Is amazing Olivia Colman the new Helen Mirren

Olivia+Colman+Iron+Lady+European+Premiere+3Zl_cwwqIFPlart Down on the South Coast, it is the end of a perfect summer. Every evening, the lowering sun turns the Dorset cliffs the colour of molten honey, before sinking behind a landscape of lush fields and church spires.

Every morning the sun ripens and rises again, beating down upon a small seaside town with a sparkling shoreline — and a dark secret.

For in the dead of a hot summer night, for reasons yet unknown, 11-year-old Danny Latimer was murdered and found at the foot of the cliffs.

Against the jolly backdrop of bucket ’n’ spade gift shops and ice-cream sellers, the horror of his death seems even more shocking.

As his parents grieve, the detectives scout for clues and the community turns in on itself, the question everyone is asking is: who is the killer in Broadchurch?

In the hit drama from ITV, Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller is played with quiet brilliance by the actress Olivia Colman.

Ellie is the simpatico local cop with insider knowledge, but she has been passed over for promotion by brash newcomer Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant).

However, the traditional cop-on-cop conflict has been turned on its head.

While Tennant, the former Doctor Who, is clearly the big marquee name hired to bring in the crowds, he is frequently outshone by Colman.

Indeed, there is barely a scene between the two of them that she does not steal.

With her no-nonsense anoraks and cross-body bags, Ellie is tough yet empathetic, kindly, irritable and so real that you feel you know her.

Whether snatching lunch with her family, dishing out holiday presents to her colleagues or confronting her abrasive boss, Colman is extraordinary at being ordinary — perhaps the hardest thing for an actress to achieve.

In the past, she has done comedy and drama: she is one of those rare actresses who can switch between the two while being tremendous in both.

She has one of those faces that is instantly familiar to TV viewers, but her ability to disappear into a role and cast makes it hard to pin down her work.

She has appeared in, among others, Peep Show and Green Wing. The 39-year-old actress also won a new fanbase as the vicar’s wife in the comedy drama Rev and — surely this is everyone’s favourite — as Hugh Bonneville’s love-struck PA in the hit BBC comedy Twenty Twelve.

Despite winning a host of movie awards for Tyrannosaur and critical acclaim for her role as Carol Thatcher, complete with a blonde wig, in The Iron Lady, her role in Broadchurch is being seen as her big breakthrough.

Some believe it might do for Olivia Colman what playing a similar type of detective in Prime Suspect did for Helen Mirren — pave the way for a Hollywood career.

Modest Olivia would probably beg to differ. She believes that part of her success as an actress is her lack of vanity: she doesn’t mind looking a frump on stage or screen.

Certainly, as windswept Ellie in a rubber mac searches for bloodstains on boats in the harbour or tries to console a bereaved mother at the end of a long police shift, she looks as glam as a wet haddock. And that is the way she likes it.

No wonder that Colman — who recently won a Best Actress Award from the Royal Television Society for her role in Accused — has been described as ‘divinely gifted’ by none other than Meryl Streep, who starred in The Iron Lady.
That’s not to say co-star Tennant is disappointing as the troubled Hardy in Broadchurch.

With all the social skills of a dropped anvil, he is a cop with a past; a man tormented by a similar murder case he failed to solve.

He also has an unspecified illness, where he blacks out and bangs his head if he runs out of pills.

Still, whatever he is going through, audiences wait quietly for the return of Ellie onscreen.

For in Broadchurch, it is Colman’s character that provides the emotional still centre; she is the voice of reason in a community racked by grief and suspicion.

She is the person everyone turns to — even as she becomes suspicious herself.

‘I hate what I am becoming,’ she said to her boss Hardy this week.

‘A good detective?’ he wondered. Hardened,’ she replied.

Four episodes into ITV’s gripping new drama and viewers are still no nearer the truth. Like Cluedo addicts, we nurture pet suspicions as we pore over the evidence.

Was it the insomniac vicar in the graveyard with a hammer? Was it the newsagent in the scout hut with a rolled-up copy of Tit-bits? Was it the dad? The dog? The scary lady in the caravan? Everyone is desperate to find out.

In the meantime, with more than seven million tuning in every Monday evening to see what happens next, Broadchurch has been a big hit with viewers. It is not hard to see why.

