Broadchurch star Jodie Whittaker talks about her new British drama.

Broadchurch actress and the incoming Doctor Who Jodie Whittaker talks to James Rampton about her new British drama in which she plays a nurse who steals a colleague’s identity and poses as a doctor.

In her final role before she steps into the Tardis as the first female Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker stars in a new British drama Trust Me.

In this psychological thriller written by Dan Sefton, she plays Cath, a nurse who is fired for blowing the whistle about failing standards in her hospital.

Determined to make a new start, she impulsively steals the identity of a doctor colleague who has emigrated to New Zealand.

Now going by the name of Ally, Cath takes a job as a doctor in an emergency department in Edinburgh and begins a new life with her young daughter Molly.

But when her ne’er-do-well former partner Karl (Blake Harrison, The

Inbetweeners) turns up and a journalist starts pursuing her about the problems she exposed at her former hospital, Cath comes under severe pressure. Will she be able to keep leading this precarious double life? If you’re in any doubt about the quality of this drama, I simply say to you: trust me, I’m a journalist. Whittaker, who also starred in Broadchurch as Beth Latimer, reveals what drew her to Trust Me.

“I was sent the script for the first episode and it fascinated me because it went in a completely different direction to how I thought it was going to.

“When Cath is suspended for whistleblowing and loses her job, it could have gone so many ways, and the fact that she takes on this new identity isn’t the way that I thought it would go.”

The 35-year-old actress, who has

also starred in the movies Venus, St Trinian’s, Good and Attack The Block, says the moral ambiguity of the character also appealed to her.

“I love the fact that Cath’s choices are quite morally dubious – they certainly aren’t black and white.

“She makes decisions that are quite challenging to justify, even though we know her reasons. Once you set off on a path of lies, it’s very difficult to undo it without bringing everything crashing down.”

Whittaker admits that it was challenging portraying a character who leads a double life.

“What’s hard is trying to gauge how good a liar she is or how in a panic she is. You’ve got to be careful because you can’t make the other characters seem stupid. These are intelligent, fully formed characters that you’re working with, so it was a fine line of being able to deceive and it not being something that comes easily to her.

“However, it can’t be that it makes everyone around her feel a bit like an idiot for not working it out. That was tricky, but the director is there to help guide you through it.”

The actress has never played a medic before, but she says that she enjoyed lots of help in preparing for her role in

Trust Me. She reveals that, “You can’t wing the medical stuff, so I had to do my research for that. “One of my friends is a sister in A&E and I sent her a lot of messages asking, ‘How do you pronounce this?’ and ‘What does that mean?’ So basically she was my personal medical coach, even though she works full time.” Whittaker reveals she had lots of expert assistance on set. “With regards to the technical stuff, we had an on-set consultant, so that there was always someone to help when we had to do procedures. “The best thing for me was that my character was also out of her depth and didn’t always know what she was doing, so it kind of covered my own personal fumbles.” The actress received help online as well. “YouTube is amazing. The genius of the internet is that you can basically sit at home and Google medical procedures and TV shows such as 24 Hours In A&E, which I watched hours of.” But the actress’ greatest aide was the writer himself. “Dan, who is also a doctor outside of TV production, showed us a load of stuff that he used when he was training people. He brought in the CPR dummy and showed us how to do a cannula and he, very bravely, let me put a cannula in his vein. “I did it right, thank God.”

“I love the fact that Cath’s choices are quite morally dubious.” – Jodie Whittaker