Julie Hesmondhalgh has had an epiphany – related to Covid-19, obviously.
“I realise that my main skill in the apocalypse is making videos of myself to send to exhausted NHS workers,” she says. “‘Hi! I’m Julie Hesmondhalgh, better known as Hayley from Coronation Street. I know you’re on your one 10-second break of a 12-hour shift and what you really need is to see some obscure TV personality making a video …’” She pauses. “I’ve never felt more useless in my life.”
And yet she knows those videos mean a lot – to the people who get them and to those who organise them. That is why she records messages for shuttered theatres and stories for children’s charities, as well as shiny shards of joy for shattered healthcare workers.
A month into the lockdown, she is feeling a little fragile herself. “I’ve generally been doing all right, because I’m in an incredibly privileged position. I live in a lovely place with a garden and countryside on my doorstep. My kids are that bit older and they don’t have any special educational needs. Kersh [the writer Ian Kershaw, Hesmondhalgh’s husband] is still working and I’ve got a job coming up that’s been deferred. But sometimes, despite all those things, I’m not all right.
“I think that a lot of the problems that we’ll have after this in terms of people’s mental health is that the quiet heroism of staying inside ain’t cutting it for some people,” she says. “Especially people who are used to resisting in some way, through protesting or campaigning. So I do what I can and I do it the best I can – wholeheartedly.”
Decades of resisting, campaigning and protesting mean that Hesmondhalgh is now the patron of several charities, including Trans Media Watch, a role that dates from the late 90s, when she started playing Hayley Cropper, a transgender character, in Coronation Street; the Sophie Lancaster Foundation, since her involvement with the play Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster; and the sexual assault charity Stars Dorset, from when she played Broadchurch’s rape survivor, Trish Winterman. She also supports food banks, hospices and arts charities. “You have to admit it,” she jokes: “I am a really good person.”
A great actor, too. From Hayley and Trish to her latest – Heather in the BBC drama The A Word, about an autistic boy and his family – Hesmondhalgh’s performances are truthful and grounded. As Peter Bowker, the writer of The A Word, says: “There isn’t a fake note about her, either as a performer or a person. I saw her in a play at the Royal Exchange a few years back and she lets you see her soul. As a performer, she’s generous, truthful and joyous.”
Bowker had wanted to work with Hesmondhalgh “for ever” and it is an ideal match. The combination of Hesmondhalgh’s humanity and Bowker’s writing – tenderness tinged with vinegar – is glorious. So glorious, in fact, that Bowker says he would work with her again in a shot. “In fact, I’m planning to,” he says. “I’m writing a romantic comedy for her.”
Hesmondhalgh grins when I mention it. “Is he telling people now? Ooh, great!”
A working-class girl from Accrington, Lancashire, the young Hesmondhalgh loved doing performing arts, but did not think it was for her. “It wasn’t a time when everybody felt like that kind of life was at their fingertips. I felt like I’d be better placed being a social worker or a probation officer. So that’s what I was planning.”
The universe, however, had other ideas. “I had a series of really good teachers who saw something in me,” she says, before pausing. “And, actually, I lost two of those really, really influential teachers recently. Brian Astbury, a great teacher from Lamda, before the virus, and this week Martin Cosgrif. He was the teacher from Accrington College who was responsible for getting loads of us into drama school. He died of the virus.”
The impression that Cosgrif and Astbury left on Hesmondhalgh is clear. When she left drama school, she, Astbury and others set up Arts Threshold theatre in the early 90s, where Rufus Norris, now the artistic director of the National Theatre, directed his first play.
“Brian had set up the first multiracial theatre company in South Africa in the 70s at the height of apartheid, and he taught me very much that you can marry your politics and art – and that, actually, theatre and art have a massive part to play in changing the world. Brian gave me permission to believe that and work with that. And that’s been underlying in everything that I’ve done.”
As far as party politics goes, she was – and remains – a staunch supporter of Jeremy Corbyn. “A series of unbelievable happy accidents meant that we got so far with the Corbyn experiment,” is her verdict on his years at the head of Labour. “Everything was put in place to stop him from becoming leader – and then it happened. Then everything was put in place to have a second leadership election and for him not to win that – and he won it. And then, on the night of the 2015 election, when so many of us thought that it might be possible, there were other people within our own party saying it was the worst night of their lives. The same forces that were recently being so, so awful [to Diane Abbott]. I find that extraordinary.”
While she believes that “we’ll look back on this period as a missed opportunity”, being negative is not her thing. “So for now I just feel like: OK, we’ve got to move forward.”
How does she feel about Labour’s new leader? “Me and Kersh both said that, even in all the Blair years, Jeremy never left the party, but worked within it, and that’s what we’ll continue to do. I think the party could do a lot worse than Keir as leader. He’s very acceptable to the establishment, but with some good principles to him. Does the prospect of him make me dance around my living room? No.”
Labour’s defeat in the 2019 general election is not the raw wound it was for Hesmondhalgh, but she has been left with a scar. “I did the audio version of the Labour manifesto and a couple of times I had to stop because I was choked up. It was beyond your wildest dreams – and yet it did seem like it could happen, because there was so much uncertainty and because 2015 had been such a shock. But now we go back to the old way of doing things, which is a more negative kind of campaigning. It’s more about just getting the Tories out, rather than about creating an amazing socialist utopia.”
