Suranne Jones Interview: Making MaryLand

It started with a dream I had that I wrote down, with a house and two sisters and discovering that their mother wasn’t who they thought she was. I wrote a treatment from there, and paired up with [writer] Anne-Marie O’Connor, who I knew socially but I hadn’t worked with in a creative or professional capacity.

Anne-Marie and I are both from the north, and we wanted to get back to our roots and tell a story that was small and about real people, and about a relationship that you don’t really ever see, the sibling relationship—usually it’s marriages or child-to-mother, child-to-father, so we felt quite strongly about that. I have a brother, she has a sister and a brother, and we could pull on lots of experiences.

At the time, her mother-in-law had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and my mother passed away with dementia, so those themes are in there, because we could also pull on what we knew. And then, of course, loss. I’ve lost both my parents, so I felt qualified to talk about the stages of grief and how they present themselves, and how you learn from grief, how you grow and how you understand new things about yourself. And in this case, the history and the questions that you forget to ask when people are alive, and the conversations or the feelings that you harbor and could be unraveled in life, but that people don’t.

We had a lot more police procedural stuff in there, more of the thriller element up our sleeve that we were going to pull on. And within all of that, we met with Polly Hill [head of drama for ITV], who said she loved the quietness of the show. She said, “This isn’t the show that you pitched me. You don’t have to do that. What do you want it to be about?” And we said, “Well, it’s just about them and their life, the family dynamics, and what this discovery does.” So we purposely did something that stripped everything away and we love it. We really felt—not that it was a female piece, per se, but that so many women have enjoyed it because it was written by women at a woman’s pace.

But we all have secrets. All families have something, be it Anne-Marie’s family, or a friend of a friend, or my family—stories that I hear from aunties or my husband’s family—there’s always, “Oh, did you know that–” and then can’t get your jaw up, because you’re like, “What? How have I never heard that?” So we felt very much like people would watch it and then start talking about their secrets, and the secrets we hold as humans.

I’ve been through it with my own family. My mom held certain things together, just by her very presence, and when it’s gone, you have to redefine yourself, recalibrate, and find your place again. And with both parents gone for me, that meant me and my brother were like, “Right, we have to make more effort. We have to make sure that our children have cousins, that they see each other and know their cousins. You have to come and see me in the summer, and I have to come and see you, and enjoy ourselves, because it is just us.”

A lot of the notes when we were writing it were, “Can we have them in the present, and not their history?” and we kept saying, “But their history is the present.” Like their argument in Episode 2, it’s like they’re still children when it’s all about, “You judge me for not having a child,” and “Well, what about when you did this?” It’s so visceral, but it all needed saying…And the beauty of it is that, really, it’s a love story, but between two sisters.

When we heard she was a yes, I was just like, “Oh my god!” I remember my husband going, “She’s amazing, isn’t she?” when we watched her in The Honorable Woman. And Nurse Jackie, and her theater presence here—amazing. And I knew that I was going to be in such safe hands with her. We were kind of inseparable because all of our scenes were together. We had this little green room in that house where we would just squish next together between scenes, and we felt very much at one. She’d just come off House of the Dragon, and it was such a huge production, so I think she felt really happy that she was in a smaller thing, and it was just all about the two of us. She’s so good and so gorgeous.

For me, Rizzo and Grease—her character and that song—was just on repeat over and over and over. But yes, her theater presence here in the UK is huge, and our casting director also knew her. We’d wanted someone American for the role of Cathy because we wanted it to feel like there were lots of people on this island who had gathered from all over the place to restart or hide—we didn’t want it to feel like it was just some little place in the middle of nowhere.

So in the writers’ room, once we mentioned Stockard, we couldn’t get her out of our heads—we kept talking about her and saying, “Well, when Stockard– I mean Cathy…” And in the end—and I’ve used the word manifestation, because it was like that—we kept talking about her as if she’d accepted it. And then, we heard that she wanted to do some more TV. Our casting director Andy Pryor sent her the script and she liked episodes one and two, but she wanted to know how it ended, so we were like, “Okay, we need to write this script and get it to her!” And she said yes, and it was amazing.

In my original treatment, it was just an unknown village that was slightly odd, and the girls had to go to this place they’d never heard of. And when Anne-Marie took it on as a writer she said, “Oh, I think then Isle of Man.” She said she wanted water between Mary’s real life and her new life, and it’s a slightly odd place with the Fairy Bridge, and the folklore there. And the TT [Tourist Trophy] go there to do these crazy [motorcycle] races. It’s so small, and then with COVID, no one could come in or go out. So it’s kind of got its own vibe going on. So when she sold it to me like that, I said, “Yeah, well let’s find this house then. If we find the right house…”

And then our director, Sue Tully, found this grand house in Ireland—where it was, we could look out of the window and it looked like the Isle of Man. It was a little bit broken down and it wasn’t luxurious, and I could really buy that it belonged to her mother.

We were in a few places—Dalkey, just outside of Dublin. A lot of our on the front stuff was in Bray, and we were also near Greystones. I, personally, stayed on my own, but then my family would come visit in Greystones, and it’s so beautiful there.

It really worked out for us, because it’s so beautiful and at the same time felt very singular in its setting, and the people and the casting were great. One day, we were sitting, looking out, me and Anne-Marie, with her notes, and Sue, and Stockard. I was like, “Wow, this is–” and then a dolphin popped up, and I was like, “Oh my God.” Then a seal popped up and was just staring at us, and I was like, “I’m having the best time.” And then, there was a coffee vendor behind us, and someone said, “Do you want a flat white?” I was like, “Yes.” I couldn’t have been happier.