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Sophie McShera on The Gallows Pole and hopes for a Downton reunion: ‘We all really want to go back’

Sophie McShera - Photographed at the Soho Theatre by Clara Molden
Sophie McShera - Photographed at the Soho Theatre by Clara Molden

From Fellowes to Meadows. “Is that your headline?” chirps Sophie McShera. I don’t write the headlines, I tell her, but it’s certainly the story. McShera is known and loved the western world over as Daisy, the naive if stroppy ­scullery maid parked by Julian ­Fellowes on the bottom rung in Downton Abbey, firmly under the thumb of Lesley Nicol’s Mrs Patmore.

But for her next role, and her first true lead, she is in something by Shane Meadows. That’s right: the writer-director of This Is England, the one with drink, drugs and improvising. It must have felt like quite a leap. “It is a leap,” she accepts, curled up happily on a ­banquette in London’s Soho ­Theatre. “Not sure I would have got to one without the other.”

Meadows has branched out with The Gallows Pole, whose alternative title might be This Was England. For one, he’s removed himself from his own time and place – the ­modern Midlands – and upped sticks to ­18th-century Yorkshire.

Also, he’s working from a literary source: the 2017 novel by Benjamin Myers about a brash counterfeiting scam ­perpetrated in the 1760s by the Cragg Vale Coiners. Driven by ­poverty, hunger and the greed of landlords (making this an all too timely adaptation), a gang of weavers in a remote valley near Hebden Bridge clipped edges off gold coins to fashion the shavings into fakes, which they then put into circulation.

“The thing that shocked me was I didn’t know the story and I’m from Yorkshire!” says McShera, who grew up in Bradford. It’s not so surprising: even though Tubthumping rockers Chumbawamba sang about them, and Sally Wainwright featured them in Last Tango in Halifax, the coiners’ big moment didn’t come until Myers’s word-of-mouth hit. What McShera could tell from a hasty reading before she auditioned in Nottingham was that the book had only one female character.

“I said to Shane, ‘I saw all these women auditioning, what are you thinking with the women?’ He said, ‘I’m on it, don’t worry.’ He put my mind at rest.” He addressed it by selecting a large cast, which met for a year and workshopped an entire community into existence.

McShera stars as the fiesty Grace Hartley - Dean Rogers
McShera stars as the fiesty Grace Hartley - Dean Rogers

The unscripted result flouts every convention of period drama. The story even includes moorland visions of men with stagheads – the sort of phantasmagoria that can’t be found in even the most unfaithful adaptations of, say, Dickens. The style of working was new to McShera, who ceded all improvising on Downton to its creator: “Julian does write what he sees,” she explains. “He changed mine and Lesley’s relationship a lot because of our relationship in real life.”

So a mandate to conjure up her own character felt intimidating. “I’d definitely never worked in that process before. Some people were writing reams of backstory. I was panicking a bit. I wanted to do whatever it took to make the character rounded, but then I wanted to throw it all away.”

She even sought the wisdom of Downton’s downstairs elders – Nicol (“my telly mummy”), Siobhan Finneran, Jim Carter and Phyllis Logan. “When I was really scared that I wasn’t going to be good enough to do this Shane job, they’re the people I’m ringing. We’re like a little family.”

History recalls that Grace, the woman she plays, would go on to marry David Hartley, the brains behind the Cragg Vale Coiners. The cast would even visit their grave in Heptonstall every morning before filming. But the drama begins with him returning from Birmingham after seven years away, and finding he’s not in good odour with the feisty sweetheart he abandoned.

McShera and This Is England ­veteran Michael Socha play out delightful scenes in which ­Meadows pointed cameras at them as they bicker their way towards harmony. Although historical ­language experts were used, it can feel like Skins in period costume, with McShera in particular deploying a modern lexicon (“wow”, “not cool”).

“I mean, does it bother you?” she says. “I like that mix. There’s a danger of thinking that these stories are really far away. A love story is a love story and I don’t want to be taken out of it by the language.”

All big eyes and impish ­confidence, McShera takes as much undiluted joy from her job as any actor I have ever interviewed. Even at 38, it’s as if she’s never stopped counting her blessings since she entered the profession, aged 11, by accident. “I found a drama club in the Yellow Pages when my parents said I should do a hobby. I didn’t know what else I could do.”

Soon a girl auditioning for a West End production of The Goodbye Girl dropped out. McShera affirmed that she could sing and do an ­American accent, went to the ­London Palladium and got the part. “I fell in love with acting from working.” Another year on she was in Annie opposite Paul O’Grady (“a lovely, sweet man”).

On The Gallows Pole she was, to use her ­designation, one of the old-timers inducting the first-timers, who were cast after ­Meadows, in search of new natural talent, threw the net wide open and ploughed through 5,000 self-taped auditions. “There was this weird thing where I used to be the baby on Downton and now I’ve got people asking me how it works.”

McShera with her 'telly mummy' Lesley Nicol in Downton Abbey - Nick Briggs
McShera with her 'telly mummy' Lesley Nicol in Downton Abbey - Nick Briggs

Did they look up to her the way she did to Maggie Smith? “No, no!” she hollers. “That’s a ludicrous comparison! I don’t know if anyone had ever seen Downton.” (She’s not sure Meadows had. “I should ask him.”)

Shooting her first scene with Dame Maggie, McShera “felt like the luckiest girl in the world. I was like, ‘Pinch me, who would have thought?’” She had similar feelings sharing a West End stage with Mark Rylance in Jerusalem. “When I first got on stage with him, I naturally took myself out of the eyeline of the audience to him, as you do. And he was like, ‘Don’t do that. If you want to sit there, you sit there.’”

As for Cate Blanchett, wicked stepmother to her wicked stepsister in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella, “I just loved how it felt like you were working with a legendary person. I really loved how she held herself on set.”

McShera and Cate Blanchett in Cinderella - Jonathan Olley
McShera and Cate Blanchett in Cinderella - Jonathan Olley

For all their differences, the one thing Grace and Daisy have in common is that they are not dressed to the nines (unlike in Cinderella, in which the sisters’ outfits were so outlandish “the crew would be in stitches”). McShera offers a rare glimpse of testiness when asked about this. “I want to play good parts and I don’t want it to be tied to how I look. You used to get a lot of people going, ‘Ooh, you scrub up well.’ You often get it when you’re on a red carpet. You’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve just been having hair and make-up for three hours.’”

Her tiggerish enthusiasm for the new vistas opened up by Meadows is palpable. “Shane can bring stuff out of you that you didn’t know was there,” she says. Yet it’s evident from the way she talks about ­Downton that she hasn’t left Daisy behind. “No, I love it!” she says when I promise not to let it dominate our chat, which takes place before rumours reached the media that the show might return to ITV.

“I really hope that we get to do another one,” she ­volunteers. “I know that we all really want to go back.” Her one fervent wish is for Daisy to suffer. “You don’t necessarily want your character to be happy, because then you might not get any good stuff to do. And she’s quite happy at the moment.” It takes one to know one.


The Gallows Pole is on BBC Two at 9pm on Wednesday 31 May, with all episodes available on iPlayer