With big-P politics discussed, I ask Hesmondhalgh about the little-p politics around two of her highest-profile TV roles. Trish, her character in Broadchurch, was one of countless female characters who have been raped in TV drama for a storyline intended to entertain viewers. Was she unsure about taking on the role?
“I wanted to be really careful about it, because, when I got the first script, I didn’t know Chris [Chibnall, the creator of the series]. I’ve loved Broadchurch, but I didn’t know what his politics were and I knew what sexual violence looks like on telly – and I didn’t want to be a part of that.”
So Hesmondhalgh did what anyone would do in her situation. She rang the Doctor for advice. Or rather, she rang Jodie Whittaker, a friend of a friend, who at that point was yet to star in Doctor Who, but had played the grieving mother Beth Latimer in the first series of Broadchurch.
“Once I’d got over my shock that Jodie was a northerner – she looks like some beautiful English rose and I assumed she was posh – she was brilliant. She was just like: “Yep, Chris is a feminist and as sound as,” so I decided to do it.”
Hesmondhalgh admits to being intrigued that she was approached about the part. “I felt I wasn’t like any sort of sexual-violence survivor that I’d seen portrayed on telly before. So often rape is shown as an act of desire, which it isn’t. So often it’s a beautiful girl being pursued through the woods – and pursued by the camera. But the whole point of Broadchurch was to show an ordinary-looking, middle-aged woman being the survivor of something like that. So I am really proud of Broadchurch, because of the way the conversation shifted at that moment. And that’s down to years and years of coal-face campaigning from people who were out working in the field. ”
Which brings us to Hesmondhalgh’s breakthrough role as Hayley in Coronation Street. The first trans character in a British soap, Hayley transformed trans visibility in the UK and led to Coronation Street being thanked in parliament for changing public perceptions. This was in 1998. It was nothing short of radical.
“Even now, I can’t quite believe the power of it,” Hesmondhalgh says. “Literally within weeks, people were saying to me in the street: ‘When are you and Roy getting married?’ I’d be like: ‘We’re not allowed to – it’s against the law,’ and they’d be like: ‘Oh, never mind that!’ I knew then that something was shifting. If you want to fight prejudice, you put somebody likable in the living room and people can see beyond what makes them different to what makes them the same.”
Even then, though, there was controversy around a cis woman being cast as a trans woman. “There was a really great trans rights group, Press for Change, who were really, really pissed off – and I totally understood why. I met them and said: ‘I hear you, but honestly I think the pressure on a trans actor – who definitely would have had a certain amount of vulnerability anyway – would have been unbearable.’ The way the press was then, they’d have been eaten alive. So I assured them that I was their ally, that I would play the part with as much sensitivity and empathy as I could, that I would listen to them. And, honestly, I think I did a decent job.”
Would she take the part today? “I would hope that it wouldn’t be offered to me as a cis woman,” she says, firmly. “I definitely wouldn’t take it. I left Corrie because it was time for me to go personally, but it was also time for Hayley – a trans woman played by a cis woman – to go, too. I was about to become an absolute anachronism, because there were then trans actors to play those parts, and even more now.”
All the same, given how popular Hayley – and Roy – were, Hesmondhalgh could easily have spent another 20 or 30 years in Weatherfield, safe in the knowledge that she would still be getting A-stories into her 80s, just as Barbara Knox, who plays Rita, does today.
“It is a really great place to grow old as an actress,” she says. But when it is time to go, it is time to go – and what an exit it was. Almost exactly 16 years after she first appeared on the cobbles in her red anorak, Hayley killed herself after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Her death attracted an audience of almost 10 million. One man remembers it especially vividly: David Neilson, who plays Roy.
“That year leading up to Hayley’s death was quite full-on and some of it was very difficult to play, not least because I lost two friends to cancer in that time,” he says. “Playing that sort of story costs you. You have to dig deep to play it properly. And Julie always did.
“I remember the last scene we did; it was unlike any other scene I’ve done in the show. The director, Kay Patrick, told us and the crew to take as long as we needed to prepare for it – because we’d only be doing it once. And we did only do it once. You could have heard a pin drop in the studio. It truly felt like an ending.”
Where does Hesmondhalgh find the energy for all this? “I was brought up Baptist and, for a time, was quite an evangelical Baptist,” she says. “I went to see Billy Graham and got a full-body immersion baptism. I was doing testimonies at church when I was like 12; I was a Sunday school teacher when I left to go to Lamda.
“I think it was Jeanette Winterson who said that, if you grow up in that sort of environment, you have an evangelical streak that never leaves you. I think that is what people see in me sometimes: the energy comes out through campaigning or through socialism. I like being part of something bigger.”
And so we return to where we began: with lockdown life. Amid the challenge, Hesmondhalgh sees hope. “Suddenly, we’re all not taking the NHS for granted. Suddenly, we are realising how much we need other people in every single way. Suddenly, we are appreciating the people who empty our bins and care for our elderly people.
“I think – I hope – it’s going to be hard to revert to the way things were. I’m hoping that what we’re going through right now has shifted the national consciousness in some way that makes people look at the way the world runs.”
The A Word returns weekly at 9pm on BBC One from 5 May; all six episodes will be available on iPlayer from 5 May