELLOW PUFFA IS BACK BUT IT’S ALL CHANGE FOR SAVE ME TOO, AS CREATOR LENNIE JAMES AND NEW CO-STAR LESLEY MANVILLE EXPLAIN
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CREATOR AND STAR Lennie James faced a particularly thorny challenge when it came to writing series two of his hugely acclaimed Sky Atlantic drama Save Me: how to realistically keep his character Nelly in his trademark yellow puffa jacket. His solution was to build the first episode of the second season around Nelly’s birthday, when his mates gather at the Palm Tree pub, and give him the present of a new puffa. “Initially when I wrote it in the script, he opens it and there was a red puffa jacket,” James tells Pilot TV. “And everybody’s head exploded. Everybody who’d read the first draft was going, ‘What? It’s a red puffa jacket, what’s going to happen now?’ Everybody had such a visceral reaction to the fact that it wasn’t a yellow puffa. There were long conversations and consternation from all levels about what are we going to put on the billboard, for example. So I was argued out of my idea and went back to the yellow.”
Of course there were bigger concerns for James when he was writing Save Me Too, which continues the central narrative of Nelly’s desperate search for his missing daughter Jody, while also expanding on the stories of the supporting characters in his life, from Stephen Graham’s troubled Melon to Camilla Beeput’s Zita, who’s now in a relationship with Nelly. James was aware of the danger of letting the success of the first series weigh too heavily on the process of creating the six new episodes. “We had to kind of shut out the world of Save Me the television series,” James explains, “and focus on the continuing journey of these characters. It wasn’t something that overly concerned me, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t something we had to navigate.”
James always thought of the show as an ongoing drama rather than a self-contained story. “It was never six [episodes] and done for me,” is how he puts it — but that first series did balance the social realism of its London-estate setting and its characters’ struggles with a massively engrossing mystery — who took teenage girl Jody, the daughter of Nelly and his ex, Claire (Suranne Jones)? Viewers came for Save Me’s thriller premise and stayed for its detailed, unusually authentic character studies.
So when it came to the follow-up, James had to find new ways to balance those parallel trajectories. “I always knew we would see behind the curtain of some of the other characters and how they get involved with Nelly on a new level,” James tells us. But there is also a new crime committed early on in the second series, and this new mystery runs alongside Nelly’s ongoing search for his daughter. One of the keys to unlocking the complexities of series two’s multiple strands turned out to be a time jump. Save Me Too begins 17 months on from the events of series one, which ended with Nelly failing to find his daughter, but rescuing another teenage girl from her abusers. The decision worked on two levels. James felt it would be a challenge to carry on the story from immediately where it left off, knowing how long the gap between the two series would be, but the time jump
inspired him in the writing of the new episodes. “It meant I could use some sense of distance to explore the characters differently,” says James. “And when I started thinking about that, it excited me and interested me, and I wanted to move the characters on. Things have changed, they’ve got on with their lives, relationships have gone, circumstances have moved on, and it’s suddenly become a fertile place to play. It just added a layer that I wanted to explore, and suddenly heightened things in a way that was cool and interesting.”
His other big move to drive the story in a whole new direction was to bring in a new character, played by Lesley Manville, fresh from her Oscar nomination for her role in Phantom Thread and her superb performance in BBC2’S Bafta-winning comedy, Mum. Her character Jennifer is the wife of Gideon (Ade Edmondson), the paedophile abuser who we met at the end of series one. James always had Manville in mind for the role. “It was a weird one really. I wrote it for her, while being absolutely certain that we would never get her,” he explains. “But I wrote it anyway because the things that I love about her as an actress are exactly what I wanted in this character.” He knew it would be as important to understand what Jennifer is not saying in any given scene, as what she does. “And I don’t think many people on the planet do that as well as Lesley Manville.”
As for getting Manville to take the role, it was all down to a chance meeting in 2019. “I bumped into her at the Royal Televison Society Awards,” remembers James. “She was at a table in the hall, and my agent came up to tell me — because they all knew at that point that she was who I wanted to play Jennifer. And whenever they asked me, I said, ‘We’re never going to get her.’ So my agent said, ‘Lesley’s over there.’” I went over and asked her if she was busy — of course she’s busy, she’s just been Oscar-nominated.”
