Bracing for the storm
Sky drama Under Salt Marsh places a police investigation against the backdrop of a storm-lashed Welsh coast. Writer-director Claire Oakley tells DQ about setting the scene for this series and its “highly combustible” lead characters.
Across a handful of short films and her first feature, 2019 psychological thriller Make Up, Claire Oakley has enjoyed the chance to write and direct her own original stories.
“The directing just feels like you’re seeing it through to its final ambition. It feels like a natural process to me,” she tells DQ.
So when she pitched six-part drama Under Salt Marsh, the idea that she would perform double duties once again also appealed to UK broadcaster Sky, which was looking to back an authored story. In turn, it meant Sky could give Oakley the time and space to have all the scripts written before production began, while she was also afforded creative control over the whole project.
The result is a compelling, character-led crime drama nestled within the tensions of a tight-knit seaside community and set against the backdrop of a unique environment – one that is further accentuated by the show’s score and its direction, which is both epic in scale and intimate in detail.
In the fictional Welsh town of Morfa Halen, which stands precariously between towering mountains and a fast-encroaching sea that threatens its very existence, a once-in-a-generation storm is beginning to gather far out at sea as former detective turned teacher Jackie Ellis (Kelly Reilly) discovers the body of her eight-year-old pupil, Cefin, seemingly drowned.
The discovery sends shockwaves through the community, reviving the ghost of an unsolved cold case that rocked the town three years prior – the disappearance of Jackie’s niece, Nessa, which ended her police career.
Cefin’s death brings Jackie’s former partner, Detective Eric Bull (Rafe Spall), back to Morfa Halen to lead the investigation into a community he failed once before. Convinced the cases are linked, Jackie and Bull must reconcile and race to uncover long-buried secrets inside Morfa, before the storm breaks and all the evidence is gone for good.
The idea behind the series, which launches on Sky and streamer NOW today, emerged from the time Oakley has spent in North Wales and her desire to set a story against the area’s dramatic landscapes and labyrinthine salt marshes.
“They’re very rarely depicted on camera because they’re quite difficult places to access. The tide is always coming in and out. They’re incredibly muddy places to try to get into,” she says. “You’ve only got a short window of time to shoot there before the water comes in, but I really wanted these rare and unique places to be seen.”
American television has often mythologised its own landscapes, from deserts to mountains, and Oakley wanted to do the same for the salt marshes. Imagining a story that could dig into that kind of setting, she soon struck upon the idea of a police investigation where the environment and a forensic examination of the plant life and the salt content of water would play an important part in solving the case.
The encroaching storm bearing down on Morfa Halen quickly sets the town on edge, even before Jackie discovers Cefin’s body in a waterlogged ditch. Then when the tragedy is discovered, the storm acts as a ticking clock against the police investigation, which must be completed before their work is derailed and any evidence is washed away.
The show’s characters emerged from Oakley’s thinking that the salt marshes also protect the town’s population from the sea. “I was interested in this idea of protection, so I started to develop Jackie and Bull’s stories and characters around that,” she says.
“Jackie’s a schoolteacher, so her job is to protect the children and yet she finds one of her pupils dead. She takes it very personally. There’s also this previous tragedy where she failed, or she feels she failed, to protect and also solve the crime when her niece went missing.”
There’s a quality embedded in Jackie’s character that means she’s determined to uncover the truth behind Cefin’s death, often getting in Bull’s way before they start to combine their efforts.
There are also numerous questions about Bull’s character. He and Jackie have a “huge” backstory together, which leads Oakley to describe them as a “highly combustible duo.” It means that as much as Under Salt Marsh is a crime drama, it’s also an exploration of their past and how it affects them in the present.
“He comes to town very aware that he has destroyed her life and a lot of his journey is about what’s he going to do after that, how he comes back from that and how their relationship will get mended or not,” Oakley says.
The series isn’t short of plot, however, with the threat of the storm and the discovery of Cefin’s body setting out the story in episode one, before a suspect quickly emerges amid questions about Cefin’s family in episode two. To piece the story together, Oakley opened a writers room with episodic writers Jonathan Harbottle and Nikita Lalwani to flesh out the families and characters the creator had already set out in her initial planning.
“I’m a big fan of character-driven crime drama, and character-driven drama full-stop,” she says. “So we tried always to put character first and make the stories human. We were very focused always on asking, ‘How do people overcome this, how do people come together, where’s the hope, how can people help each other through and how can that cause clashes?’ Jackie, essentially, takes it upon herself to investigate all the people closest to her – her neighbours, her friends, her family – and that’s a very hard thing to do.”
Jackie’s efforts “get people’s backs up” and cause relationships to fracture. “So it was really looking at those relationships and characters and how we could best express our ideas through that that informed the plot,” Oakley continues. “Plus, of course, there’s this huge outside force of the storm that no one can control, and [we were] working out how quickly that will come, when it’s going to come and how we can use that to add pressure to other situations.”
The other key part of developing the show was protecting the identity of the killer, and working out the best time to reveal their identity. “I always like this idea that when it is revealed who it is, it’s not someone you would never, ever have expected,” Oakley says. “I wanted it to be, ‘Oh, of course it’s him.’ That’s the best you can hope for. But you don’t want people to think that in episode two.”
