In Unforgivable, a new 90-minute drama by Jimmy McGovern, Anna Friel never once smiles. She plays Anna Mitchell, whose brother – released from prison as the drama begins – sexually assaulted her preteen younger son. The trauma inflicted is clear: almost throughout, the boy won’t utter a word beyond “yes” and “no”.
“We worked on the basis that her anger had to be suppressed,” Friel says, speaking from her home in Windsor. “She’s lost her husband, her mother has died, she’s lost a brother who she absolutely loved. And most of all, she’s lost trust. Trust is so hard to come by, it takes years and years, and when that’s broken, it sets off a domino effect. So while there’s a certain amount of paranoia in Anna’s mood, she has got to hold it together.”
The dialogue in the show is pared down and the aesthetic is sparse. At one point during our interview, Friel jokingly turns off her ring-light to mimic how unflattering the lighting was on set. But the effect is perhaps not what she intended: Friel still looks incredible no matter the lighting situation, her fairytale face the same as ever, tough but never hard. But the point she is making is that, with a drama like this, you can’t worry about how you look, “otherwise you lose integrity, authenticity, honesty, rawness”.
Friel says there is a certain poetry to the way Unforgivable was shot. “Natural lighting can be a character in itself. And it’s hard, because there is such pressure, particularly on women: should you, shouldn’t you look old? I think there are more important things to focus on, to be honest.”
McGovern started his writing career on Brookside, which, like Unforgivable, was set in Liverpool in the early 1980s. He left four years before Friel started on the same soap, 32 years ago, when she was 16. She didn’t do a scouse accent then, but does here, as does Leeds-born Austin Haynes, who plays her younger son, during the brief moments he speaks.
“Being a child actor myself, I can honestly, hand-on-heart, look back and say I was nowhere near as good as he is,” she says. “They’re phenomenal, the young actors [Finn McParland plays her other son, Peter]: the focus, the concentration. How can they have that understanding at such an age? It’s the equivalent of meditating – but instead of meditating on wonderful manifestations and good thoughts, you’re meditating purely on that one emotion, and you carry that around for a day. It can be quite wearing. They’re really blowing my socks off. And I’m getting to see it all because I’m at an age when I’m only playing mothers – and I’m probably soon to be playing grandmothers.”
She says that without chagrin, but it’s a real bugbear among actors over 65 that they are the perfect age to play grandmothers, but all the roles go to women in their 50s. Friel recalls, wryly, how Michael J Fox in Back to the Future Part II, aged 28, played a teenager. “That’s a way more interesting way to do it, because you have more life experience. It’s more interesting to play down than to play up.”
At the same time, the role of a mother is far less generic now. It’s not unusual in the streamer age to see a maternal character, such as hers in Unforgivable, with a personality. “I think I probably wouldn’t be working if I’d reached this age in the 1980s,” she says. “Which is crazy, because you become more fascinating in your late 40s or mid-50s, not less – it’s just this [she gestures theatrically, to her face]. Or aching bones or aching joints. But I think life experience is everything, and if you’re someone who wants to grow and be better, that will show.”
The night before we speak, the drama had a screening in Liverpool for the cast, crew, friends and family. “When it ended,” Friel says, “there was complete and utter silence. Before there was applause, you could have heard a pin drop. And we thought, ‘Gosh, I wonder what people are going to feel, because it’s so thought-provoking, such a challenging piece.’”
The challenge is that it’s about child abuse but is morally quite complicated. Of course it doesn’t excuse Joe, the perpetrator, played with an awful wounded plausibility by Bobby Schofield, but nor does it deliver any easy hate figures or certainties. Friel’s character is “really fiercely angry and devastated”, bitter, volatile and hard to warm to. Her problems are redoubled when she can’t get mental health support for her son, as he spirals into despair. “That would be so alienating and infuriating,” she says. “I tried really hard not to judge her. You can’t just go for the easy option in a performance, of, ‘Please like me.’”
Unforgivable boasts a cast you will think you have seen together before, particularly Friel and David Threlfall, who plays Anna’s dad, along with Anna Maxwell Martin as a blunt but caring former nun. All three are like a badge of quality for a particular kind of British dramatic realism, yet they hadn’t met before. Friel and Threlfall bonded over matcha, the bright green and very much on-trend drink – “as we get older, we can’t have too much caffeine,” she says, pretend-mumsily, “it makes our heart rate accelerate.”
Creating familiarity, says Friel, is probably the most important thing in doing a family drama. “When you have no rehearsal time” – the whole thing was shot in four weeks – “you need that openness and believability. ‘That’s my child’, ‘That’s my father.’”
In 2020, Friel was in a film with the same theme, called Sulphur and White – based on the real-life story of David Tait, the survivor of a paedophile ring and a campaigner for the NSPCC. The film was slightly blindsided by Covid – it was released on the eve of lockdown and hardly got an audience – but Friel is still in touch with Tait, having played his mother. “He was one of the first people I sent a screener of Unforgivable to,” she says. “He just cried from beginning to end, because all of his abusers, unfortunately, got away with it. And I think what struck him, as someone who has been abused, is that he carried the effects all the way through his life.”
Friel has also just finished shooting, in Bristol, a semi-futuristic, semi-dystopian drama, set in 2038, about “deep poverty and the union of the human spirit”. After that, she says: “I think what I need is a really good comedy, or a romcom, or a Jane Austen novel, something beautiful and sweet.”
Friel is often cast in darker roles – in the three seasons of the British so-called Nordic noir, Marcella, she barely smiles either. She doesn’t think it’s reflective of her personality. “I’m quite jolly and funny … I won’t say funny, I’m not allowed to call myself that. But Gracie [her daughter] and I just laugh constantly. We’re silly and lighthearted.” She and her ex, David Thewlis (they split in 2010) never encouraged Gracie to become an actor, but inevitably, having been on film sets in 10 countries before she was one, she is curious about acting, and their tastes are very similar. “We could, all three of us, be put in separate rooms, watch the same thing, write an essay on it and come back and say the same thing. I don’t know if that’s genetics or nurture, but we all have the same taste. We’d have the same notes, the same level of enjoyment or dislike.”
Gracie turned 20 two weeks ago. A few days later, there was an Oasis gig in Manchester, “which took me back to the carefree days”, says Friel. “It was the most incredible night. Lots of people are referring to it as biblical. I felt like a teenager. All those songs resonate still to this day. To see them reunite, it was an incredible atmosphere, of love and hope and happiness.”
She seriously got hope vibes from the Gallagher brothers?
“I danced my little bottom off!”
Friel turned 49 the day after that, then went to see her father, who is very unwell, her grandmother, who is 99 and pretty hale, and then to the Lake District for her godmother’s funeral.
“It’s been a massive rollercoaster of emotions,” she says. “But I still love my job and I hope I’m always getting better at it.
She has had wonderful mentors: “Brenda Fricker was one, and when I was on Broadway, I had the amazing Judi Dench giving me little notes and checking in on the phone. I remember being 22, looking up at them, going, ‘How have they done that?’ It’s utter discipline and never, ever feeling that you have got to a point where you can’t be better.”