View from my sofa: Jessica Raine
The Devil’s Hour star got bored playing a midwife — she’s a bad girl at heart
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- Stephen Armstrong
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What’s the view from your sofa?
Well, I’m often horizontal, not a sitter upper. I normally have a bar of Tony’s Chocolonely on the coffee table, one of the cats with me and a big TV – I’m happy!
And who controls the remote?
My son, when he’s watching, or Tom [Goodman-Hill, Raine’s husband, who is also an actor] when it’s just us. This isn’t about the gender politics of our relationship. I’m genuinely a technophobe – and I fall asleep anyway.
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What have you enjoyed recently?
I’m very, very keen on Severance. And Hacks – I’m absolutely livid that I can’t see season three right now in the UK. And Colin from Accounts. We met Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer at the Emmys, and they were everything I wanted them to be. I love comedy even though I feel like I’ve been put into a trauma role box.
Your Wikipedia page says you’ve been acting from the age of 13. What was your first role?
The page also says I danced in Beyond Ballets Russes at London’s Coliseum, and I didn’t, but I like people thinking I did. The acting was amateur, village hall stuff. I wasn’t one of those kids who wanted an agent at age seven. I didn’t even know you could do it as a profession. I grew up on a farm and knew no one in the industry. I just wanted to keep on playing for a living.
Wikipedia also says your family were bonesetters. That can’t be true.
It is true. If you had a bad back, you’d come to see the bonesetter. In Victorian times, we had one ancestor who got paid in silver, so he was called Silver John. The legend is that he was robbed, murdered, thrown into a lake, the lake froze over, and he disappeared until someone was ice skating and saw him under the ice. It’s a good story. I love all the myths of the countryside. There’s a lot of darkness, and you’re living with the cycle of the seasons and livestock. It’s very rooted. And I was a real tomboy.
Were you helping on the farm at dawn?
We were always on the farm, but not really helping. We were making bale tunnels, which is really dangerous – pulling out bales and destabilising the structure – but as an eight-year-old, you don’t care about that. I had two cousins the same age as me and my sister, so we were four girls just running absolute mayhem, playing army. It was so good.
Would you like to do some more action-based stuff, then?
I actually do loads of stunts in season two of Devil’s Hour. In episode one, I throw a guy on a table, he elbows me in the mouth, blood capsule dripping from my lips, hurled into the bath... I could do stunts all day, to be honest. But I slipped a disc during filming, which was unbelievably painful. We then filmed series three and I’d done all the rehab, so I was like, “Please, let me do them. I love them!”
Season two of The Devil’s Hour is on a whole other level…
Yes, you think you’re on safe ground, then you realise you’ve seen the crimes before in series one, and the eagle-eyed viewer will spot this is a parallel life. And then about two thirds of the way through, the rug gets pulled out again. I love it. You wait until season three, it is off the scale!
Three seems to be a magic number — you did three series of Call the Midwife.
I ducked out halfway through series three of Midwife, so this is actually the longest I’ve been in anything. I’m not a huge fan of being in endlessly running series. I get bored very quickly.
What was it like creating Midwife? It kind of hung on you for the first season.
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I worked really hard on Jenny. Ever since, people are like, “You’re not like her in real life.” But it was Heidi Thomas’s writing, and me working hard, and I guess it worked. But really, I love playing bad girls.
Authors
Stephen Armstrong
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