Hostage situation
DQ speaks to star Suranne Jones and showrunner Matt Charman about making Netflix political thriller Hostage, their actor-writer partnership and why peanut butter was an integral part of the show.
For a number of years, Suranne Jones and Matt Charman have been trying to work together. The Vigil, Gentleman Jack and Doctor Foster star had been paired up with Charman, the writer behind feature film Bridge of Spies, by their shared LA management team with the ambition to build a project together.
Initially, nothing materialised. Then further conversations led them towards discussing a political thriller, with Charman interested in seeing Jones as the British prime minister.
“He offered a couple of things that weren’t quite right, and then we were just like, ‘Come on, we need to do something,’” Jones tells DQ. “I’d not done a political drama before, and one of my things is that I play an everywoman. He wanted to see an everywoman in power. We were both really interested in that dynamic.”
“I’ve wanted to work with her, genuinely, for years and years, because I just keep watching her on TV and seeing there’s no limit. There’s nothing she can’t do,” Charman says. “Every part, she reinvents herself a bit, but what she does is bring an audience with her. So a big part of the early conversation was, ‘Where can we take an audience next?’”
Jones was inspired by the idea of women and power, and Charman began questioning whether an audience would follow the star into politics “and make them really give a damn about her, the decisions she was making and the choices that were in front of her.”
“The more I explored that, the more I thought not only can I do that, but I think I can really add a level of complexity, which means we’re rooting for her but we’re not always sure she’s making the right choice,” he says. “When you’ve got that combination for an audience, that’s so juicy, because you are just hoping that the person is going to be OK.”
“I loved House of Cards, The West Wing and also the satirical, political comedies. I’m interested in the world, and I’m not shy of playing extreme female characters,” Jones continues. “When I look at what I’ve been doing, after Gentleman Jack and Vigil, and then I’d made Maryland, which was a kind of quiet drama, I felt like this was the time to do something big.”
Hostage, which debuts on Netflix tomorrow, marks the result of their collaboration – and also stands as Jones’s first series with the streamer. The five-part drama stars Jones as Abigail Dalton, the British prime minister who is welcoming French president Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy) to 10 Downing Street for a political summit. But when Dalton’s husband is kidnapped overseas and Toussaint is suddenly blackmailed, the two leaders face unimaginable choices.
Forced into a fierce rivalry that threatens both their political futures – and lives – can they work together to uncover the plot against them?
The cast also includes Corey Mylchreest, Lucian Msamati, Ashley Thomas, James Cosmo,
Martin McCann and Jehnny Beth.
Jones describes Dalton as “hopeful,” a woman brought up in a single-parent family where her father’s politics shaped her. Now a politician in her own right, she’s stepped away from some of his beliefs, leading to a battle between father and daughter.
She’s also “very green,” Jones says of her character, who walks through the famous black door of 10 Downing Street for the first time after being elected in episode one. “Then by episode five, there’s a steeliness to her. She knows she has to play things differently, and also that things have come at such a cost. That’s the big thing. We needed her to be two different people, so the rock that runs through her is hope and being a rock for the country, but we know it comes at a huge cost.”
As soon as showrunner Charman knew Jones was on board, his thoughts turned to who might be the “opposing force” to Abigail. “Suranne burns really brightly on screen, so you’ve got to meet that with someone,” he says.
That led to discussions about Delpy – “and to be honest, it slightly blew my mind, because obviously I’ve been watching her in films for years. She’s a director; she’s so accomplished, but she’d never played in this world at all. And when I started to talk about the Vivienne Toussaint role, what she felt excited by was that there’s never been a female French president.”
Then having created two women with “enormous agency” who could drive the story and react to the threats against them, Charman had to figure out a way for them to realise each of them might be the only person the other can trust, and how they could put their politics aside to help one another.
“So I kept coming back to them,” he says. “Every time I was looking at a scene, it was like, ‘What’s their version of that scene?’ Don’t cut away to other people, other rooms, other whatever. How do they decide that? How do they discuss it? How do they go in the middle of the night to talk to the head of the armed forces to work out how to get the husband back, to work out how the hell they get through it? The minute I kept coming back to them and their experience, the more fruitful it became.”
As well as starring in Hostage, Jones is also an executive producer on the series. It’s a role she has been taking on increasingly of late, and particularly through original projects developed by her own TeamAkers Productions (Maryland, Frauds). Hostage doesn’t fall in that category – Netflix produces with Binocular Productions – but the EP credit recognises the development work she did with Charman and how she had her hand in every aspect of the series, not least supporting the casting process and securing directors Isabelle Sieb (with whom she worked on Vigil) and Amy Neil.
Having previously forged close links with writers including Sally Wainwright (Gentleman Jack), Mike Bartlett (Doctor Foster) and Charlie Brooker (A Touch of Cloth), Jones describes Charman as “really collaborative,” adding: “There’s the beauty of someone who knows that none of us can go and write what he can write. So he’s confident in saying, ‘What do you think of my scripts? Give me feedback.’ And I love that, because he’ll ask anybody who’s on set. He’ll go through stuff and we’ll change stuff together, because he will then go off and work his magic.
