It's a terrifying scene that many hilly Northern towns have become all too familiar with: a torrential downpour saturates the land, flooding the helpless homes in the valley below.
Now in a new six-parter from ITV, writer Mick Ford, whose credits include episodes of Netflix's Safe (2018) and The Stranger (2020), imagines what might happen if one such flood unearthed a body.
Titled After the Flood, it's due to land on ITV on January 10. Here we bring you up to speed with the key characters and the actors playing them.
Sophie Rundle plays Joanna Marshall
Sophie Rundle plays Jo Marshall, a pregnant police officer who has just started her detective training, following in the footsteps of her late father. She's extremely close with her mother Molly (Lorraine Ashbourne) and is married to Pat Holman (who is played by Rundle's real-life husband, Matt Stokoe). Holman struggles with his wife's ambitions and lack of adherence to the rules, wanting her to stay safe. Marshall grew up in Waterside – the show's fictional Northern valley town – and is embedded in its community.
Although Rundle has starred in everything from Great Expectations (2012) to Happy Valley (2014) to Bodyguard (2018), she is arguably best known for playing Ada Thorne in Peaky Blinders (2013-2022) and Ann Walker in BBC One's Gentleman Jack (2019-2022).
"Jo is starting her detective training course, which is a big step for her. She feels that if she can just get the detective training done before having a baby, then everything will be fine," explained Rundle to ITV. "She has this quite restless energy about her anyway. Then the mystery that opens the show occurs and she just can’t help herself. She knows she might be able to piece this together which will cement her as a detective."
Speaking about working with her husband Stokoe, Rundle said: "Jo and Pat are nothing like us. It was just a really nice experience of being able to go to work with your partner. It’s so funny because normally when you are on set, and you’re not needed you go to the green room. You are with other actors, and everyone sits, and they chat. But when it was just me and Matt, we would take ourselves off to the green room and just sit in silence and read our books and play on our phone because it was such a relief. Our son is two so this was like a holiday going to work."
Nicholas Gleaves plays Sergeant Phil Mackie
Just like Marshall, Phil Mackie is a police officer born and bread in Waterside who is a key member of the community. He was a close friend of Jo Marshall's late father Brendan, and has become a sort of father figure to Marshall in the three years following her dad's death. Mackie is married to Sarah (Jacqueline Boatswain) and the couple have spent their life together fostering children.
"He’s open, good at his job. He’s friendly, decent, and honest," said Manchester-born actor and playwright Nicholas Gleaves, describing his character. "There is a very philanthropic, open kindness about him. As far as being a copper is concerned, I think everyone in that station in Waterside could rely on him and they would very rarely be let down. He’s a straight up guy really."Gleaves has featured in dozens of TV series over the years, including Survivors (2008-2010), Foyle's War (2010), Scott & Bailey (2011-2012), Coronation Street (2018) and The Crown (2022). He acted in Ashes to Ashes (2010) alongside Philip Glenister, who will also be starring in After The Flood.
Teasing the upcoming show, Gleaves said: "This community that we’re talking about is one that is associated with kindness, small lives, rural people and a kind of place that you would generally think is quite safe, but it isn’t."
Jonas Armstrong plays Lee Ellison
Irish-English actor Jonas Armstrong, who is best known for playing Robin Hood in the hit mid-Noughties BBC series, now turns his hand to playing another heroic character: "When you first meet Lee, he is running down the embankment. A baby is being swept away by the current and the flood. Without thinking he goes on instinct and just plunges into the water risking his own life essentially to save this infant," said Armstrong to ITV. "We presume this man is dead because of the ferocity of the flood and then right at the end of episode one you see him washed up on the embankment further down."
But the similarities between the two characters stop here: Ellison had a troubled upbringing, fell in with a bad crowd and found himself in a young offender’s institute by the time he was 16. Despite trying to better himself, Ellison has been unable to free himself from a life of criminality. After the flood he discovers he has a connection with Jo Marshall – but this is before she finds out about his past.
Matt Stokoe plays Pat Holman
Matt Stokoe plays Pat Holman, Jo Marshall's husband. Just as Stokoe and Rundle are a real-life couple working together as actors on this six-part series, Holman is a detective working within the Serious Crime squad, who ends up working alongside his wife when the body is found. Holman has always been overprotective of his wife, and really isn't letting up now she is pregnant – and his comments are starting to affect their marriage.
34-year old Durham-born actor Stokoe has starred in a number of series over the last decade, including Peter Moffat's BBC series The Village (2013-2014), the BBC's The Musketeers (2016), Sky's Jamestown (2017-2019) and BBC's Bodyguard (2018).
"Sophie and I first met as colleagues (on Sky’s Jamestown), so we have been working together longer than we have been a significant player in the other’s life," he said to ITV. "It comes very easily for us to go to work and travel through that prism at the start of the day. There isn’t a team talk in the car before we get out. We aren’t particularly argumentative or stressful people so when Pat and Jo are at loggerheads their dynamic is very different to ours."
