One last job before I die
Suranne Jones stars as a con artist in a thriller with female friendship at its heart
ITV
- Benji Wilson
Ad
So many stories start on Coronation Street, and the partnership between Suranne Jones and writer Anne-Marie O’Connor is no different. “We’d known each other socially,” explains Jones, who played Karen McDonald on the cobbles between 2000 and 2004, “through Jen and Lee [Jenny James and Lee Boardman, both actors on the show].”
“And we were with the same agency,” adds O’Connor. “But I would never have gone to Suranne and said, ‘Hey, will you have a look at a script’, because that would just have been mortifying.”
It took Jones writing a page treatment for what would become the 2023 ITV drama Maryland for her agents to pair them up. It worked so well that on the first day of filming in Ireland, an exec from the production company asked them what else they had.
“We really winged it,” says Jones. “In fact, you winged it, AM. You said, ‘We’ve been talking about this new series about some frauds.’ It was freezing cold that day and we said, ‘It needs to be different to Maryland – it needs to be hot.’”
“That’s about as much as we had,” says O’Connor, who then set the series in southern Spain.
Their work together on Maryland meant that ITV’s head of drama, Polly Hill, was listening, and Frauds was quickly commissioned. Jones and O’Connor duly got out their whiteboard to flesh out their story. “I’ve not met anybody,” O’Connor says, “who wants to dive into characters’ stories and what makes people tick in the way that Suranne does.” For Maryland, a story about sisters, they talked about family. For Frauds, the subject was female friendship.
“For me, it was about sharing all of my memories, good and bad, with Anne-Marie,” says Jones. “Even traumatic stories – it was stuff that I needed to get out. It’s like purging when we work together. If Anne-Marie gets stuck on anything she’ll ask me, ‘How would you feel in this moment?’”
Jodie Whittaker and Suranne Jones star in Frauds ITV / Monumental Television
And so together they created a pair of chalk-and-cheese grifters taking on one last job on the Costa del Sol. We meet Bert [Jones] and Sam [played by Jodie Whittaker] on the day of Bert’s release from prison after a 10-year stretch. Her sentence was the result of a job that went wrong, meaning they’re yoked together – by guilt on Sam’s part for avoiding prison, by necessity on Bert’s. On her release, Bert announces that she has cancer and only has months to live, so she proposes one last job. Reunite the dynamic duo, rekindle the past, no matter how toxic, to see them both off for retirement on easy street.
“Every woman knows a Bert,” Jones smiles. “She’s the sort of frenemy who’s like an addiction. You know in your heart she’s not good for you but she’s hard to give up.”
Jones may be best known as a Bafta-winning actor, but she has been writing for over a decade. “The first person to encourage me was Joe Ahearne, the director of The Secret of Crickley Hall [2012]. After that, I got an agent and finished a full script for the first time. We tried to hoick it around, but it was maybe a bit too before its time.”
She also started to take an interest in backroom operations, working as an executive producer for the first time on Scott & Bailey. “But the main thing I like is script. What I appreciate about this relationship with AM is I know that I’m good with character, I know I’m good with dialogue, but she is a writer and she can put it all together.”
To date, all of the work produced by Jones’s company TeamAkers Productions (her husband, Laurence Akers, is a producer) has starred Jones. She is still the sell. But she admits, “I’d like eventually to not be in everything that we’re creating.”
For now, Jones (who also has a young family) is promoting Netflix’s Hostage, launching Frauds, is then off to Glasgow and Norway to film the third instalment of Vigil, while also starring in Aimee Lou Wood’s Film Club. Oh, and she’s “in a writers’ room for something that starts filming in February because I’m developing and producing that”.
Why put herself through it all? “Well, I do ask myself that question a lot. I don’t know how my head doesn’t blow up. And then I spend all of my money on massages and face treatments because I look 100… The thing is being part of a creative team feels so good and it’s also a retirement plan for when I maybe don’t want to act so much any more.”
Ad
She adds that mostly she wants to keep telling women’s stories from women’s perspectives “whether they’re perfect or not… Hostage and this are so different, worlds apart, but there are two women in each of these shows. And that’s a lot of story for women.”
Authors
Benji Wilson
Ad
Ad
Get the Christmas double issue
Too much to watch at Christmas? Let Radio Times do the choosing to find something the whole family will enjoy.
Ad