Siobhan Finneran: ‘We’re all a bit of a mess, blundering our way through stuff’

After the whirlwind success of â??Happy Valleyâ??, Siobhan Finneran is stepping up to a long-overdue leading role in an ITV police thriller. She talks to Katie Rosseinsky about delving into the secretive world of witness protection, why Sally Wainwrightâ??s work struck such a chord, and juggling hard-hitting drama with comedy

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Siobhan Finneran reckons she’s “not very good with dates”. But she can remember exactly what she was doing the morning after the first episode of Happy Valley’s final season aired – because she ended up having to do an accidental victory lap of one of the North West’s least glamorous locations.

“It was at the start of ’23, wasn’t it?” recalls the actor, who played Clare Cartwright, recovering addict and younger sister to Sarah Lancashire’s indefatigable police officer Catherine Cawood, in all three series of the brilliant, Bafta-winning drama. “I was flying to Iceland to make a film called The Damned, so I was at Manchester airport. I have never experienced anything like that, because in most of the queues I stood in to get on the aeroplane, everybody had watched it the night before.” They all seemed to want a post-show debrief, from the security officers screening her luggage to her fellow passengers. “Everybody loved it, so you can’t moan about that, can you?” she reasons. “I just went red a lot, and felt a bit sweaty.”

Speaking over Zoom, Finneran’s perched on a chintzy floral sofa, a vape just sneaking into the camera frame (she’s recently quit smoking). Chatting with her is enjoyably straightforward and entirely free from actorly earnestness, delivered in that recognisable Oldham accent (she was born in Manchester, then her family moved out to Saddleworth, near the Pennines, a few years later; she’s still based there now). Whether she’s playing someone like Clare, who is at once endearing and deeply frustrating, resilient in some ways but fragile in so many others, or a larger-than-life comic creation shot through with realism, as she does in shows such as Alma’s Not Normal or The Other One, Finneran has a habit of making her characters feel like people you actually know. They seem like someone you might bump into at the shops or, indeed, in the airport queue.

And when she’s part of a sprawling ensemble, it’s often her performance that sticks in the memory long afterwards. Just think of her role as chaplain Marie-Louise in Jimmy McGovern’s Time, a glimmer of warmth in the prison drama’s bleakness. Or her turn as scheming lady’s maid Sarah O’Brien in Downton Abbey, unforgettable for very different reasons. Her career kicked off when she turned up for a casting call for Rita, Sue and Bob Too, Alan Clarke’s 1987 comedy about a married man’s affair with two teenage girls, which proved controversial on its release. She was “just delighted to have got a job”, she says now, but filming was still “terrifying” because “you don’t really know what you’re doing, what it’s going to look like and how it’s going to be perceived”.

Somehow, over the course of the ensuing four decades, Finneran hadn’t taken on a lead role until she signed up to star in ITV’s new crime thriller Protection. She plays Detective Inspector Liz Nyles, head of a witness protection unit. Not that it was necessarily the prospect of finally getting lead billing that drew her in, she says, pointing instead to the intrigue of this shadowy branch of policing, where officers often work under aliases to keep their professional and private lives entirely separate. “It’s very secretive, it’s a very under-the-radar unit,” she says. “I think this is probably the first time we see that told in a TV series in this way. We don’t really know enough about it, but we don’t know enough about it because we don’t need to.” The show was based on the experiences of a real witness protection officer but, perhaps for obvious reasons, Finneran didn’t get to meet with them. “I certainly didn’t go undercover,” she deadpans. “I can’t watch them when they’re doing the chasing on the telly, the police,” she adds, because, despite having appeared in her fair share of crime dramas over the years, “I find it really stressful. So I’d have been hopeless.”

The sheer speed at which Liz’s professional life starts to unravel, though, provides a performer of Finneran’s subtlety with plenty of raw material. In the opening scenes, a carefully choreographed operation is blown up in catastrophic fashion, just before a key witness is set to testify; soon, Liz is forced to grapple with the possibility that her affair with a junior colleague might have compromised the whole thing. “We have to watch Liz try and keep a lid on her own emotional journey,” Finneran says. “To try and work out who she can trust, who she can’t, has the affair she’s had impacted on the people she’s supposed to be keeping safe?”

Finneran takes the lead as witness protection officer Liz Nyles in ‘Protection’ (ITV )

At the same time, her character is being pulled in different directions at home, caught between the demands of single parenting and caring for her elderly dad. “My children are more grown up now,” she says, referring to the son and daughter she shares with her ex-husband, the actor Mark Jordon. “But a lot of people I know are at that stage where they’ve still got youngsters growing up, but their parents are now reliant on them. That’s happening everywhere, isn’t it? They’re stuck in the middle, trying to deal with teenage kids and ailing parents, and becoming the parent to all of them.” Detective dramas, she notes, are gradually getting better at weaving the reality of women’s lives into the story. “I think there’s room for improvement, but we’ll know when that’s been a success when we stop talking about it really, and it’s just the norm, you know?” she says, matter-of-fact as ever.

