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Suranne Jones
Suranne Jones: ‘Something had to give.’ Photograph: Gustavo Papaleo/The Guardian. Styling by Mary Fellowes. Tuxedo, Alberta Ferretti. Vintage waistcoat and scarf, stylist’s own.
Suranne Jones: ‘Something had to give.’ Photograph: Gustavo Papaleo/The Guardian. Styling by Mary Fellowes. Tuxedo, Alberta Ferretti. Vintage waistcoat and scarf, stylist’s own.

Suranne Jones: ‘I put all the bad stuff to one side, and worked and worked’

This article is more than 4 years old

The Doctor Foster star on why she collapsed backstage last year, and her game-changing new role in Gentleman Jack

The actor Suranne Jones, a can-doer from Greater Manchester who hoiked herself up from regional musicals and the soaps to become a prized figure on stage and in prestige British telly, is a proactive and restless character. At 40, Jones says, she will sometimes look in the mirror and get the uncanny sense of her own mother staring back: “same crooked nose, same big eyes like a pixie”. But she has the lively energy of a teenager and sets a brisk walking pace, skipping along the pavement from the photography studio to the nearest pub, talking at 1.5 speed. Jones is the first person I’ve met who, after our conversation, will record and email me voice notes (like mini podcasts, or extra-credit homework assignments) that expand on earlier talking points.

It’s been a wild few years, the actor acknowledges. She got married in 2014, had a son in 2016. As for her work: “Betrayal! Murder! Paedophilia! Betrayal!” is how Jones summarises what looked, from the outside, like a flawless professional run from 2015 to 2018. She was fantastic as the lead in the BBC noir Doctor Foster, the story of a small-town GP made icily vengeful by the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. (That was the betrayal.) Then she was a mother who’d lost a daughter in Lennie James’s award-winning drama Save Me (murder), and after that another mother whose daughter had been abused in a West End production of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen (paedophilia). Amid all this, she won a Bafta for the first series of Doctor Foster and filmed a second (more betrayal).

“I look back and go: wow. I’m not surprised it affected me along the way,” Jones says, adding: “Something had to give.” What gave, in the end, was the West End gig. Jones pulled out of Frozen in February 2018, after suffering some sort of collapse backstage, mid-show. At the time she posted an apologetic note on Instagram, suggesting that the pitch-black subject matter of the play had finally overwhelmed her. Honestly, Jones tells me, there was a little more to it than that, and later in the pub she’ll talk, cautiously, about other factors that underpinned her emotional crash.

For now she wants to talk about happier things, like her two-year-old son, just crashing into potty training and “the big move to a big bed”. Jones also talks with fierce pride about her forthcoming show, Gentleman Jack, early episodes of which, broadcast in America, have been getting positive reviews. Conceived and written by Happy Valley’s Sally Wainwright, Gentleman Jack tells the true story of Anne Lister, played by Jones, a 19th-century industrialist who once sank coal mines in Halifax and is described on her blue plaque as a “gender-nonconforming entrepreneur” who advocated for same-sex marriage roughly 200 years before such a thing was legally recognised.

As Anne Lister (right) in forthcoming show Gentleman Jack. Photograph: Matt Squire/BBC/Lookout Point/Matt Squire

Lister was a character, one probably overdue an appreciative revival. “Lesbian wasn’t a word to her,” Jones says. “Anne just loved women, and she believed it was her God-given nature that she needed to be with a woman. You can’t believe how modern all this was in the 1830s. How exciting. How dangerous. How... what’s the word,” Jones asks, “when you’re pushing boundaries? The word will come to me. Begins with ‘c’. Argh. Tired baby brain. If you think of it, put it in.” (Later the answer comes via text message: “Transgressive! Didn’t begin with ‘c’!”)

To get her head in the right place before Gentleman Jack, Jones read great chunks of Lister’s published diaries. “It’s all there for you – four million words. It’s almost too much. You get every single thought: ‘I’m vulnerable. I’m strong. She’s a pain in the arse. No, I love her.’ It was like seeing someone’s brain on the page.” At times, reading the diaries, Jones got the sense that Lister saw herself as a sort of science experiment. “She spent a lot of time in front of a mirror, uh, looking down below. Because she felt so unusual within that society, she felt like she had to explore her body, biologically.”

More than anything Jones noticed how sure-footed and at ease with herself Lister was – how early in her life she had it all figured out. “She wanted to marry a woman she loved and she talked about that in her diaries from the age of 16. That was amazing to me, that she knew just who she was.” In the new show, we pick up with Lister in the 1830s, when she is a quick-talking, ambitious, lusty, horse-executing fortysomething. Episode one (which is all that was ready for me to see) is a blast.

