Katherine Kelly:'It seems to me, we live in a world where people are mostly tried by the headlines'

Actress Katherine Kelly first rose to fame playing feisty Becky McDonald in Coronation Street; a character netted her a string of accolades, including a National Television Award for Best Performance in a Serial Drama and a Tric Award for Best Soap Personality. On leaving the popular ITV soap Katherine, 41, hasn't looked back; and has gone on to become one of TV's most in-demand actresses, appearing in many award-winning dramas, including Happy Valley, Mr Selfridge, Cheat and series two of Liar.

Katherine is now taking on her latest role in series two of ITV drama Innocent, written by the incredibly talented Chris Lang and Matt Arlidge. The Yorkshire native plays English teach Sally Wright, who was jailed for the murder of a sixteen-year-old schoolboy that she didn't commit. Once her conviction is quashed, she becomes determined to clear her name and reclaim some of her life by helping police find the real killer. The show also stars Jamie Bamber, playing Sally's husband Sam, Priyanga Burford, Shaun Dooley and Amy-Leigh Hickman.

Here Katherine chats about her new role and why life onset was very different during Covid times.

Image supplied by ITV

You’ve made a few dramas in the crime genre – Criminal: UK, Happy Valley, Cheat and now Innocent – are there particular aspects of that world that you enjoy?

I just think that it’s an evergreen topic, isn’t it? I pick the scripts even though they are crime genres.

Innocent is about being integrated back into society when your freedom has been taken away from you. The character by choice doesn’t really talk about what has happened. It’s about moving forward. Regarding Criminal, that’s just a unique piece of television, and Happy Valley was because it was Sally Wainwright. She gives you a ring and says, come and do it and in what world are you going to say no?

In Innocent, I’m playing a very different character to Criminal. We shot the second series of that in January and February 2020, just before we started Innocent. It was a very conscious choice to play Sally, who is quite the opposite of Natalie Hobbs in every way.

What is different about Sally?

Sally is a strong woman but in a different way to Natalie. When you meet her at the beginning of the show, she’s just served five years in prison, and it was a wrongful conviction. She is a tremendously damaged and traumatised human being, and yet she has that inner strength to make a conscious decision to move forward with her life.

I wouldn’t say I like to use the word victim because she doesn’t see herself like that, but Sally has been a victim of the system for one reason or another, and she’s trying to re-establish her life in her community back in Keswick. It seems to me, we live in a world where people are tried mainly by the headlines, and we don’t want to read the small print and the detail. Sally goes back to where she was born and bred and was a central part of the community, but she’s not accepted back.

What would you say are the show’s most interesting parts?

It’s really about her integrating back into society, how the place has moved on, and how she hasn’t yet. Sally’s got a tricky relationship with her ex-husband, but she’s still wearing her wedding ring because he’s the love of her life and always has been. I suppose the through-line for her is she says that everything was taken away from her for no good reason, and she wants it back. That really rang true to me. She is fighting for what she feels is fair and right, the injustice. She has a quiet strength and wants to just get on with her life. She doesn’t like being in the spotlight. When she walks down the street, she doesn’t like people looking at her. I think she thought that once her name was cleared, that would be it.

The problem is that although she was wrongfully convicted of murder, there was also a pretty salacious story in the papers that she was supposed to have had an affair with this boy, Matty, who she was convicted of murdering. It really is just a rumour, but that rumour has taken over from what the actual facts. As Sally says, she was never even tried for that, never mind convicted of it.

How did you research for the role?

I love doing research. I must admit I did go down quite a rabbit hole for many months about prisons. That was where my research was. From my research, I discovered her treatment in prison would not have been good at all from fellow inmates. She probably would have had to been isolated for her own safety.

I watched an excellent documentary on Channel 4 called Prison. A year before I was offered this job, I did a workshop at the National Theatre, which was co-produced with Clean Break, a women’s theatre company that works with women who had been through the prison system. That has really stayed with me. I have stayed in close contact with the company, and I did get in touch with them because they do work in prisons.

My interest, though, had been sparked in the prison system. I also watched Louis Theroux, who has made some great documentaries on prison life, especially the treatment of convicted sex offenders, how they are ostracised from what can be quite a close prison community.

