Bitter twist in Jones’ new role
Former Coronation Street star Suranne Jones is relishing her role as the vengeful wife in BBC hit, Doctor Foster, writes Grant Smithies.
Eee, bah gum. It’s a very strange experience to be talking to Suranne Jones. I feel like I should have a pint of lukewarm bitter in my hand, and a bowl of pork scratchings at my elbow, sat in some smoky corner of that fictional Manchester boozer The Rover’s Return.
‘‘Yeah, people still have a really deep love for that character, right?’’ says the British actress, best known for playing emotionally volatile knicker factory machinist Karen McDonald on Coronation Street.
Described as ‘‘a bulldog in hoop earrings’’ and ‘‘Britain’s favourite TV bitch’’, Jones appeared in 494 episodes, twice winning ‘‘Best Actress’’ at the British Soap Awards.
Best scene? When she punched out her nemesis Tracy Barlow in church at her nipper’s christening.
‘‘Ha, yes! That was 13 years ago, and people still really remember Karen, because she was in their living room four nights a week for four years. Soap operas are a great way of people destressing for half an hour, and viewers end up feeling that you’re almost one of their mates.’’
Before Coronation Street made her famous, Jones was briefly a bikini model. She did risque photo shoots for British lad-mags FHM and Loaded, back when she was ‘‘young and impressionable’’, her press officer convincing her this would make her the new ‘‘young, funky sexy girl’’.
But serious acting was always her ambition, which is why she left Coro at the height of her fame to take on other roles.
Now 39, Jones has since starred in a steady trickle of TV and stage shows, with tough-nut characters her speciality. She played a convicted cop killer in 2009’s Unforgiven, and a hardnosed detective in police dramas Vincent and Scott & Bailey.
But perhaps her greatest post-Coro role has been the titular GP in hit BBC drama, Doctor Foster, directed by Sherlock director Jeremy Lovering. She won a Best Actress BAFTA for series one in 2016, and series two screens here from tomorrow night.
‘‘I feel very lucky to have been chosen for that show,’’ she tells me. ‘‘I was just about to go on my honeymoon when I read the first rough script in 2014, and I was adamant I was not going to take any work with me. But I really liked it, so I met up with (playwright and screenwriter) Mike Bartlett.’’
Bartlett had only written three episodes and wanted to cast the lead actress before he wrote the rest.
‘‘That’s very unusual, to get something written with you in mind. I thought Doctor Foster was very complex and distinctive, because Mike’s so theatrical in his writing. Once they got me on board, they set about gathering a brilliant cast. I couldn’t have been happier.’’
Part soap opera, part thriller, at times almost comically melodramatic, Doctor Foster was perhaps the BBC’s answer to ITV ratings hit, Broadchurch: a story in which a company of already well-loved actors became mired in intrigue, betrayal and lurid sexual and criminal shenanigans in a superficially bland English small town.
Jones plays local GP Gemma Foster, whose suspicions are aroused when she finds a long blonde hair on her husband Simon’s scarf and strawberry lip balm in his trouser pocket.
Her husband has semi-plausible excuses, mutual mates lie to cover for him and Doctor Foster is left wondering whether she’s paranoid or whether the man she thought she loved is really a lying sleazebag.
To gather more information, she sleeps with Simon’s best mate, the family accountant, and finds the sly dog has also been emptying their joint bank accounts.
Cheating man. Vengeful woman. The poisonous effects of deep betrayal. It’s an age-old dynamic that has informed endless TV dramas down the years.
But Jones knew she had a hit on her hands when people started accosting her in public, saying her show was causing ructions in their own relationships.
‘‘That’s the beauty of this show: it made you question your own relationship. Everyone was going into work the next day and talking about it, and all these distressed men were coming up to me on the street and going ‘Oh, my God, I’m not watching that with my wife again!’ It’s a show where you’re sat on the sofa with your husband or wife or girlfriend or boyfriend and it’s slightly awkward viewing, you know?
‘‘In the back of everybody’s mind is ‘Oh, God! What would I do if that happened to me?’ Infidelity is intensely painful; that sort of betrayal of trust changes you, as a woman. In Gemma Foster’s case, it made her very vengeful, and that keeps people watching because they think ‘what’s she gonna do next?’’’
Did Jones draw on any painful memories of past crap boyfriends when she played the part? She’s not saying. ‘‘I think everyone has a story, yes. But I mostly drew on the stories of two friends who were going through divorces around the time I was first playing the part. Both had husbands who’d gone off with someone else. I was feeling really sorry for what they’d been though. That helped me with the role, for sure.’’
Doctor Foster becomes, as Jones puts it, ‘‘overcome with violent urges, and a bit mental.’’ She bribes a junkie patient with prescription narcotics to spy on her husband, then physically attacks said junkie’s abusive boyfriend when it looks like he might get in her way.
She drives her 11-year-old son around to the new girlfriend’s house so that he’ll overhear his dad having extramarital sex and turn against him. There’s blackmail, fraud, assault. Patient confidentiality goes out the window. Borderline psychotic, the doc attempts suicide.
By the end of series one, it looked very much like Doctor Foster might find herself struck off the medical register. She contrived a dinner party where the now-pregnant girlfriend was present, and serious violence seemed inevitable.
It seemed to be building towards some sort of epic bloodbath, like the final gory scenes of a great Jacobean or Shakespearean tragedy. A record audience of 10 million Brits tuned in to watch the finale. Imagine their disappointment when bugger all happened.
Tough words were exchanged, expensive ornaments smashed, a bit of a slap was delivered. It was all way too civilised. As The Guardian put it: ‘‘It was like Hamlet ending not with a massacre, but a game of badminton.’’
Viewers wrote to the BBC complaining there wasn’t a more dramatic payback for the cheating swine husband. It was clearly just a cliffhanger for the second series, and Jones defends the writer’s decision to tease his audience a little longer.
‘‘Mike loves huge Jacobean dramas, with a long setup, then a big theatrical scene at the end. But he always wanted to write a second series, which is why he left it so open with season one. He wanted to make that ending bigger and better, over five more episodes, in the follow-up series. I met him for dinner to see what he was thinking, and he said he pictured season two almost like a western, because there needed to be a bloodbath.’’
Now you’re talking. In a show built around the notion of revenge, people want to witness that revenge and cheer along.
‘‘Yeah, I think so. At the end of season one, my character got a court order against the husband, and he headed off with his pregnant 23-yearold gorgeous blonde girlfriend, seemingly scot free. But this new series starts two years later. Now she’s divorced, but all the unresolved stuff that was simmering last time is very much still there. This time, it goes to some really dark places. If you think about just how much you would love to f… up an unfaithful partner, well, that’s exactly what she does.’’
She sounds oddly exhilarated as she talks about it. A little unhinged, even. Jones laughs a deeply unsympathetic laugh as she contemplates her conniving creep of a fictional exhusband finally getting his just desserts.
‘‘It’s always great to play the villain, isn’t it? And it’s better still when you know the audience actually want you to do it. You were the long-suffering victim in the first series – the wronged woman with the dodgy bloke – and now they’re cheering you along while you seek your rightful revenge. So yes, believe me, right from episode one people will be watching and thinking ‘Oh, my God! This is going to be fun … but not for that guy!’’’
❚ Doctor Foster,
Monday nights, 8.30pm, from October 9, TVNZ 1.