The gripping, slow-burn series, written by Chris Chibnall (who cut his teeth on Doctor Who, Torchwood and Law & Order UK), examines what happens to a small, tight-knit community when the murder of a child takes place in its midst.

Rather than just a straight- forward police procedural drama, Broadchurch also focuses on the shattered and bereaved family.

Once the TV appeals have been made, the cameras are turned off and the police go home, what happens behind the closed doors and shuttered windows of the bereft home?

For once, we see how the parents Mark (Andrew Buchan) and Beth (Jodie Whittaker) try to bear the unbearable.

Whittaker, in particular, is wrenchingly effective. Her pale, haunted face speaks of a mother’s pain that will never end, while her sprint along the beach towards the body of her dead son was harrowing.

She is also secretly pregnant — should we assume her husband is the father?

An emotional thriller such as this deserves a theatrical backdrop and, in this, Broadchurch dazzles.

Filmed in and around West Bay in Dorset last year, the stunning Jurassic Coast is shown at its best.

The tourist office is reporting a huge swell of interest, while local businesses advertise their premises ‘as seen in Broadchurch’ as they prepare for a bumper summer.

This is in marked contrast to their onscreen counterparts, who complain they do not want their town to be a ‘byword for murder’.

Chibnall — who insisted none of the actors knew who the killer was during filming — lived in the area for almost ten years and was always aware of its dramatic potential.

In the eight-part series, the beach, sea and cliffs are key elements in the story.

Yet what makes Broadchurch stand out from the usual TV cop dramas is the odd, unsettling atmosphere it creates and the fine acting that propels it along.

Olivia Colman is excellent at acting as a conduit for the strangeness, tensions and complex relationships that lie just under the surface of a small town.

In these neat streets, behind the doors of ordinary houses like hers, Ellie Miller must help unmask a killer who is hiding in plain sight. The question is — who?

Source:dailymail.co.uk – Is Broadchurch star Olivia Colman the new Helen Mirren?

Olivia Colman and Sherlock win at Royal Television Society awards

Olivia+Colman+Broadcasting+Press+Guild+TV+abaMHF86xeqx

Olivia Colman has been named best actress at this year’s Royal Television Society awards.

Colman beat Sheridan Smith and Anne Marie Duff to win the actress prize for her part in Accused II on BBC1.

Overall, the BBC won 18 prizes out of 28 at the event, which was held last night at Grosvenor Hotel.

Sean Bean, who was also in Accused II, won the best actor award, taking the prize over Lennie James and Oliver Lansley.

At the ceremony, BBC1’s Sherlock won the drama series category, beating Call the Midwife and Line of Duty, while its writer, Steven Moffat, won the writer section.

Good Cop, also on BBC1, took the drama serial award and The Hollow Crown, shown on BBC2, was named best single drama.

Coronation Street took the prize for best soap over EastEnders and Hollyoaks and CBBC series Wolfblood took the children’s drama prize, beating Mr Stink, shown on BBC1, and S4C’s Teulu Ty Crwn.

Other winners included Jessica Hynes, who won the comedy performance section for Twenty Twelve, beating Ruth Jones and Jack Whitehall.

However, Twenty Twelve lost out in the scripted comedy category, with Alan Partridge – Welcome to the Places of My Life winning the award. It also beat Channel 4’s Fresh Meat.

The award for best comedy writer, meanwhile, went to the writing team of The Thick of It, shown on BBC2.

Celebrity Juice, shown on ITV2, triumphed in the entertainment category, taking the prize over Britain’s Got Talent and Dynamo – Magician Impossible.

Danny Boyle was also honoured at the awards for his work on the opening ceremony of the Olympics.

The RTS Programme Awards honour excellence in “key genres of television programming”.

Source: thestage.co.uk – Olivia Colman and Sherlock win at Royal Television Society awards

Olivia Colman – I’m lucky I’m not a pin up

Satellite Ask Olivia Colman about her role as a plain-speaking woman cop in gripping new ITV drama Broadchurch and she says modestly: “I’m not a pin-up.”

The in-demand star has a string of brilliant sitcom performances to her credit plus a Bafta nomination, reports the Sunday People .

Now she is winning the nation’s affection as the likeable down-to-earth detective sergeant Ellie Miller beside former Doctor Who David Tennant.

