ON THE COVER
Sarah Lancashire “I don’t search out misery!”
Last Christmas, as Sarah Lancashire ate her turkey dinner surrounded by loved ones, she addressed her family around the table in a way that seems a little odd. “I had my Christmas dinner speaking in a Welsh accent,” confesses the actress with a laugh.
It’s all because of Sarah’s dedication to acting that she began learning to speak in a Welsh Valleys accent for her role in the powerful drama TheAccident, which is currently gripping audiences on Channel 4. Sarah is playing Polly Bevan, wife of council leader Iwan (Mark Lewis Jones) in a close knit Welsh town.town Their rebellirebellious teenage daughter, Leona, has been leeft disabled after she and a bunch of schoolfriends broke into a building site where an explosion ensued. Noow Polly is on the warpaath, bent on discoveringg if shoddy building practices led to thhe explosion. Powerhouse acctress Sarah – who’s won BAFTA Best Actresss Awards forr HappyVaalley and Last Tangoin Halifax – was determined to sound as authentic as the Welsh cast members. “I started learning [the accent] in about November of last year,” says Sarah, 54. “It was really challenging – it was awful! We started filming in April, just to give you an indication of how long it took me.”
She even travelled to Wales to tape people speaking. “If I require an accent for a certain job you will normally know a friend of a friend of a friend who will read a copy of something fairly bland for three or four minutes – then I just listen to it constantly,” she says, shrugging off any notion that she goes to impressive lengths. “It’s only Cardiff, not Australia! It’s my job – it’s what I do.”
TheAccident’s Polly represents another nerve-shredding role for Sarah, who’s become a national treasure in recent years on the back of her towering performances in dramas such as Kiri (2018) – in which she played a social worker accused of neglect of a girl in her care – as well as HappyValley (20142016) and LastTango, which returns next year for an eagerly anticipated fifth series.
When we met Sarah at a recent press conference for TheAccident, she comes across – rather surprisingly – as shy and ill at ease in a public forum. It’s quite a contrast to the gutsy, forthright people Sarah portrays. And Polly is one of the toughest. As viewers have seen, while coping with the tragedy of her daughter’s disability – not to mention the deaths of the other children in the blast – Polly is also enduring an abusive relationship with
“It has to be about the quality of the writing and I try to choose the best”
her husband, who takes out his anger and frustration on her.
Sarah reassures us that the painful scenes of Mark (as Iwan) punching her don’t really affect her emotionally. “They’re done in a very technical manner,” explains Sarah. “We’re there with a stunt coordinator who’s making sure you fall in a specific way; they are painfully technical to shoot. The shock value of those scenes is very much for the viewer, not for the actor – for us it’s just about staying safe and falling properly.
“The most shocking thing for me when
I read the scene was the fact that Iwan and Polly then hold each other [in a hug]. I just thought I’ve never, ever seen anything on a page like that before, that is prepared to explore the co-dependency that this couple have.”
If it seems that Sarah is drawn towards roles about the darkest times in people’s lives, she insists it’s all just serendipity.
“I want to be really clear,” she says with a chortle. “I don’t search out the misery! I’m not sitting at home going, ‘I can’t wait to do another harrowing piece of work.’ No, I literally choose the best of what comes along and I can only make my choices out of the opportunities.”
Sarah says she gravitates towards scripts that grab her. “For me, it has to be about the quality of the writing,” she explains. “You can do nothing without great writing – the Jack Thornes [who wrote Kiri and TheAccident] and the Sallys [Wainwright, who writes Happy Valley and LastTango] – they don’t come along very often and, oh God, I’m lucky. I’m so lucky that work comes my way.”
In other words, Sarah – who’s married to TV executive Peter Salmon with three sons – is picky when it comes to work.
“I’m not somebody who goes from job to job to job to job,” she says. “I have huge periods of time when I’m not working, because I can’t find anything that I want to do. Of course, the market has now exploded with all the over-the-top channels – it’s massive.
“Because the oyster shell has got so big, finding the pearls within it is really
difficult. You have to work hard to find the stuff that you want to do.”
But, adds Sarah with a laugh, she’s never bored when she’s ‘resting’…
“I don’t twiddle my thumbs. I’m quite busy away from work!”