Actor Jenna Coleman: ‘I’m ready to play someone who lets it all out’

In her 20-year acting career, Jenna Coleman has done it all: travelled through space and time in Doctor Who, ruled the British empire in Victoria, committed spousal murder in The Cry and been a serial killer’s moll in hit true-crime series The Serpent. But ask her to arrest someone in a detective drama, she says, and it all falls apart.

“I am terrible at it. It’s one of those scenes where I instantly feel like a five-year-old and become really aware of my body.”

Why the awkwardness?

“Because you’ve seen it so much on TV. It’s like: ‘Oh, you’re doing that thing.’ So then you try not to do the scene like you’ve seen it. On this show, I remember thinking: ‘Whatever you do, don’t put your hands in your pockets,’ because that is the [classic] detective stance. But then I thought: ‘Why am I adopting these strange positions to avoid falling into the trap of the formulaic TV detective?’ As an actor, you have to know [the genre] you’re in and embrace it.”

The show in question is The Jetty, a moody BBC crime drama set in an unnamed lakeside town in Lancashire, north-west England. Coleman plays Ember Manning, a young widow and bullish rookie detective trying to reopen a cold case relating to a young girl who disappeared 17 years earlier. At the same time, she becomes concerned about a distressed local teenager who is pregnant by a man in his twenties. Manning, who herself became pregnant in her teens by an older man, begins to re-evaluate her relationship with her late husband and ask difficult questions about abuse and consent.

Coleman, 38, is tucked away in the corner of a hotel restaurant in London’s Soho, scanning the menu for gluten-free snacks. She is a good-natured if wary interviewee; a mild question about the difficulties faced by working-class actors today prompts an uneasy, non-committal answer. Happier talking about her latest role, she says she was “a reluctant detective” at first, and not just because of her difficulty performing arrests. “I’ve been offered so many [detectives] where you end up being the vehicle for the story, as opposed to a real character. But I could see Ember as fully formed. It felt like the characters were living and breathing.”

It helps, she says, that the story is as much about Manning’s “personal awakening” as it is a whodunnit. She compares The Jetty to hit HBO crime dramas Mare of Easttown and Sharp Objects in terms of mood and in being led by women who have complicated personal lives and are battling misogyny.

“Ember is a stunted adult because she gave up her childhood to become a mother. And then there’s this period of reframing, which is related to her own unresolved trauma. I don’t think the writer Cat [Jones] will mind me saying that part of the story was born from her own experiences as a teenager when she and her friends were hanging around with older guys. Although nothing untoward happened, it wasn’t until she got older and looked back that she wondered: ‘Was that OK?’”

The Jetty too asks: is it acceptable for an adult man to embark on a relationship with a teenage girl? “And what’s interesting and uncomfortable,” Coleman says, “is that there isn’t necessarily a clear answer. You think you’re old at that age. But looking back at yourself, you see yourself as a child.”

Born and raised in Blackpool in a working-class family, Coleman did not go to drama school and was a teenager when she landed her first acting job in long-running TV soap Emmerdale. At 19, she found suddenly being in millions of living rooms “totally bizarre”. Moving to Leeds to film the show, Coleman got into the habit of walking with her head down to avoid being recognised. “My mum would ask me: ‘Why are you slumping so much?’ It’s funny because you have this recognition and you’re thinking: ‘But this is my first job. I’m still trying to be an actor. I don’t know how to do this yet.’”

The quick turnover of episodes made it a good training ground even if there was little room for error. One of the reasons Coleman likes doing theatre — last year she starred alongside Aidan Turner in Sam Steiner’s Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons — is that “you get a rehearsal room where you get to fuck up. And in that space between getting things wrong and finding a way through, you can learn and experiment.”

After Emmerdale — Coleman left after her character killed a policeman with a chair leg — came a short stint on the drama series Waterloo Road, then she decamped to Los Angeles for a year for pilot season. “I was auditioning for the most ludicrous parts, like stuff for 40-year-old women when I was 22.” Nonetheless, “I just loved it because I felt like I was learning”. She kept sending audition tapes to a casting agent in London who had previously passed her over. Eventually that agent signed her, leading to parts in a BBC adaptation of 1950s love-triangle drama Room at the Top, Julian Fellowes’ miniseries Titanic and Stephen Poliakoff’s Dancing on the Edge.

If Coleman thought working on a soap was intense, ­it was nothing next to her three years playing Doctor Who companion Clara Oswald, first alongside Matt Smith, later Peter Capaldi. Having not grown up with the series — it was off-air between 1989 and 2005 — she had never seen it. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I supposed to know every episode that’s ever existed?’ Plus, it was my first time doing green screen and being a lead.”

While most companions arrive at the same time as a new Doctor, Coleman was cast midway through Smith’s run. “You’re the new cog in a very well-oiled machine. And you don’t want to be the one who breaks it,” she says. While her days of attending Comic Con events are behind her, she is still regularly approached by Who fans. “I’ll always be in the club,” she says, fondly. “When you’ve been in the show, you’ve got a little slice of someone’s imagination. It’s a fairytale and that’s why it captures people.”

Since then, Coleman has not wanted for work: when sifting through scripts, she makes a point of seeking out projects that are the polar opposite of what she has just done, even though casting directors often have different ideas. The Cry was a departure after three years playing the young Queen Victoria, but then she was offered a string of murderers. “Recently I’ve done a lot of introspective simmering, so I’m ready to play someone who is more immediate, who lets it all out.”

Time and experience have not dimmed her thirst for challenges — or her fear that the work might suddenly dry up. Even after 20 years? “A hundred per cent!” she exclaims. “It’s a constant game of snakes and ladders. There are people who have won Oscars still vying to get jobs, so I don’t expect that to ever change.”

‘The Jetty’ is on BBC1 and iPlayer from July 15 at 9pm