Olivia, 39, claims her success in landing good parts in films and on TV is because she does not mind snubbing glamour to look just ordinary.

She said: “I feel fortunate that I’m not a beauty. I’m not a classic beauty. I feel it is harder for girls who are like that. There are fewer parts.

“It took me a long time to get used to it but I think, ‘If I’m allowed to play parts where I look s*** I’ll get more.

“For some reason people imagine that dramatic things happen to people who don’t look beautiful.

“So I feel fortunate that I’ve managed to get into that market and I’ve loved every part I’ve played.

“I’m not a pin-up, thankfully. I’m not suggesting I feel unconfident. I am beautiful to my husband. I am beautiful to my friends. I feel sexy and all those things with the people I love.”

Olivia appeared in the film Hot Fuzz and TV comedies including Peep Show, Rev and Green Wing.

In last year’s Twenty Twelve, a hilarious BBC show about the team preparing London for the Olympics, her performance as lovelorn assistant Sally earned her a Bafta nomination.

She also won acclaim as downtrodden Hannah in the award-winning 2011 British film Tyrannosaur.

In The Iron Lady she played Margaret Thatcher’s daughter Carol in scenes with Hollywood legend Meryl Streep, 63.

Meryl, who won a Best Actress Oscar for playing Thatcher in the 2011 film, described Olivia as “divinely ­gifted” as an actress.

Not everyone has been as quick as Meryl Streep to recognise her talent.

When the British actress was 20 she worked as a cleaner and struggled to make ends meet.

Olivia recalled: “It was really hard. There were years of no work and months of no work. It was a hard time.”

She has even told how she made the best of the bad times and enjoyed polishing lights and organising offices.

Olivia said: “I do go into things thinking, ‘Right I’m going to enjoy this.’

But I actually really loved my cleaning jobs.

I loved the job satisfaction. I’d really go to town. I’d wipe skirting boards, the top of lights…

“And I always thought if there was a secret camera they would be proud of me because I never did anything naughty. I never looked in drawers.”

Olivia credits her husband, writer Ed Sinclair, for getting her through tough times after they met at Cambridge University in the 1990s.

“My husband and I were very lucky,” she said. “We met when we had nothing and we loved each other then. So we were all right. We were 20 and he was also an actor. If you meet at that age then you are fine.

“For me it was thunderbolts straight away.”

She is undoubtedly at the top of her profession but Olivia still has the experience of failing to land parts she wanted.

And she still finds the rejection hard to handle. She said: “I still audition now. The rejection really hurt and it still does. Recently I auditioned for two jobs and I didn’t get either.

“That was a bit upsetting. I love my job and I know I am very lucky but still, if you audition and you don’t get it, it still affects you.”

Now she is revelling in the success of ITV’s Broadchurch, which has pulled in more than seven million viewers.

Olivia’s Det Sgt Miller investigates the murder of schoolboy Danny Latimer when his body is found at the foot of a cliff. The compelling eight-part drama is far more than just a whodunit.

It looks at how 11-year-old Danny’s death affects the small close-knit seaside community in the English south-western county of Dorset.

When she was getting into her character Olivia felt the emotional impact of quizzing the dead boy’s grieving parents because it made her think of her two young children.

She told the Sunday People: “I’ve got kids of my own. Performing some of the scenes was heart-wrenching.

“I wasn’t meant to cry nearly as much as I did. I couldn’t stop myself. It’s such an awful thing.

“The scenes with Jodie Whittaker and Andy Buchan were very emotional. It was impossible. I challenge anyone to look at them and not cry.

“I didn’t have to do any research. It’s all in the script.

“I know people approach it differently but I think if you believe what you are saying and the character isn’t that far off from yourself then you are going to be fine.

“I’ve read a lot of scripts and you get good at knowing which ones you want to do and this one was incredible.”

“Now I’m amazed at the viewing figures Broadchurch is getting. It’s such a beautiful script and it’s encouraging that the nation does not want to be thought of as stupid.

“They like a gripping intelligently written drama and I’m thrilled that everyone likes it.”

Olivia’s co-star David Tennant, 41, plays detective inspector Alec Hardy.

She said they struck up a close friendship during filming.

