We talk to the acclaimed actress about playing a grieving mum on a desperate quest for justice in BBC1's Accused on Monday, November 29 As a mum yourself how tough was this role to play? “There are no limits on where you might have to go in your imagination as an actor, that is the job. But there is one place that you really don’t want to go. As a mother of two kids, it’s the place where you have to imagine losing them. But that is where we had to go all the time with Helen.” So it was tough? “It was relentless. There weren’t any scenes in which she wasn’t fuelled by this terrible bereavement. The challenge for Peter Capaldi, who plays her husband, Frank, and I was to find the many, many different ways in which grief can impact on someone. So sometimes Helen is raging, sometimes she is depressed, sometimes she is lost, sometimes she just wants to kill her husband, sometimes she is overcome with bleakness, and other times she is channelling it all into investigating what happened to her son. While Frank just implodes with his loss, Helen hurls herself out into the world – they take totally different routes through grief, which I think is very accurate.” And it also explains how a bereaved mum could end up in a dock? “Yes, the whole idea of the series is that you take an ordinary person, who commits a serious crime for the first time ever, and look at what drove them to do it. If you read about some of these crimes as they are reported in the press, it would be easy to see them as awful things done by awful people.” What else attracted you to the part? “I think what is so very compassionate about this series is that it enables people to understand why people are driven to desperate acts. Hopefully, next time we read about similar events, we might think before we judge – if we ask ourselves 'Why?' more often, we would have a different prison system, a different penal system and we wouldn’t be banging young people up in very destructive institutions – we would look to the causes more. That would be a great response. "On the other hand, Accused is six entertaining films – but that is what I think is their potential, to make people look more compassionately at those around us who are living lives of quiet desperation...”
