Ridley | Interview with Bronagh Waugh (DI Carol Farman)

Tell me a bit about your character, Carol, and why you wanted to play her.

DI Carol Farman is a really well-shaped and layered character. What I loved about her is she’s complex, she’s layered, and she’s really good at her job. She’s a brilliant detective, but she does things her own way. She’s a bit of a conundrum because she does things her own way, but yet she also will follow the rules more than Ridley does. But she’s still a bit of a maverick herself, and that’s why Ridley likes her so much. They dance to the beat of their own drum, both of which are very different, and that’s what can cause conflict – but it also makes them get on really well. She’s warm, she’s funny, she doesn’t take any nonsense. She’s a great mother, and she has a great home life with a loving wife. But she is like a dog with a bone when it comes to work, and very focused and entrenched, and absorbed in her work. So trying to strike that home-work balance is difficult for her. I really liked her. I thought she was tough, no nonsense, and felt like a real woman.

Your characters have a good relationship but do you and Adrian (Dunbar) get on well too?

Yes! We’re obviously from Northern Ireland. It was interesting, I don’t know if it can help make the chemistry better when you’re both from the same place. You both have a similar sense of humour and share the same culture, the same language, all of those kinds of things. I just adored him. We really clicked. He’s got a wonderful, mischievous quality about him and I’ve been a huge fan of his work. it was a real pleasure and honour to work with him – he’s a wonderful captain of the ship. He understands this story and this piece really well, and he’s a great guiding light with it.

Carol and Ridley have a really interesting relationship. He was the one that pushed her to get the promotion, he sees something in her. They have a lot of similarities, but also a lot of differences, which can make them clash. And there’s a really nice dynamic between them, in the same way that you love your family but they drive you mad at the same time. There’s also the mentoring, he is a real mentor to Carol and I feel like Adrian has been a mentor to me as an actor as well, which has been really nice.

What research did you do for this role?

I always like to begin with books and online research, and to get testimony from retired detectives. I also find it really interesting to try and look from a female perspective of what it’s like for female detectives who are high up in the ranks, to see what they’ve had to come up against. And then I watched a lot of documentaries, and a lot of true crime stuff. There’s a TV show called The Detectives in Manchester, and there’s a female boss in that, so it was interesting to watch. And I love 24 Hours in Police Custody. I think that’s a wonderful blueprint to watch. To learn with observation of how real detectives are. They’re actually very unshowy. There’s something real and normal about what I’ve witnessed on these kinds of programmes. So I was trying to bring an element of that to Carol. She’s a real woman, there’s no glamour, and there’s no sexiness or anything. She’s a real, normal woman who everyone can relate to.

And the location was important to the feel of the show?

We’ve got this wonderful and diverse core team and set against the backdrop of this stunning Yorkshire and Lancashire vista makes it a very different show. It’s very rural. It feels like a small village or town, and that’s what sets it apart. It’s not trying to be a gritty city drama. And with that dramatic landscape, and with the beautiful job that our DOP Tony Coldwell did, it gives a bit of a northern noir feel. It kind of harks towards the Scandi noir stuff, but it has a unique flavour of being set in the north of England. So there is that toughness and that hardiness that you get there, but with the wonderful warmth, that you get in the north of England.

I didn’t know the area well. I’d visited – my husband and I are really into hiking, so when I had been filming in Manchester before we went hiking out to some of those spots, but I’d never spent as much time as I wanted to. We’d spent six months outside in this stunningly epic, dramatic backdrop. I think every murder that we investigate, there is epic rain, epic wind – there’s a different element in every episode. We’ve got snow, we’ve got rain, we’ve got sleet, we’ve got gale force winds, over the whole series, which is perfect.

What about the accent, was that was that hard?

Not really. I have played a detective in Manchester, and each time I do that, I find it easier to stay in the accent for the whole job. Because you absorb the crew and the people that are around you a lot. Also, in this particular show, Adrian being from Enniskillen meant that I didn’t trust myself not to slip. And even like the vernacular, and the way you say things, it’s so different. It’s interesting, when me and him would go for dinner at night, I felt like I shed the skin of Carol and became Bronagh again. Your language changes. But I don’t find it too difficult because I love working with different accents. It’s tiring though, working all day in a different accent.

Describe your on-screen family.

It’s a really nice dynamic. I adore both Bhavna (Limbachia) and Tareq (Al-Jeddal). I think it’s Tareq’s first job as well, he’s brilliant. He’s so natural. And he’s got really great instincts. And it’s been such a pleasure working with Bhavna as well. She’s wonderful. We really wanted to build a lovely home life… I guess to contrast what was going on with Ridley, and it’s a nice contrast to the detective work and the murder inquiries.

What I love that Paul Matthew Thompson, the writer, has done is he hasn’t made the fact that they’re gay into a story. My parents are gay, so I have two mums, so it really spoke to me. And that’s also one of the things that really drew me to the character of Carol. She felt normal and real, and the way my mum is, a working mum who happens to be married to another woman and they have a kid. It’s loving and solid.

Having a very young son, what it was like suddenly having a teenage son?

It was really interesting. I think what really helped is while filming some of the very dramatic stuff with Jack (Tareq), it really helped to think about my own son Oisín. I felt that instant love for him. This is the first time I’ve played a character who is a mum since becoming a mum myself, so that was really interesting, because it felt easy to imagine and put myself in the position as the story progresses with this series.

And did juggling your own home and working life help you with this portrayal?

I definitely felt that, because I’d be working from 6am till 7pm. And then you go home, and then my job as a mum begins. So that was a very exhausting, interesting juggle that I could then put into the character of Carol, because you feel that she never has enough time or enough hours in the day. And I certainly can relate to that, when you’re being pulled in every direction and nothing’s good enough.

And the other thing I really liked, as a woman, about Ridley is that there wasn’t what I call any ‘murder porn’. The role of women is often as victims. And in Ridley we don’t see that. We see two strong female characters, which is Wendy Newstone, the pathologist, and Carol Farman. And then you see Bhavna’s character Geri as another strong woman – a university lecturer. You get to solve the crime and come along with us as an armchair detective, cerebrally, and as a detective without having to look at blood and guts and gore for the sake of it. I think that’s really important. And I feel like we treat every victim, male or female, with a real respect. Now, lots of other shows do too, but it really mattered to me and I’m very proud of that in our show.

Do you watch detective dramas yourself?

I love watching the crime series. The British public have such a thing about crime drama – the genre is popular worldwide but it feels like we have a particular penchant for it. I think it’s because crime drama is such a perfect way of telling a story, because you get all the satisfaction of the setup of something, we get to play along with it, of trying to solve it, and then the resolution at the end, it follows a perfect structure and a perfect arc. One of the things that’s great about Ridley is you will discover the crime, you will get to do the detective work, and you will resolve the crime all in one episode.

The fact that we see both Ridley and Carol’s private lives so much is a different element to it. You get to know the people. And for me, that’s really important. If I don’t know the characters, then I don’t care about them, as an audience member. But you also have this wonderful personal backstory to Ridley that you can delve into. Ridley’s got his ghosts. I feel like we’ve all got our ghosts.

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