The star of Vigil and Gentleman Jack on the traumas that pushed her to breaking point.
Suranne Jones flops into a Chesterfield armchair and loosens a large medical boot on her right foot. "I've got a fracture and a torn ligament," the 43-year-old star of Doctor Foster and Vigil tells me. She doesn't know how it happened. "Apparently you can just do it walking around Tesco." She limped about on it for a month before trying acupuncture and reflexology. "I probably did more damage doing those two things. I've got to be in this for four to six weeks," she says, scowling at the boot, "which is a pain in the arse."
Jones has form when it comes to underestimating her pain — and a habit of soldiering on until she hits breaking point. In the flesh she is just as statuesque as she appears on screen, her dark hair styled in waves, framing her oval face. It is her eyes that betray a deep vulnerability: the woman who has cornered the market in traumatic female TV roles in recent years has experienced more than her share of personal trauma. In 2016, just as she was getting to grips with new motherhood, she lost her own mother. Then in November 2020, a week into filming the second series of the 19th-century lesbian rompfest Gentleman Jack, she got a FaceTime call from her 70-year-old father. She was on set in Yorkshire, he was at home in Manchester and the Alpha variant of Covid was about to rip through the country. "He was very pale, very grey. He said, 'I've had a cold for a week, so I went for a test and I got told I've got Covid.' "
Her producer arranged for him to be visited by a medic, who quickly dispatched him to hospital where he ended up in intensive care. "He was three months in ICU while I was filming," Jones says, but because of the government restrictions in place she and her older brother, Gary, couldn't visit him. Instead, she would sing some favourite songs to him — Whistle Down the Wind and Endless Love — over the phone. "We got told my dad was going to pass a couple of times," she says. He died in January 2021. Shortly beforehand she and Gary were finally allowed to see him to say goodbye, dressed in full PPE, which was "just heartbreaking".
It must be all the more painful to learn about the parties that took place at No 10 Downing Street while she was having to sing down the phone to her dying father. "I don't understand it," she says. "How rules can be broken or how there are no consequences and it just goes on." However, she doesn't want to go down the "route of feeling angry".
After her father's death Jones returned to the set of Gentleman Jack and to her role as Anne Lister, the Yorkshire landowner known as the first modern lesbian. The series is based on Lister's extraordinary diaries, which were written in code — a mixture of Greek, Latin, mathematical symbols and signs of the zodiac — and detailed everything from her sexually transmitted diseases to her sex toys. Jones was charging about in top hat and black skirts again, yet she hadn't come to terms with her loss. Everywhere she looked there were reminders of the virus that killed her father.
"You're filming in a pandemic, everyone is wearing the masks. Every two days you've got someone coming in to test you. To have a parent pass of the thing that you are reminded of all the time … Your brain filters out stuff, so I couldn't remember my lines. Most of the time I was going, 'What is it? What am I saying?' That will probably haunt all the crew. My brain was obviously going, 'This is not important.' "
To make matters worse, she was 320km from the north London home she shares with her husband, the screenwriter Laurence Akers, and their five-year-old son. So she would shuttle back and forth from Halifax at weekends. "The journey is really far when you've got to come home on a Friday night and see your son, who just wants his mum," she says. "I wasn't getting any rest." When she finished filming last October she was "all over the place". Her grief for her father had caught up with her. "I had to deal with the fallout of everything that I'd put on hold to get the show done."
The second series of Gentleman Jack airs in April but Jones won't be tuning in. "I'm not ready to watch it, because it's so full of memories mixed up with stuff," she says.
Jones is no stranger to therapy — she has been in and out of it for nearly 20 years. She landed her first big TV role in Coronation Street in 2000, at the age of 21. For four years she played Karen McDonald, a gobby, scheming "knicker stitcher" working in Mike Baldwin's factory. She struggled to deal with the stress of her sudden fame and sought help. "I had press outside my house a lot. I was followed on bikes. It makes you defensive, it makes you wary."
Not many soap stars progress to the more coveted TV acting roles, but in 2004 Jones called time on Weatherfield to try to do just that. She bumped along in TV dramas for a while before ITV's 2009 crime series Unforgiven signalled a significant shift of gears. Further prestigious roles followed, including the lead in Doctor Foster, for which she was awarded a Bafta in 2016. The finale of the first series, which saw her wreak revenge on her cheating ex-husband and his mistress, pulled in ten million viewers.
