Wilderness writer and director on casting "masterful" Jenna Coleman

RadioTimes.com caught up exclusively with the writer and director behind Wilderness, Marnie Dickens and So Yong Kim, and the pair were full of praise for their "masterful" star.

When asked whether she knew Coleman before casting her in the show, Dickens said: "I’d not known her personally - I wish I had - but I’d obviously known her work and admired it for many, many years.

"We had all six scripts written, which was really important because it's so twisty-turny, so it felt important to have the architecture quite early on, before we approached cast.

"And Liz [executive producer Elizabeth Kilgarriff] had worked with her before on The Cry, and so it just felt like a really natural place to go to. So we did.

"And then we had separate conversations, I had a conversation with her. She's so thoughtful and intelligent about her craft and the character."

Meanwhile, the show's director, Kim, said: "I didn't know her work as well as Marnie and Liz, but I watched The Cry and Serpent, and she's amazing, she's so talented.

"And then we had a wonderful Zoom talking about the character and what we were looking to do. And she was spot on as far as her interpretation of her journey, Liv’s journey.

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"Then we started to work together and she was so incredible. I don't think I knew exactly the range of her talent until we started shooting, because we block shot six episodes together, so there were days when we cover four to five episodes within a day of shooting.

"And she would be so spot on with each scene, and she gave so much care and of herself into it. It was just masterful, there's no other word for her work. And, of course, there's Oliver [Jackson-Cohen, co-star] to balance her out. Watching them work together on and off set was a real treat for me."

Wilderness is based on the 2019 novel of the same name by B E Jones, but, while speaking with RadioTimes.com, Dickens made clear that the narrative on-screen takes a "big detour" from the one in the book.

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