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Who STOLE MYHOUS
A woman’s home is snatched away without warning in a twisting new thriller with Martin Compston and Tuppence Middleton – and the scary bit is it really can happen
Just imagine arriving home after a hard day at work to find that your house is no longer yours. All your possessions are gone and somebody else is moving their furniture in, with no warning. And it only gets worse: your estranged husband and children are also nowhere to be seen. It’s as if you never lived there at all.
That’s the mind-boggling opening to ITV’S new four-part thriller, Our House. Successful career woman and mother-of-two Fi Lawson, played by Tuppence Middleton, rolls up after work to find another couple moving into her family home, claiming that the house has been sold to them. There is no sign that Fi ever lived there with husband Bram – a role taken by Line Of Duty’s Martin Compston – and their young sons.
It’s this crazy, scary plot twist that attracted Tuppence to Our House. It’s another punchy part for the actress, whose star has continued to shoot skyward after her turn as posh seductress Helene in 2016’s War And Peace. Tuppence earned rave reviews in the role of Riley in the American sci-fi series Sense8 and captured hearts in the first Downton Abbey film as Lucy Smith, the lady’s maid of Lady Bagshaw (Imelda Staunton). Lucy was revealed, in fact, to be Lady Bagshaw’s illegitimate daughter and ultimately her heir. Fans were charmed by the budding romance between Lucy and Downton’s most eligible widower, Tom Branson (Allen Leech), which continues in April in the sequel Downton Abbey: A New Era.
Now Tuppence is taking the lead in this thriller about a family in turmoil. Tuppence’s character Fi panics at the prospect of losing her home. Months before, she had caught her husband playing away with her best friend in the garden shed and had instigated divorce proceedings. In order to keep things civil for their young sons, the couple agreed to an unusual childcare arrangement: the boys would remain at home with one parent at a time while the other parent stays in a rental flat.
For Tuppence, the chance to play an ordinary woman in an extraordinary situation was too good to pass up. ‘Fi is such a relatable person,’ explains Tuppence, 35, when we chat over Zoom. ‘She has this seemingly “together” life but she’s been going through some difficulties. The story is told in present day and flashback, seeing the breakdown of her relationship with her husband, her meeting a new partner and then this present-day storyline where she’s confronted with the idea that she might lose her house and everything that’s important to her.
‘She’s someone who a lot of people would look up to,’ continues Tuppence. ‘Her house is beautiful and she has this seemingly perfect relationship and family, and then it all goes horribly wrong.’
Tuppence was intrigued by the harrowing opening scene. ‘I immediately jumped on Google and was looking at property fraud, and there really are cases where it’s happened, because everything is so remote and done digitally,’ she explains.
‘Now there are so many security stages that you go through before you buy a house, but it was truly shocking to me that this has happened many times and that people really have lost their homes. It’s a kind of modernday horror. It’s really scary.’
The theme of divorce also appealed to Tuppence. ‘I think almost half of the population have gone through a divorce and, reading the script, I felt that maybe we don’t see this enough on television – how difficult breaking up is, how many decisions you have to make, how much of your life you’ve invested in this person and your family, and how does that work when it goes wrong?’
The truth behind Fi’s misfortunes
is more complicated than it appears, however. And Martin Compston says his character Bram, though very impulsive and appearing to be the likely culprit for the catastrophe, may not be the villain he first appears to be.
‘The script is full of bad sliding doors moments, as in, “If somebody hadn’t done that, then things would’ve been fine,”’ says Martin, 37, best known for playing DI Steve Arnott in Line Of Duty. ‘And that’s a great part of the drama. There’s a sense that things spiralled out of control for Bram and we feel sympathy for him along the way. Hopefully I’ve tried to make him a bit of a lovable rogue who’s always going out to seek out a bit of danger.’
Martin, who has a son, Brodie, with his wife Tianna, confesses that playing Bram took its toll on him. ‘It is probably the most emotionally draining role that I’ve played in a long, long time. The scripts are relentless – they’re brutal. They’re a gift for an actor, but they can go very dark at times. And that can take a lot out of you. So I just tried to give it absolutely everything I’ve got.’
There’s a third person in this drama, too. After her marriage to Bram breaks down, Fi forms a new romance with a mysterious charmer called Toby, played by Rupert Penry-jones. ‘Toby is the seemingly lovely guy who starts dating Fi after her split,’ explains Rupert, 51. ‘So he is a new love interest in this relationship that becomes a love triangle. He’s an interesting character.’ But Rupert, who has been married to actress Dervla Kirwan since 2007, remains tight-lipped on what Toby gets up to in the thriller.
Tuppence, who split with long
term boyfriend Robert Fry in 2019, explains that Fi is drawn to how sensible Toby seems compared to Bram. ‘Although Bram is charming and they have this chemistry, Toby is a very different type,’ she says. ‘He seems kind of sensible and together, and everything that she’s been looking for – a grown-up who knows what he wants. But she’s also torn because she didn’t want any of this. She didn’t want her marriage to break down.’
A twisty thriller, Our House is full of big surprises, promises Tuppence. ‘Although it’s in a contemporary setting, it has that sort of Hitchcock feel about it – ordinary life becomes a sort of mystery that unravels slowly, and then has this big, dramatic finale,’ she says. Shortly, we’ll see Tuppence back in a bob and flapper dress for Downton Abbey: A New Era, and trailers for the film have already shown that her character Lucy does in fact get married to Tom. But right now, she’s relishing the idea of being seen as a modern, thirtysomething working woman in Our House. ‘I don’t think I have played a mum in anything contemporary before, only in period dramas and stuff like that,’ she muses. ‘It feels really nice to come into a different casting age bracket as a woman now that there are just so many more interesting and complex roles for women out there.
‘What I really loved about Fi, is that, yes, she’s a wife and a mother, but she’s also so much more than that,’ she continues. ‘She is a really strong woman who has a career that she loves – and is good at – and she juggles all of those things simultaneously.’
‘I think it used to be the case that, as an actor, you would get to a certain age in your life and then the roles would start to dry up,’ Tuppence considers. ‘You would just be playing roles such as the wife of the protagonist or a character on the side lines. But I really do think things are changing now because some of the most interesting roles to be had for women are of those in their 30s and 40s. And I’m very much all for it.’