The pair would regularly find themselves laughing at the dour character David plays.

She said: “We all got on so well and enjoyed going to work even though it was a miserable subject matter. We all adored each other.Olivia+Colman+Iron+Lady+European+Premiere+3Zl_cwwqIFPlart

“David Tennant is gorgeous. He is so jolly and happy and witty.

“It was a big delight. We had a giggle being mean to each other. He is so warm and charming and having to play someone who is so socially inept was hilarious.

“We would all go to the pub and out for dinner. It was like a big family.”

Olivia was born and brought up in Norfolk, the daughter of a nurse and a chartered surveyor.

At Homerton College, Cambridge, she met future co-stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb and auditioned for the Footlights.

She spent a term doing a primary school teacher training course before deciding to switch to drama and trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

Olivia had first got the acting bug playing Miss Jean Brodie, aged 16, in a school production.

She said: “I was on stage and suddenly felt really at ease and at home. But at that age you keep it to yourself and say, ‘I want to be a nurse or a teacher.’”

Broadchurch was filmed on the cliffs and shores of Dorset and in the town of Clevedon, North Somerset.

It meant Olivia, who lives in London, spent time away from her sons Finn, seven, and Hal, five.

She said: “I miss my kids when they are not there so I make sure work isn’t far away from them. They keep me grounded.”

Source: mirror.co.uk – “I’m lucky I’m not a pin up” ITV’s Broadchurch star Olivia Colman’s own battle

Is Olivia Colman Britain’s most versatile actress?

Olivia+Colman+Iron+Lady+European+Premiere+3Zl_cwwqIFPlart

Olivia Colman has the fear – the one actors get when they don’t have another job lined up. “Maybe I’ve had a good run of it and now it’s all going to stop,” she says. Right now such a dismal outcome is highly unlikely, as Colman seems to be everywhere – as Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) visiting Bill Murray’s Franklin D Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson, as a foul-mouthed marriage counsellor in the British rom-com I Give It a Year, and as Nick Frost’s sister in the eagerly anticipated dance comedy Cuban Fury.

Also in the wings are a guest turn in the wonderful Sky Atlantic comedy This Is Jinsy and a new series of BBC2’s dog-collar sitcom Rev, while for the next eight weeks she is going to be sharing top-billing with David Tennant in the ITV whodunit Broadchurch – a sort of British The Killing about the murder of a boy from a close-knit Dorset seaside town.

“The Killing was so brilliant that it seems a bit up yourself to say this is ‘the British Killing’,” says Colman, characteristically averse to hyperbole. She plays a local police detective miffed when an abrasive outsider (David Tennant, giving good stubble) is parachuted in to lead the investigation, while an all-star cast of suspects (Andrew Buchan, Jodie Whittaker, Vicky McClure and Doctor Who’s Arthur Darvill) slowly reveal theirf secrets. Colman’s is a very personable breed of copper (Scott & Bailey are a pair of Dirty Harriets in comparison), which is hardly surprising since she’s modelled on herself. “I wanted it to be me in the police force,” she says. “I thought I could damage that by doing too much research, which is my lazy way of saying ‘I couldn’t be bothered’.”

Take that with enough salt to grit Heathrow airport, for the rise and rise of Olivia Colman is about unassuming hard work as well as talent, intelligence and (never a quality to be underestimated in her profession) likeability. Her success is certainly nothing to do with being brazen or pushy – she positively blushed with self-consciousness on our two, albeit brief, prior meetings (on the sets of Broadchurch and This Is Jinsy). Today however she’s more relaxed, perhaps because it’s her 39th birthday, and also maybe because the ice had been broken with a discussion about the attractions of her native north Norfolk.

There’s no East Anglian accent; in fact her voice reminded me of a softer version of Rising Damp’s Frances de la Tour – Miss Jones’s gentler, more diffident younger sister perhaps. And like another shy comedy actress, Hunderby’s Julia Davis, she has a dazzling smile that seems designed to deflect the inane intrusions of journalists and other idiots. “Perish the thought,” she says when I ask whether she has a Hollywood agent, and she describes herself as “not terribly thick-skinned”, when explaining why she doesn’t tweet and why she keeps “my head down” in public. What do people say when they do recognise her? “They shout Peep Show,” she says, mimicking a drunken cockney. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say in response.”