Her biggest role to date was playing Amy Silva, a detective chief inspector grappling with anxiety and depression in the BBC's Vigil. The six-part murder mystery set on a nuclear submarine topped Doctor Foster, drawing more than 13 million viewers. Jones had become our generation's go-to "trauma woman" — but she was paying the price for her art.
Her mental health took a battering in 2018 during a stint in the West End revival of Bryony Lavery's harrowing play Frozen (a far cry from the Disney musical of the same name). She played the mother of a 10-year-old girl who is abducted and killed by a paedophile. Reliving such a tale night after night would take its toll on anyone but it tipped the balance for Jones, who pulled out of the production on the advice of doctors that May. She had performed in 90 shows over three months, during which time she had become increasingly agoraphobic and felt trapped every time she arrived at the theatre. Four days from the end of the run, halfway through a performance, she started having hallucinations and collapsed on stage. She has previously described it as an "out-of-body thing, a really scary incident".
The reasons for this episode were twofold. Just over a year earlier, in 2016, as she was adapting to life as a new mum, her own mother, who had suffered from dementia, died. "I'd lost my mum and had a child and was just trying to work through it all."
Her collapse "was perhaps to do with fight or flight because I was being looked at by a thousand-odd people and I was trying to fight something, tell a story and be a character, when my body was saying, 'You can't be on this stage right now because you're experiencing something else much more pertinent and you need to rest because you've had trauma.' "
Again, she didn't listen to her body. "I went from Frozen straight into Gentleman Jack feeling very bruised from the experience and kind of wobbly on my feet. It wasn't until after I'd finished filming the first series that I suddenly went, 'Oh my God,' because I hadn't dealt with what had happened to me with Frozen."
At the end of 2018, once filming had wrapped, she suffered a breakdown. She returned to therapy and started on medication, which she continued with for a year until just before the pandemic hit in 2020. "The medication is a choice and it's not for everybody," Jones says, but it rescued her. "If you've had quite a few knocks, like I had in a row … I needed that help."
With the benefit of experience she and her husband were quicker to act following the death of her father. "Laurence and I were straight on it, and I went back on medication because I knew that I needed help," she says. "I think anyone that has had a rock bottom in that way, particularly with their mental health, you hopefully go into a care system where you have therapy and doctors around you, guiding you so that you can recognise the signs. So I still have ups and downs, but I definitely know how to ride them now."
She first went public about taking medication on Fearne Cotton's Happy Place podcast last August. "It felt like a great relief to say, 'I'm taking medication so that I can get on with my life,' rather than, 'I'm just a mess. I'm not coping.' Fearne is now one of my really close friends. We speak most days."
Jones was born in 1978 and grew up in a working-class family in Chadderton, a former cotton-producing hub near Manchester. Her father, Chris, was an engineer, and her mother, Jenny, worked as a secretary. Christened a Catholic, she was given the name Sarah Anne but her great-grandmother was Suranne, so she chose that as her stage name. The picture of childhood she paints is a happy one of "shopping on Friday, chippy teas afterwards, car boot sales, lots of markets, all the things I love now". Her favourite thing was shopping for earrings at Middleton market. "I used to collect earrings from when I was really little — they were all like Pat Butcher's: clocks and penguins. And I used to buy bags of baby clothes for my dolls from flea markets."
She had "just a beautiful relationship" with her mum; they were "best friends. I went everywhere with her." Her extended family also played a big part in her life. "We were always at loads of family parties, loads of family holidays."
As she was about to start secondary school, she lost her grandfather. "When my grandad died, my nana and my aunt came to live in our house, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They had the whole of the front room, they put a double bed in and we lived like that for about a year. It was a tiny little house. There were lots of queues for the bathroom, which wasn't so great."
Her years at Cardinal Langley Roman Catholic High School in Middleton were bruising. She put on weight when she hit puberty and was bullied. Then, when she was 14, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she survived following chemotherapy, a mastectomy and a further operation. Jones doesn't mince her words: "I had a really f***ing shit time at school."
The young Jones's salvation came via Oldham Theatre Workshop, whose alumni include Anna Friel, Lisa Riley and a number of Coronation Street actors. She had joined at the age of ten, found a passion for dance, violin and drama, and quickly decided that she wanted to be an actress. Later her parents were advised by her history teacher, Mr Coogan, that she should concentrate on her studies instead. His reasoning was that his own brother, who had similar acting aspirations, was struggling to find work, but Jones's parents encouraged her to stick with it. It paid off: both she and her teacher's brother — the comedian and actor Steve Coogan — went on to find fame and fortune.
