An interview with Emilia Fox

Emilia plays Dr Nikki Alexander.

Is Nikki is reunited with Matt in this series?

A private jet crashes at the opening of the series in very dramatic circumstances. On board is an ex-US ambassador who is friends with Matt, so that’s how his character is brought back into the series. We see the effect that this incident has on Nikki and Matt’s relationship.

How are things panning out for Nikki and Matt this year?

Nikki and Matt are trying to cope with the long-distance relationship, which is something familiar to a lot of people. The plane crash affects Matt and brings back some painful memories relating to another family member of his. Nikki is trying to look after his needs as well as being part of solving the crime. She is balancing that working life/personal life dilemma.

What does Episode 1 (Deadhead) illustrate?

Deadhead deals with feelings, with how you feel when you’re isolated with your emotions and who you reach out or don’t reach out to. If you can’t speak to the people that you are meant to be closest to, it can be to the detriment of your relationship and to yourself and your own sense of mental well-being. It's also about how to access ways of dealing with grief or loss or not knowing who you are. So the episode tackles quite a lot in an emotional sense as well as in the actual solving of the crime.

Was the aeronautical jargon hard to learn?

We had a lot of “aero-lingo”! I think that was the most complicated lingo we have had to learn. The language is very specialised and it's really hard to remember. When I have to remember stuff which is so complicated, I do riddles. Like with the medical stuff - you can talk it through with a pathologist so, with the bodies, there is a sort of picture to it and you can make it work by remembering the words as riddles. That means that if a word sounds like something, or if it’s got a certain number of letters in it, that just triggers the memory of what that word is.

Will we see more of the main characters' personal lives?

Yes, in this series all of the characters have a story that we are personally invested in. For my character, Nikki, there are a few things: There’s the relationship element to the episodes with Matt and there is story called Seven Times (Episodes 5 and )] written by Tim Prager, who is always excellent at dealing with the topical issues, and has written a really heart-felt, moving episode about domestic abuse and links that into Nikki’s relationship with her mum.

Is that hard for the writers to craft?

Yes. It is a very difficult balance for the writers. The characters are meant to be, and are, on the professionals’ side of things and not emotionally invested with every single case. You can’t do it in every episode because it would be too much for the series to cope with, but when a writer ties-in a personal connection to the case, and we become involved emotionally, it’s lovely to play. It gives us more to play with and you definitely have that in this series.

 

Is there one storyline in this new series you have not been able to shake off because it’s been so emotionally powerful?

Definitely. It's called Hope. It’s Liz’s episode. It deals with such a personal story for Clarissa but also it explores an area of death that we haven’t explored in Silent Witness before. It's about cryogenics and the validity really of how we can manipulate life and birth to great benefit with IVF or helping people have babies through medicine and science and how that relates to death. Would we try to keep our loved ones alive if there was hope that medicine could help them in the future? It's such an interesting, muscular topic to talk about. It could have gone slightly science-fiction, but it doesn’t, and it runs parallel to, I think, a very, very moving story.

Do you still make charts to plot Nikki's progress through a series?

I do. I find it really helpful. We often film out of sequence, and so you have to remember what information the character already knows during certain scenes, because otherwise - and particularly at the speed that we film - we’re coming into scenes thinking “Where are we in this story?” and “Was that in the last script or was that here?” So I make charts on every job that I do, I map it out. I think it must be a hangover from university days. I like to have done the homework on it and then I know that I’m okay, particularly with solving crimes! We are bouncing between episodes and so you have to know what you know and what you don’t know.

Do you get much feedback from the public?

Very often I get lots of young people and students who come up and talk about how the show has inspired them to go into pathology or forensic science. That’s what they have chosen to study, and they communicate with you through social media. I love that side of it.

Are the exchanges on social media always positive?

Yes. The stories in Silent Witness can often provoke people to say that they don’t agree with that or that it’s not how it’s been with them, but that’s as valuable as the other side of it. You have to be prepared to face people saying, "No, that’s not how it was for me".

A couple of series back, Nikki was in therapy because of what had happened in Mexico and people had quite strong feelings about that. But it gets a conversation going, and that’s no bad thing. I like it that people can communicate about it if it’s made them feel something. If they have just enjoyed it for entertainment, fine, but if it actually strikes a chord as well, then that's even better.

Do you like Nikki's dress sense?

Definitely. I only ever go to the shops when I go costume shopping. We all have an influence on what we wear in the show. It’s a contemporary show, and certainly I’ve found the pathologists we have met have very particular styles of dressing. That’s part of the fun of the character, and it seems to be a part which people address on social media a lot - hairstyles and what we’re wearing. What makes me laugh is that Liz said at the beginning, "I will never discuss what Clarissa wears on the show" - and oh, how in these years she has changed!

Why has Nikki gone brunette in this series?

The real explanation is that I was doing The Trial of Christine Keeler (BBC One) and playing Valerie Hobson and they dyed my hair for that. The producers on Silent Witness said they really liked it brunette. We talked about whether I could be Nikki’s twin sister, Vicky Alexander, but then we thought we would just get on with it. People change their hair colour all the time. Richard (Lintern) says that my hair is now "cognac by the fire rather than a blonde skipping through meadows."

Does working on Silent Witness ever give you funny dreams?

Yes. I definitely have dreams about doing post mortems because you’re constantly trying to settle things in your head if you’re doing a post mortem the next day. Then last night I dreamed that we were all doing a scene together and there was a detective in it. The detective asked a question and Thomas Chamberlain answered it, but as the doctor in Tootsie. It was so funny. I’ve never had a dream which has made me laugh so much. I had to go back into my sleep and finish off the dream because I was enjoying it so much. Then I woke up thinking how lucky I am that I go to work with people who really make me laugh!

How do you keep the passion for the show going?

I love it with exactly the same excitement as the first day I arrived on it, but with the history of loving it now, too. It’s a really huge relationship that I’ve had with it as a show. I still feel excited by it and I still feel sad when it comes to these last weeks. As soon as we get into filming the last episode, I get like, “Oh, we’re going to be saying goodbye for a little bit!” and I still get excited when we’re back on it!

I think a large, large part of that is the relationship that we four have with each other and the fact that it is a show which is constantly bringing in new casts. So it’s constantly giving us as actors the luxury of the familiarity of the character, but always being put into new situations.

Tell us more…

Sometimes the nature of the beast is that we are the information-givers and that’s a skill in itself, to try and deliver information ad infinitum, but as though we are very relaxed about it. That’s our everyday. There's a challenge in that as an actor as well. Then you also get to play the emotional stuff and the action stuff – we always have that. We are so lucky. I never take this job for granted. Seven months of the year we are working on a job that we really love.