Hair: Ben Jones using Davines. Makeup: Jaimee Rose at Untitled Artists Ldn using Tom Ford beauty. Overcoat, Esau Yori. Shirt and trousers, Arket. Photograph: Gustavo Papaleo/The Guardian

Jones’s own early years were a touch more conventional, the actor says, full of incident nonetheless. She was born a Sarah in Oldham, her father an engineer and her mother a secretary. “A happy, working-class background. Friday nights, me and my brother got a Fry’s Peppermint Cream, picked a video from the video shop. My brother was older, very bright. He went to university. I wasn’t academically bright – maybe at first, when I was little, but it was lost. I started doing a drama workshop and got really into it, then I did a BTec in performing arts and started to work. I left home at 16, toured [with regional musicals], did some theatre education in schools. I would get home for little moments, to drop in, get my clothes washed, then go again.”

Someone had already registered the name Sarah Jones with the actors’ union, so on her father’s suggestion Jones took up her great-grandmother’s name, Suranne. She was 22 and working two bar jobs when she landed a six-month contract on Coronation Street, playing a firebrand called Karen McDonald – a character, Jones remembers, who “really flew” right from the start. In 2000, the year Jones started, a cool 19 million were tuning in to watch Coronation Street four nights a week. Six months turned into two years, then another two years after that.

As Karen McDonald in Coronation Street. Colleagues threw her a fancy-dress party themed around the character’s ludicrous storylines. Photograph: ITV Plc

In 2004, colleagues threw her a fancy-dress party, themed around the various ludicrous storylines McDonald had been written in to. Her friend and co-star Sally Lindsay came wearing a factory uniform, honouring a time during which McDonald had been a conniving underwear machinist. Jones herself wore a wedding dress, a reference to an episode where she learned she was about to marry a love cheat while standing at the altar.

It was probably the right time to leave. But the road out of a soap, for any ambitious actor, can be bumpy. (That road can be circular: plenty leave one soap only to wind up on another one, or back where they started.) I first met Jones in 2011, a few years after she’d quit Corrie, when she described the sort of jobs she was offered in the aftermath: jungle reality shows, “lots of money to go off and eat a crocodile’s knob or whatever”. In the end, two Coronation Street Sallies helped her shape an infinitely more satisfying career.

With Lesley Sharp in Scott & Bailey, the show she dreamed up with Coronation Street’s Sally Lindsay. Photograph: ITV

Jones was chatting in the pub with Lindsay, one day, when the two actors idly invented a cop franchise. Scott & Bailey, as the pair would title the show, naming one of the characters after a bottle of liqueur they could see behind the bar, was a procedural about two female detectives. “A bit Cagney & Lacey, grittier, set in the north.” The screenwriter Sally Wainwright, who’d also once found her professional feet on Coronation Street, and got to know Jones when they worked together on a 2007 drama called Dead Clever, transformed the concept into a fully fleshed show. It took a while to get off the ground, but Scott & Bailey premiered in 2011 (with Lesley Sharp in the other lead role) and wound up running on ITV for five years.

But it was probably Doctor Foster, which first broadcast in 2015, that cemented Jones as a real-deal actor. This was marquee television, that year’s Line Of Duty or Bodyguard, picked over all week from one episode to the next. Looking back, Jones has a guess at why her character, cheated-on, pushed over the edge, seemed to resonate: “She had the same dark thoughts we all have. But she executed them.”

Trouser suit, Maxmara. Shirt, Arket. Brogues, Everlane. Photograph: Gustavo Papaleo/The Guardian

One such execution was watched by about 10 million viewers and has come to be known, in pop-culture shorthand, as The Dinner Party Scene. Boiled down, this was a revenge episode, as Jones’s character very publicly exposes her husband for having an affair. She had once filmed a silly version of the same scenario on Coronation Street. In Doctor Foster, the tone was darker, weirder, hyper-real, and culminated in Jones, glassy-eyed and shouting, “I’m a wolf tonight!” (It sounds strange, but ask the 10 million who watched: the line landed.)

Jones tells me she came close to putting her head back and howling after delivering this bit of dialogue. She didn’t quite go that far; but it was an important moment for her, she remembers, a realisation that not every performance had to be restrained and naturalistic. “She was totally out of her mind and totally lucid.”

Jones won a Bafta for Doctor Foster in spring 2016. When she went on stage to collect her prize, that May, it all looked like a peak – a life high. Jones and her husband had just had their son. And here she was, on stage in the Royal Opera House, getting a standing ovation. The weird thing about people in the public eye is that, often, what looks like one of their best moments from the front can also be, round the back, one of their worst.

