Jack Thorne and Rachel Mason on Netflix's Joy and the "dark" and "isolating" journey of fertility struggles

I’m sure he is, I say, but this is your story. In the new Netflix film Joy, Nighy plays one of three pioneering scientists who invented in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), but the scripts were inspired by Thorne’s own battle to conceive with his wife, talent agent Rachel Mason.

"If those three people hadn’t come together and had that Sliding Doors moment, we wouldn’t have our son," Thorne explains. "And that makes us very emotional."

I start by asking the couple to stop me should I veer into any areas they find too personal about their journey to conceive their son Elliott, who’s now eight, which took seven cycles of IVF.

"No," interrupts Thorne, firmly. "You can’t. Ask anything." Although it soon transpires that the couple haven’t always been so open.

The idea for Joy was conceived by Slumdog Millionaire and Philomena producer Cameron McCracken. Thorne – BAFTA-winning writer of National Treasure and This Is England '90 – was then asked to come on board, having already done some research into the origin story of IVF.

"After Elliott was born, I pitched a terrible play to the Royal Exchange that was all about the lab mice," Thorne laughs, "and the things we could do on stage with mice. They said no, and I put that in a drawer. As soon as I read Cameron’s pitch, which revolved around this forgotten researcher Jean Purdy, who wasn’t celebrated by science because of her gender and her role, it was like, 'Wow, this is the way to tell the story.'"

Joy begins in 1968, when 23-year-old nurse Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie) applied for a job managing an in-vitro fertilisation research lab in Cambridge for physiologist Bob Edwards (James Norton). She became part of a trio with renowned surgeon Patrick Steptoe (Nighy) who went on to produce the first "test tube baby", Louise Joy Brown, 10 years later.

Purdy had endometriosis and couldn’t conceive, and threw herself into the work, discovering how to collect women’s eggs from their ovaries, fertilise them, then replant them in the womb.

Mason has also suffered with endometriosis so "it just made sense" to try her hand at writing with her husband for the first time, knowing she could bring a personal insight to the script.

Thorne, however, had reservations. "I’m not a balanced person when it comes to writing," he admits. "We’ve got a pretty good marriage, and I didn’t want to bring Rach into my madness. So there wasn’t a great part of me that was going, 'Yes.'"

In the end, not only did they love working together, but they found the process cathartic, discussing the pain of the IVF process in a way they never had before. Mason even admitted to Thorne during the writing process that she had planned to leave him if the seventh cycle hadn’t been successful. "The infertility issue was mine," she explains, "and I felt like I was putting Jack through this. I just thought, this isn’t fair on him and if this doesn’t work, what then?"

How did Thorne react? "It was nuts. I told her, 'You’re nuts.' There was nothing in my head about having kids before I met Rach. So the idea that, because we couldn’t have kids, she would go, is just insanity."

What sort of conversations did you have about it at the time: was there a limit to how many cycles you would try? "We had sort of talked about stopping," says Thorne. "But there was a long period where she was impenetrable.

"I’m not very good at dismantling walls, so I was dancing on the outside of it going, 'Look at the statistics. This is fine! Keep going.' Men apparently always say things like, 'The statistics will go up to 18.9 per cent when we do the next round, then 22.6 per cent on the round after that, so that’s good, isn’t it?' But that’s not what she wanted to hear. I couldn’t reach her."

Mason adds, "We did talk about stopping, and thought the seventh round would be the last. But who knows? Financially, you can only do so much, although I’d have lived in a tent to keep going. I was obsessed. I don’t think you can have certain discussions when you’re going through it, because it’s so raw.

"I want people to understand the darkness of the experience, the isolation. There were days I could talk about it, and other days I’d be furious, and jealous of people with babies. Jack was so good about it."

"What she means is 'bloody useless'," Thorne interjects. "As someone who is a professional empath – I mean, empathy is literally my job – I couldn’t get there. I once spent six months in bed with a very painful disease, and I can tell you without doubt that IVF is the hardest thing I’ve ever done."

While studying at Cambridge, Thorne was diagnosed with chronic pain condition cholinergic urticaria, and he has often written about pain and disability – but is Joy an even more personal project?

"Not more, no," he says. "It’s the most loving project I’ve done. At the start of every script rehearsal, we’d talk about our fertility journeys, and we’d cry.

"Everyone has a story, whether it’s them or a friend or a family member. That’s why we were all attracted to this story. My favourite moment in the film is just after one of the women has become the first to get pregnant. Jean’s in the car eating an ice cream with Trisha, one of the other women who’s been trying unsuccessfully to have IVF. Jean turns to Trisha and says, 'I’m jealous of her, too.' That little stuff is all about us."

There have now been 12 million babies worldwide born through IVF, yet the process is expensive and complicated. Before the procedure became more widely available in the UK on the NHS, most IVF babies were conceived at the private Bourn Hall clinic. Yet today the NHS provides just one or two rounds per couple.

"Infertility is classed as a disease," says Mason. "The stress of thinking, 'I’ve got one chance, maybe two' – it’s just wrong. And if you’re with a partner who has a child from a previous relationship – which would have been true for Louise Brown’s parents, who wouldn’t get the level of care now that they did in 1978 – you wouldn’t necessarily qualify. We think Bob, Patrick and Jean would be hugely disappointed by how it’s played out."

In essence, Joy is a tribute to Jean Purdy, whose achievements were ignored when a plaque was put up at Kershaw’s Cottage Hospital near Oldham in the early '80s, to commemorate the work the scientists carried out there. Her name was only added to a plaque in 2015.

Thorne says, "Nothing would have been possible without Patrick’s developments as an obstetrician or Bob’s brilliance as a scientist. But equally, nothing would have been possible without Jean. She was an embryologist, and Louise Brown calls her her first babysitter. Science just decided she wasn’t important because of her gender and her role: she was a lab tech, while they were great big professors and obstetricians. But she was crucial."

The film is also a tribute to Thorne and Mason’s son. He knows he is an IVF baby but has little interest, according to his parents. "He’s brilliant, he’s fantastic," says Mason. "He’s very like Jack. We are biased but he’s wonderful. This project has involved some difficult conversations but overall it’s been a fantastic experience."

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Joy is now showing in select UK cinemas and will be released on Netflix on Friday 22nd November 2024 - sign up from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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