Tripti Tripuraneni plays Deepa Das
Deepa Das, a junior police officer who has grown up in Waterside, is Jo Marshall's loyal partner at work. She too has ambitions to become a detective one day.
"Deepa can soften some of Jo’s harder edges. They balance each other out well," explained new face Tripti Tripuraneni to ITV. "I think Deepa is looking for a mentor figure and she really looks up to Jo." Tripuraneni has had several walk-on roles in Temple (2019) and House of the Dragon (2022), but is best-known for her theatre work. She most recently featured in The Merchant of Venice at The Globe (2022) and The Cherry Orchard at The Yard Theatre (2022).
"Really, After the Flood is the first time that I’ve had a proper run at a character and got to see the whole season and really been on set every day," said Tripuraneni. "It’s really where I have learnt the most about acting for TV and how everything works. It’s been such an unbelievable opportunity."
Teasing the upcoming series, Tripuraneni said: "One of the most interesting aspects of the script and what makes it different is it tackles climate change. It shows it on a level that people who may feel a bit removed from it – when you just see these big stories on the news – this shows it in a way that affects individual lives and communities."
Philip Glenister plays Jack Radcliffe
Over the last three decades Jack Radcliffe has built up a property empire in Waterside and the surrounding area. Business hasn't always been easy, but he's now about the embark on a green eco-development – one of his biggest projects of his career. Radcliffe, a bachelor, is a well-liked big name in the town, although there is some bad blood between Radcliffe and Phil Mackie – which is partly to do with Radcliffe's friendship with Mackie's wife Sarah.
"He’s a bit of a Jack the lad. He’s a big fish in a small pond," said Philip Glenister, unpacking his character for ITV. "He’s never married or had children. To be that age and to go through life like that probably makes him a self-centred, selfish sort of human being. He’s still a bit of a lothario, God forbid, but he does have a good side to him. I think that’s important to say. He does have a caring side. That side is wrapped up in his business dealings, but he has turned his work into something that can be environmentally friendly as well."
Harrow-born British actor Glenister is best known for playing DCI Gene Hunt in the BBC's Life on Mars (2006–2007) and its sequel Ashes to Ashes (2008–2010), but he has also featured in series including Vanity Fair (1998), The Other Boleyn Girl (2003), Cranford (2007) and Outcast (2016-2017).
Jacqueline Boatswain plays Sarah Mackie
Jacqueline Boatswain, who is best known for her roles in Grange Hill (2003-2006) Shameless (2013), Hollyoaks (2015–2019) and Bancroft (2020) plays Phil's wife Sarah Mackie.
Sarah grew up alongside Molly (Jo Marshall's mother) and Jack Radcliffe but often found herself feeling like an outsider. However these days this is not the case: she is ambitious and galvanized, both professionally, as a local councillor and potential Conservative candidate, and personally, in her decades-long relationship with Phil.
"I liked that she was this woman who seemed to be plate spinning and doing it well," said Boatswain to ITV. "Married to a police officer, a successful foster parent for years, ambitious, doing something for the community. And I was interested in the fact that she was a Tory councillor.
"She feels that she has done what she needed to do as a foster mother. There is some issue as to why she and Phil didn’t have their own children, but it feels like that part’s done. 25 years. Now it’s time for her to do what she wants to do and what she has always wanted to do. It’s her time."
Addressing her character's feud with Molly, Boatswain said: "Molly thinks that Sarah is stuck up and has changed the way she speaks. What I would say is that Sarah's no fool and she has assimilated to where she wants to be. Those glass ceilings are difficult enough to pierce. You are not from a city. You are from a little kind of backwater. You’re a woman and you’re a woman of colour. There are lots of things for her to be dodging so what Sarah doesn’t want is to not sound right."
Lorraine Ashbourne plays Molly Marshall
Lorraine Ashbourne plays Molly Marshall, Jo's dynamic, hardworking and family-focused mother. Just like her daughter, Molly has spent her entire life in Waterside. Since her husband's death, Molly has been keeping busy campaigning for more resources to be put towards building anti-flooding measures to protect the town. This has led her to butt heads with councillor Sarah Mackie.
Ashbourne, who is married to Andy Serkis, has featured in dozens of films and TV series over her four-decade career including Jane Eyre (2006), Jericho (2016), The Crown (2019) and Bridgerton (2020-).
"I am completely besotted with Lorraine Ashbourne," said Rundle to ITV. "Everybody is. She is so cool. She’s got this amazing energy.
"Mick [Ford] has really understood that relationship with Jo and her mum, they are borderline sisters at times. The way they communicate is by rowing with each other. We did this lovely scene where we come into the kitchen having a row. I’m telling her off and she’s telling me off and it’s all love. It’s so clever. It’s two people saying one thing meaning something else.
"Jo’s relationship with Molly is effortless and easy and fun and warm, so it was nice to have those scenes to counterbalance the high stakes scenes."
