Cold justice
JOANNA SCANLAN is a grief-stricken mother looking for answers in a Welsh thriller
Y Golau
Sunday, 9pm, S4C
FRESH FROM WINNING a Leading Actress BAFTA for her role in film After Love, Joanna Scanlan is taking another departure from her comedy roots by playing a grieving Welsh mum in six-part psychological thriller Y Golau on S4C.
The drama comes from the team behind Keeping Faith and is similarly filmed in both Welsh and English, with the English version, entitled The Light in the Hall, being shown on C4 later this year.
The Welsh noir thriller sees Scanlan star as Sharon, whose 15-year-old daughter Ela was murdered 18 years ago.
The culprit was local man Joe Pritchard (played by Game of Thrones villain Iwan Rheon), who was jailed for the crime. But with no body, and Pritchard suffering from dissociative amnesia, meaning he has no memory of the murder, Sharon continues to struggle under the weight of unanswered questions – which only intensify when Pritchard is released on parole.
SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH
‘Sharon is an ordinary woman who’s had extraordinary things happen to her,’ says Scanlan. ‘She’s seething with incandescent rage and so far she’s kept a lid on those feelings.
‘But she gets to the point where she begins to take a level of action that’s borderline illegal. She’s been campaigning for years to force
Pritchard to tell her where he put Ela’s body, and she becomes fuelled by this need to find out where her daughter is.’
Also in the cast is Scanlan’s former No Offence co-star Alexandra Roach, who plays Ela’s childhood friend Cat. Now a journalist, Cat’s also determined to uncover the truth about Ela’s mysterious murder.
But things unravel for both Sharon and Cat when they’re forced to confront the past and the part they played in the days leading up to Ela’s death, while also reconsidering Pritchard’s guilt.
‘I very much feel that this is Alexandra’s show,’ says Scanlan.
‘It’s been fantastic to work with her again – I didn’t think we’d have that opportunity after No Offence was cancelled.’
LANGUAGE LESSONS
Scanlan, 60, says that the biggest challenge of the series was learning Welsh. Although she grew up in Wales and took a Welsh-language course many years ago, she says having to learn it fluently to play Sharon was terrifying.
‘It felt extremely frightening,’ she says. ‘My main helper was my niece, Robin, who’s a Welshlanguage speaker. She spent months drilling me and telling me to get a grip when I got my pronunciations all wrong. But it is the most beautiful language, so getting to act in Welsh has been a real privilege.’
Y Golau EPISODES WILL ALSO BE AVAILABLE ON BBC IPLAYER SHORTLY AFTER THE WEEKLY S4C BROADCAST