My darkest role playing a mum on a mission for justice has led to my own peace
ACCIDENT’S JOANNA SCANLAN
IF acting is therapy then Joanna Scanlan is getting the full treatment in her role as a grieving mum in gripping new TV drama The Accident.
The actress, who stars with Sarah Lancashire in the Channel 4 programme, says playing traumatised characters helps her beat depression – which haunted her in her 20s.
Joanna, 57, first suffered crippling mental health problems after her student years.
She says she left Cambridge University feeling she had a great education behind her but no real life skills.
She struggled to “grow up, take responsibility and manage ordinary things”.
“It was hard at the time,” she recalled. “I don’t want to be too self-pitying but it was very hard feeling I was living the wrong life.
“I had a life inside me that I wasn’t living and I think that was one of the big forces of depression. I knew I had the talents, I just didn’t know how to make anything of them.”
Taking on the role of a bereaved mum in the gritty four-parter has been a cathartic experience, Joanna reveals.
In an exclusive Sunday People interview, she said: “Acting is a place where I can express myself and find emotions I didn’t even know I had. That is good in terms of my mental health.
“If things are too painful to look at head on, this sideways approach really is very effective for me. I haven’t felt any depression for well over ten years.”
Explosion
In The Accident, Joanna plays mum Angela Griffiths, whose daughter is one of a group of teenagers killed in an explosion at a local regeneration project in a small Welsh town.
Acting is so helpful for wellbeing she has even started to teach drama techniques to teenagers living with cancer. She hopes expressing emotions through acting can help others manage their mental health.
Joanna says she loved working with co-star Lancashire, 55, who has become a good friend.
She and Sarah play best pals on the show and she describes their bond off- set as “almost familial”.
Joanna explained: “You just click or you don’t and it was a real click from the beginning. We’d really like to work together again. It would be great.
“We were always trying to make each other get deeper and deeper into the characterisation.
“I trusted her completely as an actress and as a person.
“We did little evening debriefs in the hotel in Swansea. We had a lot of bruschettas.”
The series also stars Mark Lewis Jones as Sarah’s on- screen husband Iwan Bevan, Adrian Scarborough rborough as lawyer Philip Walters and Sidse Babett Knudsen as property developer Harriet Paulsen.
Joanna confided: onfided: “Apologies to Sidse, I just ust couldn’t really talk to her.
“I saw her r as the enemy and got locked cked into that thinking.
“I could not take on the corporate side without just wanting g to spit at the ground in front ont of them.
It was really y strange.”
The loss of her daughter is a huge tragedy for supermarket et worker Angela, ngela, but Joanna anna reveals how w she finds her purpose in the aftermath and passionately sets about campaigning for justice. While she didn’t consciously base Angela on anyone, Joanna admits that after t hey finished f i l ming she realised there were comparisons between
her ch character and real-life campaigners such as D Doreen Lawrence and Ann Ming.
Baroness Lawrence battled for justice after he her son Stephen’s racially motivated murder. A And Ann fought to get the double jeopardy la law reformed so that convict Billy Dunlop, wh who admitted murdering her daughter Julie H Hogg, could be put on trial again even though he was earlier found not guilty.
Crack
She said: “Angela loses her child and is ut utterly devastated but the process she goes th through empowers her.
“It’s not in the script but I see her going on to become a proper campaigner.
“I didn’t base her on anybody but I was w watching one of those crime and justice do documentaries about Ann Ming and I was