In a way these boors are right – it was Peep Show that first made Colman. In Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong’s brilliant (and brilliantly sustained) Channel 4 sitcom, she played Sophie, the endlessly forgiving girlfriend of the appalling Mark (David Mitchell). “I couldn’t do the latest series because I was doing Broadchurch,” says Colman. “But also from a story point of view I don’t think Sophie was as interesting for people to watch any more. And Dobby (played by Isy Suttie) is such a brilliant character and it’s more fun to watch Mark fuck it up with other people.”

Also, she might add, in recent years she has had to make the conscious decision to distance herself from her co-stars, David Mitchell and Robert Webb, whom she first met in Cambridge. “That was the discussion I had with my agent,” says Colman. “She said, ‘I know you love them and I know you’re probably going to cry but you need to decide what you’re going to do’. And Rob and David were heavenly about it. I’m so grateful for them – they were my first job and without them, well, I could be one of my many mates who doesn’t get much work. But it’s their show – it’s Mitchell and Webb, not Mitchell and Webb and Colman. So Lindy [King – her agent] was right and it’s all worked out.”

It has indeed, starting with Tyrannosaur, the directorial debut of actor (and Colman’s friend) Paddy Considine, with whom she had starred in Shane Meadows’ mock documentary Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee, and with whom she has just finished filming an upcoming episode of the ITV period crime drama, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Colman’s performance in Tyrannosaur, as a charity shop worker enduring hidden domestic violence and further challenged by Peter Mullan’s raging alcoholic, was a revelation, and won several awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.

“It changed everything, really,” she says. “It’s funny… I’ve always done bits of drama, but clearly nothing anyone had ever seen.” Next came her Carol Thatcher in Abi Morgan’s misjudged Margaret Thatcher biopic, The Iron Lady, being singled out in Meryl Streep’s Bafta acceptance speech for being “divinely gifted”. Colman’s research involved watching tapes of Carol in the 2005 series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. “It was such a godsend being able to watch the person you’re trying to emulate in that situation,” she says. “It was her being herself. Anyway, I thought she was amazing; if I was stuck in a forest I’d want her with me.”

Colman was born in north Norfolk in 1974, the year before Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party. She had an “absolutely heavenly” childhood moving around the county as her father, a surveyor, and mother, a nurse, renovated houses. “I had a lovely, feral, free childhood – out and then come back when you’re hungry or it gets too dark,” she says. “I feel slightly cruel that I’m not offering my children the same.” The children are her two sons, Finn, aged seven, and Hal, five, with her husband, writer Ed Sinclair – but more of them later.

Colman didn’t discover acting until she went as a sixth-former to the independent girls’ school Gresham’s in Holt, but the idea that you could make a living from this new-found passion never crossed her mind. “I’m the only weirdo in the family who’s gone into it,” she says. f “My older brother, who was in the Army, now owns his own building company. My half-sister was a nurse and is now a psychotherapist.”

Instead she went to teacher-training college in Cambridge, but left after a year (“I was rubbish… a generation of children have had a very lucky break”), but not before that fateful meeting with Mitchell and Webb when she attended an audition for the Cambridge University Footlights under the mistaken impression that it was a straight drama society. “I’d never heard of Footlights,” she says. “I think Rob and David probably thought I was quite game because they said, ‘Find something in here and try and sell it to us’, and I picked up a cigarette butt and was trying to sell it to them as nutritious and then ate it. Instead of laughing they just looked slightly shocked.”

Another long-standing relationship that began at Footlights was with her future husband, Ed. “We did a play together,” she recalls. “He did a play because he fancied the director and I did it because she was a friend of mine, and then I turned up and said (in a breathy voice now very much like Miss Jones in Rising Damp), ‘Oh, he’s amaaazing…’. And luckily the director… she wasn’t that interested in him… thankfully… so, erm, then he got into drama school [the Bristol Old Vic] when he graduated and I was heart-broken that it would all end there. So I said I’d come along and I could support him.”