However, the killer only emerged to Oakley as she considered the reasoning behind a series set in the aftermath of the loss of two young children. “In thinking about these precarious coastal communities that may not be there in another 20, 25, 30 years, I was looking at who’s most at risk in these places, and it’s really our future generations and the children who are most at risk,” she says. “I felt in a story that’s talking about those bigger themes, we had to have the plot reflect those themes, so it felt right to have these deaths and losses be around the children. But I didn’t want it to be a sensationalised child killer or crazed psychopath type of story. That wasn’t where I wanted to go, so we had to find other reasons why a death like this might occur. It was through exploring that that we then came across our killer.”
As a writer and director, Oakley’s first priority is to complete the scripts, while her script directions will more often contain hints to how she wants a scene to feel in place of any technical cues. On Under Salt Marsh, she was also mindful of the show’s budget, especially when she knew it would be necessary to depict a devastating storm looming on the horizon.
To do so, she didn’t want to rely on CGI and instead opted to do as much practically, in camera, as possible. “I liked the idea, for instance, that we could build the story to a point where some water rising up through the carpet is just as sinister as seeing a huge wave rolling in from the sea,” she says. “We’ve ended up with both of those types of storytelling. I never want to write something that can’t be made, because you want people to watch it.”
Nevertheless, “it was quite brutal,” Oakley says of filming those scenes, which were shot mostly through December 2024 and January 2025 in the flooded backlot of a Cardiff studio – an event preceded by numerous health and safety meetings relating to how long cast and crew could stand in near-freezing water.
It certainly brought back memories for Oakley from filming Make Up, which similarly had a lot of weather involved. On that set, a lot of hosepipes were used to mitigate the £30,000 costs imposed every time the script called for rain.
“It was very DIY,” Oakley remembers. But on Under Salt Marsh, she was supported by RealSFX, with specially adapted trailer‑mounted wind machines and two 20x20ft rain machines suspended by cranes to create the key storm scenes. “We had an incredibly skilled, huge crew with amazing expertise and the storm is amazing. It’s really exciting and fun.”
Produced by Little Door Productions in association with Sky Studios, the series also takes in numerous locations along the North Wales coast, from Anglesey and Fairbourne to Barmouth and Mawddach Estuary, Llanbedr and the iconic Menai Bridge – all of which Oakley wanted to celebrate through the lens. Classic framing was used to capture the characters, while the camerawork always sought to be responsive and empathetic to them. She also wanted very naturalistic skin tones, with pops of colour used to break up the greens and blues of the landscape.
Drones were used to photograph the most inaccessible locations, often from overhead. “There are a lot of people who probably don’t know that the UK possesses these amazing places,” says the director, who helmed episodes one, two, five and six, with Mary Nighy picking up the other two. “It’s beautiful. You’ve got the mountains falling into the sea and these huge expanses of wilderness and extreme environments. So a lot of it was using that in a way that felt descriptive of the mood and tone of the show.”
The drama’s score further informs the atmosphere and emotion. Oakley reunited with composers Ben Salisbury and Suvi-Eeva Äikäs on the project, having previously collaborated with them on Make Up. With an ambition for the music to carry the natural sounds of the landscape, they used lots of wind instruments, including the clarinet and saxophone, though the sound is often distorted.
“That brings these reedy, wind-like tones, but they also feel human,” Oakley notes. “Suvi and Ben created a lot of the music off the script, so when we came into the edit, they’d already made maybe 30 pieces. It was amazing to have their music in the edit. We never used any temporary score. A lot of what we put down at the very beginning just stayed there.”
As for her partnership with stars Reilly and Spall, Oakley found both actors shared a desire for their performances to be truthful and real. That they were often working in freezing or soaking wet conditions only enhanced that authenticity, in a show that also features Naomi Yang, Jonathan Pryce, Dinita Gohil, Brian Gleeson, Kimberley Nixon and Harry Lawtey.
“It was a very demanding shoot, but both Kelly and Rafe were really up for that,” she says. “The scene in episode one where Kelly finds the body, that was a real ditch in December at night, and it was freezing, and she was totally up from the very beginning for doing everything real. It really brought a level of authenticity to the performance, and into the show as a whole, to be able to do that and shoot on location, and for her, for everyone, to be prepared for that. At the same time, we made sure people were as comfortable as possible.”
While Jackie is quite driven and “steely” in her search for the truth, Oakley says Reilly brought a nurturing, compassionate and empathetic side to the character, “which I didn’t really know was in the scripts. She really lifted that out, and it was exciting to see that come to life.”
Meanwhile, Spall grounded Bull in the Black Country, a historic industrial region in the West Midlands, which added to the character’s outsider status. “He’s disliked by most of the town, and that’s something he has to overcome in the story,” Oakley adds. “He really understood the idea that he’d hurt someone deeply, and he wanted to work out ways to overcome that as a character, even though a lot of his story is also about figuring out who he is. They brought so much to it. I’m very grateful to our amazing cast.”
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tagged in: Claire Oakley, Keilly Reilly, Little Door Productions, Rafe Spall, Sky, Sky Studios, Under Salt Marsh