With Jodie Comer in Doctor Foster. Why does Jones think her character resonated? ‘She had the same dark thoughts we all have. But she executed them.’ Photograph: Alamy

It was during those months that Jones’s mother was coming to the end of her life, after a long, long illness. “I’m really good at compartmentalising,” Jones says. “That night [at the Baftas] I was thinking: ‘OK, I’m just gonna get on with this. I’ll present one person – Suranne, the actor – to the world.’”

Her mother had already been through a lot, a breast cancer survivor who later suffered an aneurism that seemed to leave her changed. “Like, she didn’t hug properly,” Jones recalls. “You’d go in for a hug and she wasn’t… She’d lost a part of her emotions.” Her mother went on to develop a form of dementia called vascular dementia. “With hindsight, when my mother stopped recognising me, that was… yeah. Your whole relationship over 30 years has been one thing, and then you have to rewire it. You have to accept losing someone when they’re not fully lost. You’re still visiting. There’s still a connection, only it’s very different. And meanwhile your whole being is saying: but this is my mum. There was a good five years of that. And then you lose them for real and you have to grieve again.”

When her mother died, in autumn 2016, Jones’s son was only a few months old. “Every day I would watch him and think: my mum should be here, seeing this. But like I said, I’m really good at, uh, compartmentalising. Building up a resilience. And I probably did that too much. Put all the bad stuff to one side, and worked and worked and worked.”

She describes the first physical symptoms of things going wrong, when she was in the West End. Frozen had been getting positive reviews, but it was gruelling work, and, “I’d been feeling edgy. Nervous around people. Not being able to converse properly. Not being able to get my points across. And being in the theatre didn’t help. I don’t think theatre was the cause, but I think it heightened it. You’ve got a 1,000-seater full of people staring at you. And when you feel the anxiety, breathlessness, it’s just drilling right into your solar plexus and you think, fuck. This is something I can’t stop, not once the show’s started.”

Her doctor advised she did try to stop; but Jones, at first, carried on. “Because I didn’t want to bring along my personal shit. Because I didn’t want to be a headline. That is one of the risks – becoming a headline. Even by me talking about this now. As much as you want to be honest. Being in the public eye, with the internet, it’s scary. You can put out too much and it becomes a part of the pie chart of who you are. Things stick. And they never go away.”

During one matinee, backstage, Jones collapsed and had to be replaced by an understudy. “You try and resist what’s happening,” Jones says. “Keep working. Keep doing the trick of going round as Suranne not Sarah. And in the end something gives. I think that’s what happened.”

In Bryony Lavery’s play Frozen. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

She took time off. Did yoga, did therapy, quit Instagram. When she went to read for the part in the Anne Lister biopic, Jones wasn’t sure she was ready to work again. A big-budget shoot, Gentleman Jack would mean moving her young family around. Emotionally, she was still finding her feet. Then Jones got to the audition room and found herself face-to-face with her old chum Sally Wainwright. The writer had been trying to get Gentleman Jack off the ground for years and, as well as scripting it, would be directing several episodes.

Wainwright, Jones recalls, was characteristically brusque that day. “I was stood there and she said, ‘Right. We’ve decided we’re not going to find anyone who can do all the things that made up Anne. Anyway, do you want to have a read?’ I knew then I wanted to do it,” Jones says. “And I know it helped me. Anne was an amazing woman, so full of life and energy and positivity. It rubbed off.”

A year has passed since the untidy end of her West End run. I ask Jones if she’s signed up for any more theatre. “Go back to emotionally draining myself in a very dark auditorium? Probably not yet.” She’s been tentatively reasserting herself in other ways. She and her husband recently put together a short film called Gone – her acting, him directing – that they’ve entered at festivals.

With husband Laurence Akers. Photograph: David Fisher/REX/Shutterstock

In the autumn she will shoot another series of the murder drama Save Me, though this time, Jones says, with no grisly stuff packed either side. “With every new job now, I’ll consider the psychological side, I think. The content. Which I maybe didn’t do before. I’ll need to know that I can live in that place for a period of time.”

In the pub, it’s getting late, and Jones needs to get home for her son. I ask her what she’s learned from the last year. She says: “That the inner light, the inner confidence, can go out of all of us, can’t it? And if you lose it personally, that inner thing, you can’t put it out professionally – cos that’s where it all comes from, inside you.” She leans on her elbows, blows out her lips. “I don’t know. I think of it as another thing on my ‘I’m 40’ checklist. Another thing I didn’t know before. I feel like I’ve come through something. That’ll have to do.”

Gentleman Jack starts 19 May on BBC One

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This article was amended on 17 May 2019. Vascular dementia was described as a form of Alzheimer’s, however they are two different forms of dementia. In addition, an earlier version referred to Gentleman Jack as a show only by HBO, when it was a collaboration with BBC One. This has been corrected.

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