She’s played plenty of embattled mothers in her time, but Sheridan Smith says her latest role was the toughest yet - because she’s now got a child herself.
In new ITV drama No Return, the actress plays ordinary mum Kathy, who finds herself trapped on the holiday from hell.
Sheridan, whose son Billy is nearly two, says she wept for the entire time during the read-through of the “high angst” series.
In the plot, penned by Shameless writer Danny Brocklehurst, her character’s 16-year-old son is arrested while on a family break in Turkey, accused of a sexual assault on another boy. As the situation escalates and he faces a 12-year jail sentence, she must do everything in her power to convince the authorities that her boy is innocent.
“Playing roles before I had Billy to playing ones now I’ve had him, is totally different,” Sheridan explained. “People had said you can’t understand the protectiveness and the overwhelming fear when you have a child and, he’s not even two yet, but I feel it. I hope it will resonate with the audience, they’ll be feeling all the angst as well. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. I love playing protective mums like that. Kathy is a lioness.”
Sheridan, 40, said she could barely contain her anguish over the storyline at the initial meeting with producers and fellow cast. “I’ve never been to a read-through like the one for this. It was so powerful. I mean, I cried all the way through,” she said.
She said she read all four episodes back to back without pausing. “I read it and was gripped - I had to know what happened. It gave me that jelly belly feeling of ‘what would you do in that situation?’ They’re just ordinary people in an extraordinary situation and Kathy was an amazing lead role.”
The drama opens with happy holiday scenes around the pool, but the fun is short-lived when Noah, played by Louis Ashbourne Serkis, is arrested just 10 minutes into the first episode.
“From the minute Noah is arrested that’s it,” said Sheridan, who stars alongside Michael Jibson as Kathy’s husband Martin and Sian Brooke as her sister Megan. “Four hours of intense, high drama telly. She’s fiercely loyal and fiercely protective and someone I could relate to. After that first 10 minutes it’s like a roller-coaster and I’ve not had that, not such an intense role, ever.”
Much of the drama was filmed in Spain, because travel restrictions prevented the crew from going to Turkey.
Executive producer Nicola Schindler said Sheridan’s emotional outpouring at the initial meeting helped her and Brocklehurst to shape the four-parter, which airs on ITV next month.
“Sheridan literally blew us away,” she admitted. “I remember us both sitting there afterwards going ‘that’s just extraordinary’. I’d never been in a read-through like that before, where someone gave so much. The emotion was just there. And it helps us so much because it makes you realise which scenes are important, which ones we need to make sure we have enough time to shoot, which scenes we perhaps don’t need, it just made a difference.
“Knowing how she was going to deliver emotionally, so early, it made the process so much easier for the whole crew.”
Sheridan has played many strong women before, including her Bafta-winning performance as Charmian Biggs, wife of Great Train robber Ronnie, who was left to bring up their two sons alone in Australia.
In The Moorside she played the campaigning friend and neighbour of Shannon Matthews’ mother Karen, who refused to believe the missing girl was dead. In Four Lives, which aired earlier this month, she played the mother of serial killer Stephen Port’s first victim Anthony Walgate.
“It’s very different doing real-life - you’d think that was harder than doing fictional but this particularly was somehow tougher I think, more of a challenge,” she said. “There are light moments in it but it is high angst and when you’re doing that for three months it takes its toll. I really put my heart and soul into it. I just trusted my instincts of how I would react for my son.”
Brocklehurst said he came up with the idea when a family friend experienced a different type of trauma while on holiday. He explained: “It’s how a mother responds when her son has been accused of something abroad and they can’t get them out of the foreign system that they don’t understand.”
*No Return starts on ITV early next month
