Fashion

Suranne Jones On Her Revelatory New Role


After an emotionally punishing year for Suranne Jones, she reflects on how her most recent role – the “wildly promiscuous Regency lesbian Anne Lister”, in the BBC’s forthcoming Gentleman Jack – has been a revelation, in the April issue of British Vogue.

Coinciding with the huge success of Doctor Foster, in which she played the titular vengeful GP, in 2015 was a series of major life events for Jones – her wedding, the birth of her son and, then, the death of her mother. It also followed a run of brilliant but bleak dramas which, as Rebecca Nicholson describes, “turned Jones into the master of misery”.

“Working, working, working, on all these very dark subjects. So without realising, I was not dealing with what I should have been dealing with,” she told Nicholson, shortly after finishing filming period drama Gentleman Jack. “By the time I got to Frozen [last year’s harrowing West End play, in which Jones played the mother of a child abducted and killed by a paedophile], I was feeling very lonely, very anxious, I didn’t want to go out and speak to people. And that ended up with me collapsing.” She apologetically pulled out of the run just before it finished, with reports citing a “mystery illness”.

“I was having hallucinations, which was my body shutting down, because I was exhausted. I was feeling trapped every time I went to the theatre – when I heard the music for Frozen I’d freak out. Doctors told me not to continue, but of course I did, because my face was up there [on the posters].” It was a wake-up call one night – an “out-of-body thing, a really scary incident” on stage, which saw her came off halfway through a performance – that meant she finally listened to the doctors. “I got help.”

Of her latest role for the BBC, Jones described the job as “so uplifting… so life-affirming”. She moved to a farmhouse in Yorkshire with her husband and son for the duration of filming. “I found [a therapist] who came to the house every week. We had lovely neighbours, and chickens and ducks and goats, and it was just… peace. I needed that peace to deal with what had happened to me, to say goodbye to my mum in the way that I needed to, and to be around my baby boy who wanted his stories read, and just be a mum. And then also be Gentleman Jack.”

Read the full interview in British Vogue‘s April issue, on newsstands now.





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