The series was filmed on location in the Lake District and Ireland during the pandemic in 2020, how did you spend your downtime?

I was based in Dun Laoghaire. My dad’s Irish. He was born in Roscommon, but we spent our summers in Kerry because that is where his mum’s from. His mum’s two sisters live there, and he’s got a lot of cousins there. When I first got the job, before we’d ever heard of Covid-19, my dad was going to come over. Any excuse to get back to Ireland.

My hotel looked out over the Dun Laoghaire pier. I walked along with it, and there was a plaque about the Forgotten Irish. I sent him a picture saying, here I am and wish you were here. He said, ‘That’s the pier that I left from with your grandma and granddad in 1953.’ Isn’t that amazing? That’s where they left with a suitcase each.

I didn’t have a lot of free time at all because of scheduling. We’d been due to do Innocent in March, and then it moved back to September, and my children were starting a different school, so the production was outstanding in accommodating that. They began by filming all of Shaun Dooley’s police scenes to get the kids into school and then go over and do my two weeks of quarantine. Once I’d done that, I hit the ground running and was in all the time, So really, my only downtime was when I was quarantined in a hotel room. We were allowed out to exercise. I just used to walk around Dun Laoghaire. I bought an SLR camera for the first time in my life and got really into taking pictures. I feel a powerful connection with Ireland. I’m the oldest of four, and I look back on my family upbringing; and it was a very Irish household just with Yorkshire accents. (Laughs)

Is the Lake District a part of the world that you knew well before making the show?

Not really. We used to holiday East rather than West. I went on a Duke of Edinburgh award thing to Windermere when I was about 13 and I remember going with a friend of mine from school, again to Windermere, on a family trip. They had a caravan so I went for a week or two with them, but it’s not a place where I’ve spent much time, because I moved down South at 18.

Shaun Dooley speaks very warmly of working with your dad, John, when he was starting out in his career.

Yes, to me, Shaun Dooley was Jesus. That’s the part he played in the Worsborough Mystery Plays that used to be performed every four years. I’m a bit younger than Shaun. He’ll tell the story more accurately than me, but from my understanding he was the shining light at the Electric Theatre in Barnsley.

My dad wanted a young man to play Jesus and Shaun was highly recommended. I was about nine years-old then. We went along a few nights with my mum and my two younger brothers and I played a peasant. I really wanted to be a wave. The dancing school’s girls were waves, but I had stopped going to dancing class so I couldn’t be one

. The waves had blue Lycra leggings and leotards and they were running around waving chiffon blue scarves. There was I sat in a brown sack-like costume at the back and my dad’s the bloody director (laughs). No nepotism in my family. It’s very strange that this is the first time me Shaun and I have ever worked together. It was a real joy to finally do it. Jesus and the peasant finally meet.

How did you cope with the threat of Covid and the new working health and safety restrictions?

Everyone was just cautious, and there was an immense amount of gratitude. We’ve all got friends and families who have lost their jobs and are not working, especially our comrades in the theatre. And then people are actually dealing with the loss of loved ones and chronic illness. So we never forgot for one moment how fortunate we were, and we made the best of it.

It was an experience going to Ireland unlike any other. I’d been over for my birthday three years before and had a family reunion in Dublin. We had a wild weekend. I remember us running to catch the flight back on Sunday. The airport was packed, and we had a pushchair, and it was just crazy. Cut to three years later when I arrived for this job, and there was more staff than passengers on the Aer Lingus flight and at the airport.

Do you know if Criminal:UK will be returning for a third series?

We usually film it in January, but because of the backlog – Pinewood was shut effectively closed for six months – they had to finish off all those productions first, so there was no space for us. I expect it will come back at some point, but until we’ve played catch up with the other productions, we don’t know when.

It’s the sort of show that you can remount at any time with as many episodes as you want. There’s a busy year coming up with shows catching up. I’m trying to land on something that I want to do. Lovely things come my way, but there is so much television now it’s a case of I have to be really excited by something to do it.

Innocent is on ITV nightly from Monday 17th May - Thursday 20th May at 9pm