When the actor Joanna Scanlan was four years old, she had an epiphany. She recalls standing on stage at her north Wales convent school reciting a poem and “in that moment feeling transported to another realm of existence. I remember thinking: ‘I prefer it here.’ The reality is that I still feel that way. As much as I love my life, I do prefer to be in the realm of the imagination. It is the place where I am my truest self.”
Scanlan, who is 61, is installed in a meeting room at her publicist’s office in Soho, London. It has been a long morning of interviews, but if she is tired of talking she is too nice to show it; her default setting is sunny and self-effacing. She is here to discuss The Light in the Hall, a psychological thriller set in Carmarthenshire which has been shot in English and Welsh (Scanlan learned her lines with the help of her Welsh-speaking niece). She plays Sharon, whose teenage daughter, Ela, was murdered 18 years ago. A local gardener, Joe Pritchard (Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon) was convicted of the crime, but never revealed why he did it or what he did with the body. When he is released on parole, Sharon determines to find out what happened to her child.
