Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Don’t mess witha grıeving mother
ESPECIALLY IF SHE’ S JUST SPOTTED THE SON SHE THOUGHT HAD DIED, SAYS J ILL HALF PENNY–STAR OF NEW THRILLER THE DR OWNING
After nine years of hell, Jodie Walsh believes she may just have glimpsed heaven. Stuck in traffic while driving to a business meeting, she spots a boy walking past her car who she believes might be her son Tom, missing presumed dead since 2012.
‘He looks just like him, right down to the distinctive scar under one of his eyes which he had when he disappeared at the age of four,’ explains Jill Halfpenny, who plays Jodie in tense new four-part Channel 5 thriller The Drowning. ‘She follows the boy to school, then discovers where he lives and tries to become part of his life. She’s convinced it’s him.’
Pretty much everyone else disagrees though. Although Tom’s body was never found, both Jodie’s mother and her brother believe that he drowned while the family was enjoying a picnic beside a lake. The police officer she approaches with her suspicions, DS Harvey, also comes to the conclusion that Tom perished in the water.
The Drowning, co-written by Tim Dynevor whose daughter Phoebe plays Daphne in Bridgerton, is not just about discovering whether it really is Tom, but the lengths to which his mother will go to reclaim her son. A mother herself, former Strictly Come Dancing winner Jill, 45, says she would have accepted any amount of extreme behaviour from her character when she first read the script. Whatever it was going to take for Jodie to find peace of mind was more than all right by her.
‘I asked myself what I would do if I found myself in a similar situation, and then I asked myself if there were anything I wouldn’t do,’ says Jill, who’s mother to 12-year-old Harvey Reece from her marriage to actor Craig Conway. ‘The answer was pretty much nothing. I would absolutely want to get to the bottom of what happened to my son. I would do whatever it took – and Jodie feels the same way.’
Jodie hopes she can find answers by becoming a music teacher at the school attended by Tom – or Daniel (15year-old Cody Molko) as he’s now known – and befriending him during one-to-one guitar sessions. And the fact that she has no formal qualifications for the job isn’t going to stop her. When she discovers Ade, an employee at the landscape gardening company she co-owns, has forged his own work papers she asks him to create some documents for her.
Then she goes to meet Daniel’s father Mark (Spooks and Whitechapel star Rupert Penry-jones), an aloof architect who appears to be single, offering to provide music lessons for the boy at their luxurious home. ‘He declines her offer, but without giving too much away, he will undergo something of a transformation during the course of the series,’ says Rupert. ‘He starts off as one thing and then becomes another. ‘Mark has been through a lot but, a typical Englishman, he keeps his feelings repressed. He fears not being able to get his emotions back under control again if he ever lets them out. He’s a cold fish.’
Jill admits that filming The Drowning presented a range of challenges on top of the obvious Covid-related ones. ‘I inevitably found myself thinking about how I would feel if something like this had happened to my own son. If it were a scene where I was talking it wasn’t so bad, I’d be concentrating on my lines and actions. But if it were a scene without dialogue – for example where Jodie’s just sitting and crying – then I’d find myself imagining I was in the same situation as her and that was extremely unpleasant. An absolute living hell, in fact.’
As the series progresses we learn more about the Walsh family dynamics, how Jodie had fallen out with her father who tried to contact her shortly before his death, and her troubled relationship with her mother and high-flying brother Jason (The Bay star Jonas Armstrong). ‘He’s a barrister and he was there at the picnic when Tom disappeared. He’s been carrying a big secret around with him for years,’ reveals Jonas.
We discover during the final episode what did happen to fouryear-old Tom on that fateful afternoon, and whether it really is him enjoying a new life with Rupert Penry-jones’s character Mark. But at a time when viewers could all do with a lift, surely Tim Dynevor won’t just have it that Jodie has made a terrible mistake and the boy is simply a lookalike of her dead son?
‘I’m certainly aware that people will be hoping for a happy conclusion to the story, but I think it’s really hard to please an audience whatever type of ending you give them,’ says Jill. ‘If it all gets wrapped up nicely they’ll think that it’s a cop-out, and if it’s miserable they’re going to be upset. So just wait and see what Tim Dynevor has come up with. You may be surprised!’
‘Imagining I was in her situation was a living hell’