At 16 she embarked on a BTec diploma in performing arts and at 17 she was doing musical theatre. It was a dream come true when she landed her role in Coronation Street. "All my family went crazy for that because it was the thing," she says. It was "a very formative time of my life".
While she was on the soap, ladette culture was in full swing and like many of her contemporaries she became a scantily clad fixture in lads' mags such as Loaded and FHM. She was nominated for sexiest actress at the British Soap Awards three years running from 2002 to 2004. To remove her inhibitions ahead of photoshoots she was given alcohol and although wearing underwear when photographed, images of her were airbrushed out to give the impression she was naked under an apron. Recalling that time she says: "My knickers were erased. I had a pinny on and then my knickers were taken out, or we'd be given champagne before a shoot."
How does she feel about those days now? "In hindsight we all took a look at what we were asked to do. In the past four or five years, everyone's gone, 'Oh well, that just seemed normal.' We were all feminists but ladettes, and I'm not sure that we really understood what was going on."
Over the years Jones had a string of boyfriends, including her Coronation Street co-star Jonathan Wrather. There is an ex-fiancé too — Jim Phelan, a computer programmer. She met Akers, who is ten years her senior, in 2014. Five months after being introduced at the wedding of mutual friends they got engaged, and nine months later, in 2015, they married and settled in north London. Their son was born the following year. "Meeting Laurence was my first step into being my authentic self in a relationship and not having to figure out who I was so much. Certainly up to my mid-thirties I just didn't find that," she says.
I wonder how it must feel for her husband to watch the woman he loves fall apart at the seams and then have a version of it replayed on TV. Most notably she recently won plaudits for her portrayal of a woman having a slow-motion breakdown in Channel 4's I Am Victoria. His reaction is telling. "Laurence remembers [Jones's real-life breakdown] to be much harder than what is portrayed," she says. "[For TV] we had to make it palatable enough and universal enough for everyone to understand it."
Jones's depiction made for uncomfortable viewing. In one poignant scene Victoria is seen biting into a milk carton to stop herself from screaming and, in another, scribbling lipstick on a mirror in frustration.
"The amount of women that have said, 'Oh my God, that is exactly how I felt,' " she says. "I felt like I wasn't on my own in the milk biting and the scribbling and the talking myself down on a daily basis. I love connecting with women, and it's like I need to constantly say, 'But this is what is really going on.' Because I feel like the world sometimes thinks, well, we've caught up enough now, so it's all good, we're all kind of getting there, and I'm, like, 'Not quite.' We're all still clinging on in a way."
This year she is slowing things down. "I've had a 'no' policy from the beginning of the year. I'm not ready to film anything yet because I'm enjoying the life that I've got." However, she is carving out time to work as an executive producer on a few projects, including a three-part drama for ITV called Maryland about estranged sisters who become close again after a tragedy. Her first foray into executive producing was with Scott & Bailey, a female cop show in which she starred. It ran from 2011 until 2016. "I prefer it to being on screen. I don't know when that happened."
The slower pace is helping her recovery. Two weeks after our interview we speak on the phone. She has just returned from a holiday in Norfolk and is feeling refreshed. "I'm still in therapy," she says, "but I'm no longer on medication, which is a choice. That's no guarantee that I wouldn't go back to it if I needed help to be resilient enough for life again."
How is her family adjusting to having her back full time? "I want to do the school runs and Laurence is, like, 'Oh, it's my job.' I'm, like, 'Well, no, I want it to be my job now.' Then I'm, like, 'Can I be on the parent WhatsApp group?' I absolutely adore being a parent to that boy and I love being a wife again. You are so absent from your life when you are on a big show. You want to be doing all these things, like the grocery shop, the school run — and you can't, and it's heartbreaking."
She has previously talked about wanting a second child, but her losses and mental health challenges scuppered that. "I'm too old," she says. "I thought about it after I did the first Gentleman Jack and then so much happened to me … there wasn't a right time. Your body does crave it because it's telling you it's the last-chance saloon. Now I've come out of the other side and I feel like I'm 44 next and I'm very happy with my lot."
As we wrap up, Friday afternoon is slipping into Friday evening. Has she got plans? "I never go out. It's almost like I did all that properly. So now all I want to do is go and play with my boys outside, or walk my dogs. It's a simple life."
Maybe she has been listening to her body after all.
Written by: Audrey Ward
© The Times of London
