Addressing The Rumour
All Creatures Great & Small star Rachel Shenton speaks to DQ about taking the lead in 5 drama The Rumour, in which she plays a mother who discovers that sharing some gossip brings buried secrets to the surface and leads to unintended consequences.
For five seasons, Rachel Shenton has played farmer’s daughter Helen Alderson in 5’s popular reboot of All Creatures Great & Small, which debuted in 2020 and is set to return this autumn for a sixth season.
Before then, she’s swapping the drama’s period clothing and idyllic rural Yorkshire locations for a modern-day urban thriller called The Rumour.
“There’s definitely no potential child killers in All Creatures Great & Small,” the actor tells DQ. There are also no goats in The Rumour. “They are the main differences,” she laughs.
In The Rumour, which debuts on 5 tomorrow, Shenton stars as Joanna, who arrives in the town of Flinstead with her son Alfie, eager for a fresh start after leaving London to be closer to her mum.
But when she shares a rumour that a child killer is living in the town, paranoia soon takes hold of its residents. Then as suspicion spreads, Joanna becomes convinced her neighbour Sonia is hiding a dark secret, starting a chain of events that fracture the community.
When someone dies under mysterious circumstances, fear and blame spiral out of control. With her relationship with her estranged partner and Alfie’s father, Michael, crumbling and her mother, Bea, drawn into the fallout, Joanna is forced to confront the consequences of her actions as the town turns against her and buried secrets emerge.
Produced by Cuba Pictures and Clapperboard, the show’s cast also includes Joanne Whalley, Emily Atack, Samuel Anderson, Ellie Haddington, Lucy Speed, Liza Sadovy and Carryl Thomas. Richard Clark directs the five-part series, which is distributed by Fremantle, and Giula Sandler wrote the scripts based on the book of the same name by Lesley Kara.
Before landing the lead role, Shenton received the first two scripts and also read Kara’s novel, before meeting Clark and executive producer Dixie Linder. “The thing that drew me to her initially was the ordinariness of her,” the actor says of Joanna. “There’s nothing remarkable about her job, life, wardrobe or husband that we see such a lot now. She didn’t have a particularly overwhelming skill, or whatever, which made her incredibly relatable.
“Then that idea that she hasn’t got a very strong sense of self was quite interesting to play around with as well. As the story unravels, you learn why that is. But that was really interesting, because somebody who doesn’t have a particularly strong sense of self runs with the hares and hounds. That’s what was happening with her, and that was really instrumental in the spinning of the rumour. So all that made me go, ‘Yeah, that sounds interesting. I’ll have a go.’”
As the series opens, Joanna is a stranger in a new town and is eager to fit in and make friends both in her new job and with the other mums at the school gate. But when she learns that a notorious child killer, Sally McGowan, might be living among them, her decision to spread the rumour sees the gossip quickly spiral out of her control.
“At the start, it’s all in innocence. It’s a plea to just fit in and be part of a gang and bring something to the table,” Shenton says. “I don’t think she’s got a robust sense of self, so she doesn’t feel confident enough to go and just have that conversation and invite everyone over or do whatever is a bit more typical.” After spreading the rumour, “she becomes part of the gang, and she quite likes that, so she doesn’t put a lid on it. Then by the time she realises it’s getting a bit out of hand, it’s too late and it’s got a life of its own.”
Shenton compares Joanna’s desire to fit in with the other mums to a playground situation where she’s desperate to ingratiate herself with the “cool kids” and become one of them. “But it plays into a bigger picture that she’s probably always felt quite other. We all do. She never really fits in anywhere,” she continues. “That’s really relatable, particularly from school and things. Everybody feels a bit like that. But there’s something a bit deeper with Joanna in that, when we really learn why, I was so on her team.
“Actually, her entire life turns out to not be the way she thought it was, and that in itself is just so disorientating. She’s not really fitting in anywhere. She’s never really known what the truth is of anything, and that in itself, I can’t even get my head around what that must feel like. It was really interesting to play around with.”
Playing a “normal” character on screen, Shenton looks for the elements she can relate to, in order to find the “truth” for her performance. Here, the actor could get on board with playing a mum in a new town who is trying her best to settle into new surroundings.
In particular, her anchor was Joanna’s love for Alfie and her “desperate” need to keep him safe – “and that is very relatable,” she says. “He’s the epicentre of her world, even if at times she’s making very questionable choices. I really do believe that it is to protect him and to make sure he’s OK. And in some sort of strange way, she’s desperate for him to fit in, because she never did. But her behaviour sometimes creates the opposite of that. She’s causing in a big divide, but she’s very well meaning. That kept me steady, even when she was going a bit crazy later on. That’s a spoiler.”
Filmed in December 2024 in Budapest, Hungary, The Rumour offered Shenton the chance to lead a television series for the first time. Being number one on the call sheet, she’s also in almost every scene. But filming out of sequence, she often relied on director Clark to remind her of Joanna’s state of mind at various stages as she navigated the psychological pressures facing her character through the story.
“I was pregnant as well at the time, so I was probably a bit more tired than usual in the early stages of pregnancy,” she says. “It’s like anything you take like that, it’s intense. There are lots of lines, it moves quickly, as television does, and it’s an intense experience.
“It was great shooting in Budapest. Half the crew was Hungarian, and some we took over from [the UK]. It was amazing trying to learn bits of Hungarian. It was great, and I’d never been before. It was beautiful. I’d go again.”
That there is no smoking gun or dead body in The Rumour was another reason the project appealed to Shenton, who says the drama has a light touch to it. “It’s quite subtle,” she says. “It’s psychological, but not in an overt way. It’s just her emotions that take us through. Then as the story unravels, we make sense of her. It’s just a very human psychological unravelling that I hope people get and get on board with.”
However, there will be plenty of moments when viewers question what Joanna is doing, and why. “I certainly did that on first read, and then you get to know her and you’re like, ‘OK, I understand where this woman’s coming from,’” she says. “But it’s one woman’s psychological unravelling, really, as she reveals things about the rumour and about herself, and about how those two worlds are intertwined, and what that means.”
“Ultimately,” Shenton adds, “she’s read a headline and all of a sudden, this [rumour] is set on fire and it’s growing arms and legs, and it’s got a life of its own. Even that is in itself interesting, and shows the sorts of dangers of that kind of thing. It gets out of hand.”
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tagged in: 5, Clapperboard, Cuba Pictures, Fremantle, Rachel Shenton, The Rumour