Jessica Brown Findlay says Playing Nice reflects the "hazy, wild, visceral reality" of parenthood
The star of ITV's new drama on returning to the screen after navigating motherhood and the NICU.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
In recent months, fans of Lady Sybil Crawley could be forgiven for wondering whether she’d swapped the high life for one below stairs, so yawning has been the absence of actor Jessica Brown Findlay from our screens. In fact, the Downton Abbey star has been busy with another role – her most demanding yet – as the mother of twin boys.
Since welcoming them in November 2022, she’s been in what she describes as a "nappy bubble". "I’d spent the year at home with the boys, pottering around. After my first trimester, I wasn’t able to work; being pregnant with twins, I was high risk."
When she was approached to play Lucy - a talented artist married to the entrepreneurial Miles (James McArdle) - in ITV's Playing Nice, it felt like fate. "I’d been out [of commission] for a while, so to read something this good, with this cast, blew my mind," she recalls. "I devoured the script.
"It felt like such a gift of a role. As dark as it is, it also felt like the perfect step out of maternity leave. I’m a strong believer that your real life is the only way to learn how to be an actor. So, to be able to bring to the table the experience that I’d been living for so long felt serendipitous."
As was how she came to the role in the first place. "Years ago, I’d done a short film with James [Norton]. We ended up chatting away for a couple of hours on a train back to London, then went our separate ways. I’d see him over the years, but only peripherally. Then this came to me as an offer."
Like any new mother returning to work, she was nervous. "On my first day back, I thought, 'Whoa – is my brain going to be able to work at speed again? In one sense [as a new mum], your synapses have been popping off and you’ve been learning every second of every day – but in a different way. After that first day at work, to realise it was all still there – that there was more in my brain, and more in my heart – felt amazing. I was grateful for the opportunity, and also for my partner, who was saying, 'Go! Fly! We’ll be here. We’ll make it work.' That proclamation is pretty important."
It sounds as though her husband, the actor Ziggy Heath, is the polar opposite of her screen husband, Miles, a bully of a man whose response to the hideous circumstances he and his wife find themselves in – bringing up the "wrong" son after their baby was accidentally swapped at birth – is to control his environment, particularly his wife. Brown Findlay deftly captures the coiled, careful nature of Lucy, a woman always seemingly flinching as though from an invisible blow. "Lucy is inherently kind but lives a life where she’s not necessarily given much agency. There’s a real expectation as to what she should be like, what she should wear, how she should act. But it all seems fine on the surface."
As the only real-life parent of the quartet, Brown Findlay undoubtedly felt the harrowing storyline more viscerally. "It definitely hit me in a deeper way. This was my first real foray back into the work space after our twins were born. It sounds so weird, because of the subject matter, but I couldn’t have had more fun. Sometimes the darker a story is, the more you rally together. I was very well supported. My family and I all moved down to Cornwall together, so everyone was a ten-minute drive away from set. That was incredible, because I didn’t have to take on a role that could really mess with my head while being separated from my children. But I had to be very protective of myself, and make sure that I could always go back and kiss them."
The drama offers a rare window into the tense world of the neonatal unit, an environment Brown Findlay has experienced first-hand herself. "We spent 12 days in the NICU after our boys were born," she says. "We were in hospital for over two weeks, from me going into labour to us leaving. When we filmed those scenes, our boys had just turned one. I kept thinking, 'I was in here this time last year.'
"I still had my post-baby bump. Some of those feelings were still in my body, and felt so natural but so overwhelming."
She’s full of praise for the sensitive way in which she was treated. "Our director, Kate Hewitt, was incredible. She’s a mum herself, and she’d come over in a kind and deeply respectful way, just checking in on me, but not in front of everyone or making it a big deal. It was quite surreal. But hopefully within that, I was able to honour what it feels like as a parent to sit in those spaces, and give some of the hazy, wild, visceral reality of being there."
The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.
Playing Nice will air on ITV1 on Sunday 5th January at 9pm, with subsequent episodes airing on Monday and Sunday in the same timeslot.
Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
