"This is the first time I’ve worked in London filming for quite a few years and I’ve completely fallen in love again with our city”, says Anna Friel, casting a glance at the metropolis laid out beyond the window of the 14th-floor meeting room at ITV’s office on London’s South Bank. “It’s great to come back here and make a film about London, set in London.”
Friel’s first British-based project since she played Jean Raymond, the wife of soft-porn publisher Paul Raymond in the 2013 biopic, The Look of Love, is all the more remarkable for being a drama about London, written by a Swede. And not just any old Swede, for Hans Rosenfeldt is the creator of beloved Scandi-noir series The Bridge. The eight-part thriller Marcella is Rosenfeldt’s first English-language script, and is named after Friel’s character, a detective returning to the Met’s murder squad after a 10-year career break.“I am a huge fan of The Bridge so I was so honoured just to go and meet Hans”, she says. “But I was also a little intimidated because I thought, ‘How can you do it better than that?’”
Our first glimpse of Friel’s Marcella Backland is in the bath, a gash to her head. It emerges that she suffers from some form of stress-induced blackout. “It’s a very real disorder”, says the actress, who turns 40 this summer. “You’ll be surprised when you see it and you’ll want to look it up.”
A pathologically emotional female policewoman, Marcella is the polar opposite of The Bridge’s Asperger-ish Malmo detective, Saga Noren, one of the most iconic TV protagonists of recent years. “In many ways I’d say we did go for the complete opposite”, agrees Rosenfeldt.
“The Bridge has been hugely successful and a big part of that success is due to its lead character, Saga Noren, magnificently played by Sofia Helin,” says the 51-year-old Swede. “But I didn’t want to do another version of her, with her flaws, shortcomings and merits. I’ve been living with Saga for quite some time - it was fun to meet somebody new.”
“I’m always looking for flaws and where you can poke and where it hurts them most. We also set out with this one with ‘wouldn’t it be nice to have the police officer investigating the crime, but also investigating herself’.”
Marcella is Friel’s first crime drama, although she has played soldiers in two of her more recent projects – the Homeland-like Odyssey in which she played a US Army sergeant stranded in Mali, and a British secret agent helping scupper Nazi atomic research in The Saboteurs. “I seem to be offered strong, surviving, tough women,” she says. “I don’t know what that says about me.”
That Friel is a tough survivor is beyond doubt. Having become a sensation as patricidal Liverpool teenager Beth Jordache in Brookside, her 1994 snog with nanny Margaret (Nicola Stephenson) – the first pre-watershed lesbian kiss on British television – turning her into a national talking point and gay icon. Friel could easily have slipped off the radar, like many soap stars before and since.
Instead she used the exposure as a springboard, quitting Brookside for a string of film and TV roles that included David Leland’s Land Girls, Stephen Poliakoff’s Tribe and opposite Ewan McGregor as Nick Leeson’s wife in Rogue Trader. Remarkably, Marcella is the first time that Friel has used her native Rochdale accent since Brookside. “That was 21 years ago… it’s been quite a while”, she says.
For research Friel was partnered with a female detective from Charing Cross police station. “She’s called Liz and was so glamorous”, says Friel. “If you’d sat and looked at the two of us, she’d be the actress, what with me in my sweat pants.”
Following the tradition of such Scandi-noir dramas as The Killing and The Bridge, the actors on Marcella weren’t told the identity of the killer until they received the script for the final episode. “Each of us could end up as victim, witness or suspect”, says Friel, although Rosenfeldt reveals that the title character survives, by way of saying that he hopes Marcella could go to several series.
Friel herself is busy: a recent sojourn in Canada was to film Tomato Road, adapted from the novel by Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell, and in Dublin for revenge techno-thriller I.T. Now she’s just looking forward to a holiday with her 10-old daughter Grace, from a decade-long relationship with actor David Thewlis, which ended in 2010.
Her more recent relationship with actor Rhys Ifans ended two years ago, she reveals. “I’ve had two weeks off in two and a half years”, she says, adding that she “has a lot of stuff to sort at home in Windsor” (her other home, in LA, is currently rented out).
On the evidence of the first episode, Marcella promises to be fairly strong meat, in the complex, multi-layered tradition of Nordic noir. Not that that is a label that Rosenfeldt feels entirely comfortable with.
“I don’t really know what Nordic noir is”, he says. “It seems that everything coming from Denmark, Norway and Sweden these days is labelled ‘Nordic noir’. I just brought my way of storytelling and just placed it into London.”
Was there anything that surprised him about the city? “London is actually very colourful, especially at night,” he says. “We 'bleaked out' everything on The Bridge, but here we wanted to show how colourful and vibrant London actually is.”
And then the burning question for fans of Saga and her new Danish partner Henrik. Will there be a further series of The Bridge? “Maybe”, Rosenfeldt says. “We get a final decision in April from the broadcasters. I would think probably, but the timeframe is very loose. It’s getting everyone together – they’re all very busy.”
‘Marcella’ starts on Monday 4 April at 9pm on ITV