Suranne Jones: How the punky soap star became one of Britain’s greatest actors
From a 19th-century lesbian in ‘Gentleman Jack’ to an under-pressure PM in ‘Hostage’, Jones inhabits women who go through the wringer in their determination to make themselves heard, writes Claire Allfree
When, in the opening scenes of Netflix’s political thriller Hostage, we see Suranne Jones’s Abigail promising her husband Alex that she won’t allow the job of prime minister to affect their family, we know this is a vow she’ll be unlikely to keep. Soon enough, the country’s newly elected leader feels the pressure from all sides: not just the demands of the job itself, but the inevitable challenge of ensuring the couple’s 17-year-old daughter isn’t caught doing something stupid on social media. And then comes the phone call; Alex, a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières, has been kidnapped in French Guiana. Abigail, her political career already on a knife edge thanks to an NHS crisis and now the victim of a cleverly targeted blackmail plot, finds herself in a position of near intolerable stress.
Few actresses excel at portraying women under extreme pressure quite like Jones. In the BBC thriller Vigil she played detective Amy Silva, leading a possible murder investigation five fathoms deep on an HMS submarine while suffering from a severe bout of PTSD following an accident involving her family, a car and a reservoir. A lesser actor might show it all getting to Silva. Jones preferred to reveal just the merest flicker of strain. It was all in the tight way she walked, dressed in perfunctory monochrome knitwear as though part of the paintwork; in her refusal to rise to each chippy little comment; in her dogged, implacable determination to keep on doing her increasingly perilous job.
In Hostage, her performance is arguably even more subtle. Behind-the-scenes exchanges with her unflappable secretary (a wonderful Lucian Msamati) reveal the psychological impact of her situation; a quick change of shoes and she is abruptly camera ready – brisk, professional, focused. Much of the programme’s intrigue comes from the cat-and-mouse game she finds herself in with the French president Vivienne Toussaint, surely modelled on Marine Le Pen and played with feline cool by Julie Delpy. Toussaint likes to unseat Abigail by offering her unwelcome advice on how best to show off her face to photographers and by regarding each negotiation as a sly exercise in feminine one-upmanship as well as political power. Jones carefully responds to each veiled insult in what becomes a thrilling psychological game of near-unbearable tension.
Born in Oldham in 1978, Jones is now regarded as one of our most accomplished and versatile screen actors – although this will hardly be news to anyone who has followed her since she first appeared as Mandy Phillips on Coronation Street in 1997 (she joined the cast full time for four years as the fabulously punky Karen McDonald in 2000). In a career that included an early stint on Doctor Who, playing a humanoid manifestation of the Tardis’s consciousness, alongside an acclaimed performance as a convicted police killer in Unforgiven (2009) and a Yorkshire detective in the longrunning Scott and Bailey (2011-2016), she’s become particularly good at inhabiting women who go through the wringer in their determination to make themselves heard.
Consider Anne Lister, the 19th-century lesbian landowner on whose diaries Happy Valley writer Sally Wainwright based her rompy BBC period caper Gentleman Jack, and in which Jones swaggered about 1830s Halifax in highwayman black, refusing with a radical sense of entitlement to play the furtive lesbian. Instead, she set about openly ensnaring the heiress Ann Walker while boasting of her likely success in cheeky asides to camera. The show broke new ground as a primetime LGBT+ drama that placed a complex, condoned relationship between two women centre stage, but it also gave Jones the chance, as the cocky, charismatic and deeply passionate Lister, to reveal a theatrical playfulness in a career previously dominated by classic British TV realism.
There was Doctor Foster, too, the 2015 domestic thriller written by playwright Mike Bartlett, which turned Jones from a respectable TV screen presence into a household name. Jones’s performance as beleaguered wife Gemma had viewers initially firmly on side as she accelerated with dizzying speed from calm, reliable family doctor to a character worthy of Greek tragedy after suspecting her husband Simon of having an affair. The second series lurched into melodrama, but Jones’s mesmeric performance kept us watching all the same. In 2021, she made another vintage appearance in the eponymous and semi-improvised I Am Victoria, playing a woman struggling to keep it together while in the grip of nervous collapse. The Independent’s reviewer Alexandra Pollard called her performance “an open wound”.
She’s appeared a few times on stage, playing Ruth Condomine in Blithe Spirit and the eponymous Orlando at Manchester Royal Exchange, and in an anniversary revival of Jonathan Harvey’s landmark Aids play Beautiful Thing at the Arts Theatre in 2013. In 2018, she took on a truly harrowing role in a West End revival of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, playing a mother compelled to seek an interview with the paedophile convicted of murdering her child. Jones was riveting as Nancy, battling a toxic cocktail of contradictory emotions as she tried to reconcile understanding with furious, overwhelming grief.
So what next? Film? A lucrative small-screen long-runner in America? It would be good to see her back on stage, too: the theatre has been largely deprived of her talents. You suspect, though, TV is her natural home: it seems to effortlessly generate the fiercely complex, arse-kicking female roles at which she excels. “You just don’t do victims, do you?” observed an interviewer in 2018. “No!” she replied. “Or if I think I do, then I turn them into really feisty characters.” Long may it continue.
‘Hostage’ is out now on Netflix