Jenna Coleman: The Jetty would have been made “through a different lens” 10 years ago

In recent years, the Victoria star has increasingly cornered the market in the kind of intense roles her peers would surely give their eye teeth for – young, female protagonists in high-quality TV dramas, all complex, unknowable characters that audiences are left not knowing whether to root for until the final reel.

The now 38-year-old Coleman has brought such enigmatic gravitas to the mother of a missing child (The Cry), the partner of a seductive serial killer (The Serpent), the betrayed wife on holiday with her husband in the Rockies (Wilderness) and now the detective with a complicated past in The Jetty.

This four-part drama from the pen of playwright Cat Jones sees Coleman play DC Ember Manning, who’s tasked with solving a crime; one with buried roots that weave into her own romantic history. Set in a scenic Lancashire lakeside town, the story touches on complicated themes, including memories blurred by nostalgia, and sexual boundaries blurred by issues of curiosity and consent.

"Cat wanted to ask these questions, but not answer them," says Coleman. "It’s complicated. We all look at our past through a certain lens, and when Ember’s lens gets shifted, she has to re-examine who she is. I’m always interested in a detective thriller when the case becomes personal. It’s an awakening, really dense and nuanced."

Flawed motherhood is also at the heart of the show, with Amelia Bullmore playing Ember’s liberal mum Sylvia, and Ruby Stokes as her teenage daughter, Hannah. For Coleman, who recently announced she was expecting her first child with partner, the director Jamie Childs, the loving but dysfunctional dynamic at play is a fascinating one.

"Everything seems to be reverse-engineered: Ember’s mum is like the teenager, Ember the adult having a teenage awakening and her daughter Hannah having to become the grown up. Those dynamics felt very real. I have a couple of friends who had daughters very young. They’re more like siblings and then sometimes you have to pull the Mum card. They’re constantly keeping each other in check."

At the core of the case is confusion over sexual politics between young men and much younger women, in an insular community that all the #MeToo memos of the last several years evidently didn’t reach. For Coleman, while the story may be a tale as old as time, the focus is fresh.

"I’ve been asked if this project could have been made 10 years ago, and maybe yes, but through a different lens," she says. "We’re not saying women good, men bad, it’s more nuanced. One teenage girl character is sexually liberated, another much less so – so how can you apply the same rules to both? 10 years ago, their stories would have been painted with much broader brushstrokes."

Does Coleman feel more empowered than when she first arrived in the industry in 2005, still a teenager herself, having given up a university place for a role on Emmerdale? She pauses. "You have moments where you feel the shift and you have moments where it feels exactly the same, depending on what set you walk on, and what else is happening," she says eventually.

"Also, it’s wrestling with being comfortable advocating for yourself without conflict. That’s taken my generation a long time to get to, whereas I see the young girls in The Jetty… they come in and they’re so relaxed, they’re really present, they know their own voice. I was an anxious wreck at their age, thinking everyone’s opinions were obviously so much better than mine. I would have found it a lot harder to bring my voice to set in my 20s."

She puts this former self-doubt partly down to the fact she didn’t attend drama school. She sounds almost wistful about it. "It took me a long time to find confidence on set," she says now.

"If you’re in a rehearsal room, you have time to explore your toolbox, how you work and operate. Finding that time to mess up and fail is where you can really understand yourself as an actor, whereas I’ve learnt on the job the whole time. It’s why I like going back to rehearsal and doing plays. If you want to study your craft, how amazing to be in a place for three years to do that. I’d have loved that."

What Coleman had instead were hugely helpful parents – "I was the kind of kid who studied for my exams without being told so they were able to be supportive but hands-off" – and a curiosity for her craft piqued, she shares, by the work of Anthony Minghella.

"He was the first person who got me thinking about film in a different way," she remembers of the late director of Truly Madly Deeply, The English Patient and Cold Mountain. "Truly Madly Deeply and that one shot on Juliet Stevenson’s face!" she rhapsodises. "I read his book, and I used to audition using one of his plays."

On the other side of culture, TV legend also has it that Coleman was named after Priscilla Presley’s character Jenna Wade in a certain Texas-based soap opera, something she says is pretty much true… "I was going to be called Gemma, and my granny said Jenna was better. Dallas was where she’d heard the name."

Like her The Jetty co-star Amelia Bullmore, Coleman cut her teeth on TV soap, in her case as Emmerdale schoolgirl-turned-journalist-turned accidental murderer Jasmine Thomas. Australian actress Margot Robbie once told me she’ll never work so hard as she did on Neighbours, and Coleman agrees. "On Emmerdale, if the boom wasn’t in shot you were done," she says. "I had to learn to nail a scene really quickly, which is probably a great exercise."

Although she felt it was the right time to leave when she did in 2009, and she swiftly bagged a recurring role in Waterloo Road, she now reflects on that time as tough and confusing: "It was very difficult to get in a [meeting] room for a TV show, and without being in a room, how can you be considered for a part? It was a Catch 22, and I see it with my friends, too. Unless you’re with an agent, how do you do it? I remember feeling strongly, 'This is my first job, you can’t be typecast, you’re just beginning!' It was a difficult move, and it only came through by luck and fluke."

Perhaps with this lesson in mind, Coleman appeared to skip lightly through five years as Clara Oswald, companion to the Doctor in his Eleventh and Twelfth incarnations, aka Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi. Despite being a popular addition to the Whoniverse, she remained in no danger of being typecast, and was completely convincing in her next lead role, that of young Victoria in the ITV period romp about the long-reigning monarch.

Now, with two decades of work under her belt, a role in Netflix juggernaut The Sandman, more development projects on the horizon as well as a baby on the way, Coleman is a far cry from the ingenue worried her voice wouldn’t be heard. When she mentions being an executive producer on The Jetty as well as its star, it’s all part of the creative control she now embraces.

"You know your own tastes and tones, and what appeals to you," she reflects. "I’m very much at the beginning, but it’s a coming of age."

The Jetty will be available on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from 15th July 2024.

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