Manville remembers the moment vividly. “We both a had a good night because Lennie won Best Series for
Save Me and I got something for
Mum,” she tells us. “And he walked past my table — and I hadn’t seen him for quite some time — and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got something for you’.” Manville told James to send whatever the ‘something’ was to her, and soon the script for series two arrived. Shortly afterwards, James called Manville. “He said, ‘Look, I’m not saying this to try to persuade you, but I really have written this with you in my head. I completely understand if it’s not for you, but that’s the truth of it,
I have written it with you in mind’,” remembers Manville. ”So I thought, ‘Well, I’d better watch the first series.’ And it was incredible, powerful… so I told him I’d love to do it.”
Manville was particularly taken with the ending of that series, when her character’s husband was introduced. “That was a wonderful cliffhanger with Adrian Edmondson at the end of series one. You thought, ‘No! Stop now!” Just look at him, he’s a middle-class guy, he’s well to do, he’s dressed in a great suit — what the hell is going on here? It was a brilliant, horrible ending, which just left you pining for series two.”
After a negotiation enabling Manville to take a break in the middle of filming to do another job, which is why she doesn’t appear in episodes four and five, James made sure that even though she was a supporting character, her role would add a vital new layer to the uncertain, edgy texture of series two.
“I think it’s a very interesting journey that Lesley’s character goes
on with Nelly, and who she turns out to be and what happens to her,” James says. “She’s someone whose whole life has blown up in front of them, so she’s faced with how to navigate not just who you spent your life with, but the choices you’ve made, and the way you reinvestigate your whole life.”
While creating the character, James read articles and watched documentaries about people who had only discovered their loved ones were living secret lives after they had died. James wanted Jennifer to be a woman who only feels there’s something not quite right about her husband, without knowing his true depths. “She knows there’s something there, she’s just choosing not to look in order to sustain her relationship,” is how James puts it.
As for Manville, the challenge of playing that was complicated. “In my head, I had to create this woman on a normal day, because all we see in the show is an extreme situation. So you’ve got to work out what this woman’s like in her normal life.” So on one level, Jennifer and Gideon are professional people who have had a nice life, with a lovely house and a decent marriage. “But then you put her in this very heightened situation,” says Manville. “And of course you would doubt it at first. You would say, ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, I’ve been married to this man for 30 plus years. I’d know if he was running a paedophile ring.’ But she didn’t know, and coming to terms with that is a very slow burn.”
James also had to make sure
Gideon wasn’t just a one-dimensional monster. “Ade’s character isn’t just there as a malevolent, devious kind of baddie psychopath,” explains James. “He’s got to be someone who on the surface is capable of appearing to be what he says he is — just a regular kind of guy — but to be something altogether different as well. And how he rationalises it, and therefore how he’s been able to keep it secret, that was the challenge that I set myself — and we’ll see how successful I was in pulling that off.”
Manville points out that all the characters in Save Me are similarly complex. None of them conform to simple stereotypes. “The character of Nelly, for example, is a very rich character that Lennie’s created for himself, and he does it justice. It’s not one thing and none of us are one thing. I love the way he can be quite brutal and also very tender and understanding. He’s a complex guy and I love that about him.”
One of the major recurring highlights across much of Save Me Too is the relationship between James’ Nelly and Manville’s Jennifer, which develops and changes as they get to know one another, played out in a series of enthralling one-on-one encounters, which James says were a joy to write, then play and film. Manville agrees. “As the episodes go on,” she explains, “Nelly starts to believe that Jennifer genuinely didn’t know about her husband, because he finds that unbelievable at first, that she’s not in on it somehow. There’s a lovely scene on the banks of the Thames in Putney at twilight that we had to shoot very quickly because the light was fading. But I loved that, because it meant we shot it quite theatrically, almost held it as a two-shot all the way through. Nelly says, ‘I’m sorry, I can see that you’re a good woman and I want you to pick yourself up and have a life’.”
To some extent that’s what the whole Save Me saga so far is about: how decent people in extraordinarily painful circumstances somehow have to keep going. Maybe that yellow puffa of Nelly’s is part of that. In the end James admits he was wrong to even think about giving Nelly a different colour jacket of any kind. “I think in the moment when he’s given his new jacket, Nelly feels that his [old] jacket is somehow lucky, and he’s made a promise to himself that he’s going to keep wearing it until he finds his kid — if he ever does.”