“We talked a lot about Abigail and we shaped her together, in a way, because I needed to be in control of that as well, of who I wanted to be as a prime minister. If you’re going to play that part, you’ve got to be really confident and comfortable with the kind of woman you want to be.”
As for how to be both an actor and an EP on set, “I haven’t figured that out yet,” Jones jokes. But she does aim to lead by example. “It’s a bit like Abigail looking after her team. I’m looking after the team all the time, and there are always conversations to be had,” she says, recalling lunch breaks spent in impromptu script meetings with Charman or looking at costume pictures or sets. “So I feel like it all becomes one, but I like it. You do the pre, do the filming, then you do the post, and then you do the sales. It’s like four times as much work.”
Grounding her character in the real world was particularly important for the actor, who would have board games in the office and peanut butter – Abigail’s ‘fuel’ – in her desk drawer. But despite the show’s political themes, Jones never lost sight of the fact that Hostage is a piece of entertainment.
“Those details, to me, are really important, but at the end of the day, as long as I can ground myself in some kind of reality and I’ve done my research, it’s an entertainment show,” she says. “I’m used to working like that, where I need grounding all the time. I know when she’s not had a shower and I know when she’s not slept and all those things. But really, we want to be on the edge of our seats. There are five episodes of a bingeable Netflix show. That’s what you want.”
“Suranne is incredibly passionate about the reality of her character’s world. So we talked about a range of things. We talked about, what she’s eating, and Suranne’s like, ‘Peanut butter. She’s eating peanut butter. That’s her fuel. Everywhere she goes, there’s a jar of peanut butter and a spoon.’ And honestly, there was,” Charman remembers. They also imagined Abigail might only get four or five hours of sleep a night, and keeps a Peloton treadmill in her office but never uses it.
“We really carefully walked that through [the series], and what ends up happening when you do that is it ends up working its way into scenes in a really enjoyable way. Suranne has really clear ideas, and then you can tweak as a result of her instincts as an actor.”
As a writer from the theatre, Charman is used to working closely with actors and inviting them to “help you make it better, to help you find it, to tease out the potential in it.” Over his career, he has also become used to taking notes from actors and tailoring scenes or roles for them.
In particular, he points to working with Mark Rylance on Bridge of Spies, his 2015 espionage drama that also starred Tom Hanks. “I’ve never really met an actor before who said, ‘You can take that away. Don’t need that line. Don’t need that.’ That was about was Mark chiselling away at the role and finding the economy of a character that was largely wordless,” he says. “Mark was like, ‘I don’t think this guy says anything he doesn’t need to say.’”
The difference with Hostage is that not only is Jones an EP, but the show grew organically around her. She also helped to set the tone from the outset. “Her energy and her sense of enthusiasm when you’re on set is totally infectious, both for cast and crew,” Charman says, “so almost in an old-school Hollywood sense, she ends up being a leading woman who sets the bar, and everyone needs to react to that. I love that about her; it’s a real skill.”
Writing a series with five hours of screentime, Charman knew he had to commit to the thriller genre and the twists and turns it needed to keep an audience hooked without ever confusing them. In fact, he approaches his work as a fan in the first instance, and focuses on the feelings he wants to have himself – and offer the audience – by the time the credits roll at the end of each episode.
“You can get the plot humming, you can get the structure working, but if you end an episode slightly unsure about how to feel, it’s weird,” he says. “You get to a final ep of a show and you’ve been on a journey where you have a complete sense of something, an experience. That’s what I love more than anything.
“It was about using those five hours to work out where are the twists? Where are the turns? Where’s the journey for both the two central women? And therefore, how do we deliver at the end on this sense that Abigail Dalton’s character has truthfully gone from something very idealistic through a baptism of fire to be ultimately the prime minister she wants to be at the start of the show?”
The show was filmed in London, using some eye-catching locations in the centre of the city. And the fact the main set was just a short drive from her house meant Jones could stay at home during production. “That was brilliant. I had a really good time,” she says. “I just remember how lovely all the cast were. I have good memories of it, and everyone’s very funny. Actually, the cast are really funny, and it’s not a funny show. The cast are lovely.”
Charman now hopes that Hostage stands up as an example of a political drama from a country more used to skewering politics through satire or comedy – but says that the series stands in its own fictional world without speaking too directly to real-world politics.
“The fun of it is that you let an audience bring their own awareness of the world to the show,” he says. “You can actually be incredibly subtle about how the show connects to the real world, world leaders, politicians. The show can be very light-touch in that sense, and the fun of an audience is they see different things when they look at it. We want to exist in a fictional world, but we do want to be in conversation with the world that’s going on around us. Otherwise it would feel untethered.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Le Bureau des Légendes: In France’s covert Intelligence world, a top spy returns home after years undercover and struggles to balance personal loyalty and professional duty while facing double agents, deception and danger at every turn.
Ransom: An elite negotiator and his team resolve high-profile kidnappings and hostage standoffs worldwide, racing against time and psychological manipulation.
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tagged in: Binocular Productions, Hostage, Matt Charman, Netflix, Suranne Jones