deep water
Could ITV’S new thriller be the UK’S answer to Big Little Lies?
Three female leads — anna friel (Marcella), sinead Keenan (Little Boy Blue), rosalind eleazar (Howards End) —playing complex, layered characters. One female director, harry Wootliff, and screenwriter anna symon adapting Paula daly’s Windermere novels, make Deep Water feel right on the money for 2019 TV drama.
“It’s especially important to have female talent behind the camera,” says eleazar, who plays Kate, top of the three-tiered hierarchy of mums whose lives intersect at the school gates. “That’s not to say that I don’t think men can write nuanced female characters but what’s good about having a lot of women surrounding this project is that we’re not going to fall into stereotypes of women and how we believe women and mothers in particular are. That’s really refreshing.”
an accident involving Kate and lisa’s (friel) kids on board a boat in the idyllic setting of lake Windermere is the catalyst for relationships to be tested and dark secrets uncovered. “They’ve all got families and that always comes with some sort of baggage,” says sinead who plays roz. despite the source material of daly’s novels, the premise does have an unmistakeable echo of Big Little Lies, as anna friel acknowledges. “There are those parallels, I guess, of being female-driven and filmic,” she observes, “but that’s a massive thing to say because Big Little Lies is such an amazing series. You try to make your own thing rather than be a copy of something else.”