There are shades of Happy Valley in the way that Finneran’s new series deals with the messy intersection between its protagonist’s work and home lives. For so many viewers, the heart of that earlier show was the painfully believable sibling relationship between Finneran and Lancashire, as sisters who can rake up years-old resentments, then crack a joke in the same breath. “One minute you’re screaming about something, and two minutes later, you know, you’re all sitting down and eating your tea,” Finneran sums it up. “It’s family life, isn’t it?” she adds, noting that there’s “some kind of comfort” in watching “people who look like us, and are a bit messy – we’re all a bit of a mess, blundering our way through stuff”.

With longtime friend and co-star Sarah Lancashire in ‘Happy Valley’ (BBC/Lookout Point/Matt Squire)

She and Lancashire go way back – her co-star was a few years above her at Oldham Technical College, where they both studied theatre – which made summoning a sisterly dynamic easier. But Finneran is also quick to sing the praises of writer and director Sally Wainwright, hailing her as “one of the greatest storytellers”. She recalls one scene in particular, where we see Catherine putting Clare to bed after she’s relapsed, ensuring that she’s in the recovery position. “There’s care, there’s love, there’s kindness there. Scenes like that, we don’t necessarily need to see them as an audience. But Sally puts them in. And, well, we invest more in them, don’t we?” More Happy Valley is off the cards – and feels unnecessary, after that nerve-shredding ending – but can we expect another collaboration in the future? “Oh, I don’t know, darling,” she says (Finneran peppers her conversation with “darling” – the slightly abbreviated northern version, as opposed to the more elongated, theatrical kind). “I love her stuff. I absolutely love her stuff. So I hope so, at some point.”

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If you glance at Finneran’s back catalogue, especially in recent years, you’ll see some quite harrowing subject matter; from Happy Valley to Time’s bleak portrayal of the prison system to real-life stories such as The Moorside, about the Shannon Matthews abduction case, and The Reckoning, which dealt with Jimmy Savile’s crimes. She’s pragmatic when she describes how she tends to choose her work. “It’s not necessarily that I think, ‘oh, that needs to be heard, that needs to be said, I need to be involved in the making of that,’” she says. “It can just depend on what drops on that day.”

Alternating the hard-hitting material with comedy roles prevents her from feeling weighed down, too. “I was very, very lucky that when I finished doing Protection, I went on to make the second series of Alma’s Not Normal,” she says. “So that was the complete antithesis of what I’d just done. I can’t say that I’d have been desperate to do another big, heavy drama on the back of [Protection], because you can kind of go, ‘that’s enough of that for the time being. Let’s change it up and go and do something different.’”

Finneran in ‘Alma’s Not Normal’, with writer Sophie Willan (BBC/Expectation TV/Matt Squire)

In Alma’s Not Normal, Sophie Willan’s semi-autobiographical, Bolton-set comedy, Finneran dons outlandish wigs and fake teeth to play the title character’s mum Lin, who is dealing with a heroin addiction and mental health problems. Not exactly the breezy stuff of sitcoms, you might think, but “Sophie manages to make really hard-hitting political points about the state of welfare, social care and stuff like that, without you feeling like you’re having it rammed down your throat,” Finneran says. “She’s not doing a party political broadcast. She’s just making a statement, and in the mix of that, we’re also laughing at the situations the characters have got themselves into” – and “question[ing] whether we should be laughing so hard”.

A show like Alma, she adds, brings bigger issues to life, because it lives on in our memories in a way that a news bulletin doesn’t. “We can listen to LBC all day and listen to what a state the country’s in, how angry people are, and yes, we can learn from that. But I think with something like Alma’s Not Normal, it just stays with you that bit longer.” I wonder whether Finneran thinks there’s much space for aspiring writers from working-class backgrounds – like Willan’s, and Wainwright’s – to carve out careers right now, as the TV industry seems more precarious than ever. “Gosh, I hope so, darling. Because without that, what are we going to be left with?” She points to Time writer Jimmy McGovern’s dedication to “bringing up young writers” and “newcomers” (because “they’re not all young!”). “You have to hope there will always be people like that in the industry to encourage and support.”

Up next for Finneran is Out of the Dust, a psychological thriller set in a conservative Christian sect. So, if she’s sticking to her usual pattern (a bleak one, then a funny one), she’s probably overdue a bit of comedic respite. Whatever form that comes in, I predict it might just provoke more compliments in the airport queue.

‘Protection’ airs on ITV and ITVX tonight at 9pm

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