How Joanna’s become a Jack of all trades
JOANNA SCANLAN enjoyed being invited into the ‘licentious’ world of Gentleman Jack, the hit TV drama starring Suranne Jones as the swaggering 19th-century title character.
Scanlan appears in the highly anticipated second season of the show, which has become a global phenomenon. She plays Isabella ‘Tib’ Norcliffe, a ‘wild and great spirit’ who was a friend — and sometime lover — of Anne Lister, real name of Jones’s Regency era ‘Gentleman Jack’.
‘The more you look into the history and reality of what happened, the more exciting it becomes,’ said Scanlan, who described Norcliffe as a ‘hunting, shooting, fishing country landowner’ who enjoyed a good time. ‘She was fearless,’ she told me. ‘A lot of women were doing their own thing — if they were fortunate enough to have the means.’
Such women are rarely heard about today, because of what she termed the ‘Jane Austefication’ of that period, when ‘licentiousness and sexuality’ was frowned upon. But they did exist.
The actress was in an ebullient mood, following her triumph at the annual BIFA Awards last Sunday, where she was named best actress for her acclaimed performance in Aleem Khan’s sublime film After Love. She plays Mary, an Islamic convert who travels to Calais, in an attempt to uncover the truth about her late husband.
Scanlan, who starred in No Offence, The Thick Of It, Getting On and more recently The Larkins (as Ma), has been praised before for big screen performances, as when she played Charles Dickens’s long-suffering wife Catherine, opposite Ralph Fiennes, in The Invisible Woman. But this is her first entry into the UK film awards season. I sincerely hope the BFI is screening After Love to BAFTA voters.
The actress was speaking to me from Wales, where she has been filming The Light In The Hall, aka Y Golau, a thriller, for S4C and Channel 4. Shooting the sixpart drama is a lengthy process because it’s being done in Welsh and in English. ‘I’m filming in the Welsh language for the first time in my life!’ she told me.
SCANLAN, who was born in the Wirral, took part in the Welsh language channel’s Language And Journey programme, where she was taught by Welsh speakers. The filmmakers saw her and offered her the role of a mother seeking restitution following the murder of her daughter 18 years before.
As she was preparing for the role, Scanlan found herself drawn to stories involving the families of murder victims...Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa... ‘there are, sadly, so many examples,’ she said.