CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
EMILY WATSON TRIES TO UNDERSTAND WHAT MAKES A CRIMINAL TICK IN THE DANGEROUS TOO CLOSE.
WE CAN’T say she didn’t warn us. When Metro spoke to Emily Watson last year for the bonkers Jude Law vehicle The Third Day, she was already building up the hype for ITV’s psychological three-part thriller Too Close. ‘It’s an interesting, intimate, different, dangerous piece,’ Watson quietly enthused then. ‘I love it.’
And now it’s here and we can report that it’s very much not for the faint of heart. Watson plays Dr Emma Robertson, a forensic psychiatrist hired by the Crown Prosecution Service to assess the mental state of a woman, Constance Mortensen, who is pleading not guilty to attempted murder after driving her car, with two children on the backseat, off a bridge. Cheery stuff, right?
‘These are people really working at the forefront of the very, very desperate and complex situations people get into,’ says Watson, who worked with a forensic psychiatrist, Sarah Hewitt, to dive deeper into the role. ‘We talked a lot. She talked about some of the situations she has to deal with, the nature of the things these people have done. She said that almost the hardest moment is when somebody comes down from the psychosis because then they realise what they have done.
‘In the case of Connie, she’s taken this traumatic event and blocked it because she can’t deal with it. Or has she? We don’t know at this stage whether she’s faking it or not.’
It’s a dramatic piece that could easily play as a two-hander. Emma and Connie circle one another in a small airless room, probing each other’s psyches, as the waters muddy between doctor and patient.
Denise Gough, who plays Connie, first worked with Watson in BBC drama Apple Tree Yard. Both actresses relished the opportunity to work together again on emotionally challenging material.
‘Denise was a witness in the court scenes,’ recalls Watson. ‘I remember thinking, “Oh my God, she’s brilliant.” She really was amazing and then we all went to see her in People, Places And Things [where Gough won an Olivier award for Best Actress], so I was absolutely thrilled to get the opportunity to go toe-to-toe with her.’
Their claustrophobic psychiatric unit scenes were filmed at the now decommissioned HM Prison Holloway in north London, once the largest women’s prison in Western Europe.
‘You got a very powerful sense of a distressing place where women have grappled with their demons,’ Watson says. ‘It’s weird. There’s a wall and then this enclosed set of buildings with gardens all around them. They’re all going to seed and the buildings are crumbling and very dank and unused and sad. We used some of the existing building and we built sets inside as well for the brighter, cleaner parts of it.’
On the evidence of the first episode Watson’s Dr Robertson is the less showy part. While a battle-scarred Gough (three and a half hours in make-up, no less) gets to rage and smash things up, Watson is dealing with a troubled home life and
repressing a devastating personal trauma of her own. It’s a typically understated performance. Driving cars off piers and stunts in general don’t seem to be Watson’s thing.
‘I climbed a tree at one point,’ she laughs, ‘but I didn’t have to do anything particularly dangerous, not in the way that Denise did. I’m like, “No, I’m not doing it. I have dependents [she and husband Jack
Waters have two children] who need me to be fit and healthy at the end of the day.”’ A smile comes with that. As an actress, she appears to adopt a low-key, no-nonsense approach to her work and appreciates that same attitude in others. Too Close also gave Watson the opportunity to work with childhood friend Clara Salaman
(DS Claire Stanton in The Bill), who adapted her own novel, written under the pseudonym of Natalie Daniels, for television.
‘I’ve known Clara since I was five years old,’ says Watson. ‘I read the book before it was published and then we immediately started a conversation about what the potential of it was.’ Both attended St James Independent schools in west London, run by the controversial School of Economic Science, an organisation Watson has described as a ‘very repressive regime’ where she witnessed ‘incidents of extreme cruelty’.
‘We have a very intense bond from our childhood,’ is how she puts it now. ‘It’s just very nice to be working together now we’re in our mid-fifties. It’s about time!’
Too Close begins on ITV at 9pm on Monday