As a woman you can be drawn to danger
GEORGIA HUMPHREYS chats to Angela Griffin about starring in Irvine Welsh’s drama Crime
ANGELA GRIFFIN felt genuinely scared while filming one of the scenes in Crime.
The Leeds-born actress was working alongside Dougray Scott in the new Britbox drama, based on Irvine Welsh’s book of the same name, and was so impressed with her co-star that she had to tell him.
“Afterwards I said, ‘That was just absolutely incredible. I’ve never had that kind of physical feeling within a scene before’.”
The six-part series, set in Edinburgh, is as thrilling to watch as it sounds like it was to make.
Scotsman Dougray plays Ray Lennox, a troubled detective inspector battling his own personal demons and struggles with addiction. Angela takes on the role of Trudi, who has only recently become Lennox’s girlfriend, and has no idea of his tortured past.
Angela notes that Trainspotting author Irvine writes “really complex, dark characters that really should be quite unlikable, but you ultimately invest in them”.
The novelist adapted Crime for the screen with his long-standing screenwriting partner Dean Cavanagh.
Directed by James Strong and David Blair, the drama has been many years in the making.
The novel, released in 2008, is a sequel to Filth. That story – which has Lennox as a supporting character – was made into a film, starring James Mcavoy as protagonist DS Bruce Robertson, in 2013.
“It’s not going to give you nightmares, but it’s not glossy, it’s not warm,” says mum-of-two Angela of the series. “It’s not Sunday night, ITV, eight o’clock. It’s absolutely Britbox, ‘come grip on to your sofa, and be taken to a different place’, which is what I like in a drama, personally. “It is raw, and it is quite explicit and much darker than the kind of things that you would find on terrestrial TV – hence why I think you do need these platforms nowadays,” she continues. “We want more. There’s so much choice, you have got to elevate, you have got to give an audience something new. I think that’s achieved in this.” Angela, 45, has barely been off our screens since she joined Coronation Street aged just 16. She has starred in numerous successful British dramas, including Waterloo Road, Cutting It and Lewis.
Her character in Crime, Trudi, works for the local energy company, Dunedin Power.
“She loves that she’s corporate,” says Angela. “She’s in this world of rules and regulations and normality, and she likes that.”
But having climbed her way up the ladder from office junior, Trudi is facing a situation with her workplace that is “breaking her heart”.
Angela elaborates: “What Trudi finds is that the people who she trusts, the people who she’s admired, the people who she’s looked up to, the world that she wanted to be involved in, isn’t what she thought it was.
“Trudi is literally a fighter. She will not allow justice not to be done and she will not allow people to get away with things, and she stands up, raises her head above the parapet.”
In her personal life, as Lennox becomes consumed by the case of a missing girl, Trudi will see her partner as a different man from the one she first knew – threatening their happily ever after.
What does Angela think it is that drew Trudi to the copper initially?
“I think what she sees in him is he’s quite attractive – that might be the initial pull,” Angela chuckles.
“You don’t always see the darkness on the surface, but I think, as a woman, you can be drawn to danger, and he has got that. She obviously doesn’t know what that is to start off with.
“But also, he’s been going through his career, there are various things that have happened to him in his youth, and he thinks he’s over those and he’s ready for a relationship. As an older woman, as an older man, when you find somebody who actually is open and is ready for a relationship, there is an ultimate attraction to that.
“There’s a really lovely spark between them, which I think that me and Dougray have managed to get.”
Trudi wants to believe she can fix Lennox, explains Angela, who has been married to actor Jason Milligan since 2006.
“Their relationship begins in quite a lovely, warm, supportive place and he wants to open his life and his family up to her, and she absolutely wants to go in there.
“She’s at the age where she’s getting to the last chance to have kids; this is a committed relationship and they’re taking it very, very seriously. And the relationship gets tested beyond all imaginings, really. It awakens, in him, a darkness that she doesn’t quite know how to deal with.”
Angela reveals there is a book she herself has been wanting to adapt “forever”.
“I keep getting nearly close to it, and then the author just decides that she doesn’t want to make any of her books into TV shows any more,” she confides.
“Each year I check in on her and just say, ‘Is this the year that maybe you’d like to do it?’
“Covid has meant that myself and my friends have been developing things in our living rooms.
“So, there are definitely projects that I would like to get off the ground – but you’ve got to convince those authors that you’re going to look after them and look after their books.”
...I said, ‘That was just absolutely incredible. I’ve never had that kind of physical feeling within a scene before’ Dougray Scott’s intense performance left Angela shaken