Getting away with murder!
EMMERDALE PRODUCER LAURA SHAW REVEALS HOW THEY PULLED OFF A KILLING AT A 2M DISTANCE...
When we shut down filming for lockdown, we were only a week away from Malone’s murder. We’d spent months carefully crafting the storyline, and we had been building to this moment since Malone first appeared. So when I first picked up the scripts during lockdown to see what we needed to change, my heart sank! What I hadn’t realised was that changing it would make it more dramatic, exciting and thrilling! Originally, the whole thing would have been more physical. Harriet would use all her strength to get Malone off Dawn, causing him to hit his head on the sideboard, seemingly dead – but when he reared back up, the fatal blow would be delivered by Dawn, with a candlestick. Clearly there was no way that fight would work with a two-metre distance. So we had the plan that Malone would force Dawn to take heroin. It really worked as it was drawing on Dawn’s dark history, and it was bringing the story full circle – Malone was in the show because of drugs, so it was fitting that they featured in his demise. The clever use of a long lens allowed the actors to stay apart when Harriet hit Malone with the kettle. Mark [Womack, aka Malone] couldn’t see Katherine [Dow Blyton, aka Harriet] behind him, so he had to time it perfectly to sell the visual that he had been hit! Dawn shooting Malone actually made the scenes stronger. Before, you could have wondered if Dawn had intended to kill Malone with the candlestick, but the bullets left you in no doubt! And it made it so the women felt they had no option but to bury the body instead of calling the police. We were supposed to follow Dawn and Harriet to the graveyard, to take on the grisly task of digging the grave in the darkness. We did feel we could achieve this within the safety rules, but as it was one of the first weeks back filming, we didn’t want the added complication of also working in the dark. So it became a mystery. Traumatised Dawn has dirt in her fingernails, so you spend the whole episode thinking, ‘What the hell have they done with the body?’ Then you realise! That body won’t stay buried forever! There will be some reason later on why it needs to be moved, so we will fully enjoy some dark and grisly grave-digging in the future!”