A determined suitor, I suggest. “Yuh,” agrees Colman, who thought that drama school looked like so much fun that she herself applied. She and Ed got married seven years later (“He’s a steady chap… he likes to be sure”), although Ed has given up acting for writing. “I’ve got so many friends who just aren’t working, it’s puzzling; I’ve no idea why,” says Colman. “And for Ed the work just stopped. But actually for him I think he was quite relieved because he always wanted to write and he’s brilliant at it. I was lucky enough to pay the rent for both of us. It’s not fair if I’m living the dream and he’s not.”

Wow. Would she consider marrying me? “Ha. Well, I’m hoping the novel will sell for a lot of money,” she says. “I’ve only read the first four chapters. It would be awful if it came out and it was shit.”

I ask whether her sons have seen her in anything, desperately racking my brain for any child-friendly fare that Colman might have appeared in. “I did Doctor Who, thinking there’s something they can watch,” she says. “I turned it on to be horrified and tried to turn it off again because there was mummy with a big scary mouth [in the episode, The Eleventh Hour, Colman’s character sports piranha-like fangs]. I didn’t really think it through.”

But back to drama school in Bristol. After graduating, Colman set about looking for straight roles, but always seemed to gravitate towards comedy. It’s at this point, with faultless comic timing, that her mobile phone goes off, her ringtone a honking clown’s horn. Her screen-saver is a picture of her dog, a ‘Jackapoo’ (a Jack Russell/poodle cross) called Alf. “They’re not supposed to moult,” she says. “But I keep finding hairs.”

There’s something canine about Colman’s nickname, Colly – she had to change her birth name, Sarah, to Olivia, because of an Equity clash with another Sarah Colman. “One of my best friends at university was called Olivia and I always loved her name,” she says. “I was never Sarah; I was always called by my nickname, Colly, so it didn’t seem so awful not to be called Sarah.”

Colman’s knack for comedy saw her progress through such shows as People Like Us, The Office, Black Books, Green Wing, as well as the aforementioned Mitchell and Webb collaborations. But it’s only with her two most recent sitcoms, Rev, in which plays the wife of Tom Hollander’s inner-city vicar, and Twenty Twelve, the Olympics comedy in which her PA shyly won the heart of boss Hugh Bonneville, that she has parts large enough to equal Peep Show’s magnificence. And Rev has won her a whole new fan-base.

“We went to try and do some filming at Greenbelt Christian rock festival,” she says, “but we couldn’t use the footage because everybody went ‘Aaah!’… It was like being in the Stones. There was a vicar shaking Tom’s hand and saying, ‘Thank you so much… I’m proud of my dog collar – you’ve shown us as fallible and human and trying our best’.”

Rev returns at the end of the year, although Bad Sugar, the telenovela pastiche co-starring Julia Davis and Sharon Horgan, surprisingly won’t be progressing beyond the pilot stage that was shown on Channel 4 last year. “It’s been decommissioned,” she says. ” I think there might be some new blood and it’s not their baby… I don’t know… politics.”

And then our time is up and it’s off to have her photograph taken – and I notice that this seemingly self-effacing actor, casually attired in black leggings and Ugg boots, is carrying a plastic bag with a pair of ultra-high heels, in the fashionable dominatrix style, and a birthday present to herself. It leaves me with a nagging feeling that there might be another Olivia Colman that I haven’t yet begun to meet.

Source: independent.co.uk – Is Olivia Colman Britian’s most versatile actress?

Olivia Colman: Scenes with dead child’s parents left me in tears

Olivia+Colman+Iron+Lady+European+Premiere+3Zl_cwwqIFPlart Filming heart-wrenching scenes for upcoming ITV drama Broadchurch left the actress, who is better known for her comedy roles, in floods.

The compelling eight-parter, in which Olivia plays DS Ellie Miller, opens with the grim discovery of schoolboy Danny Latimer’s body at the foot of a cliff.

She was moved to tears during the scenes when DS Miller quizzes the dead boy’s grief-stricken parents.

Olivia said: “I found it really hard to do the emotional scenes with Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan who play Danny’s parents.

“Because they are such beautiful actors, I had a hard time keeping it together.

“My character wasn’t supposed to cry half as much as she ended up doing but I couldn’t stop myself. It was so sad.”

Olivia is best known for appearing in TV comedies including Peep Show, Rev, Twenty Twelve and Green Wing. But it wasn’t just the serious subject matter of Broadchurch that wiped the smile off her face.

The mum-of-two found it hard being away from her family while filming on location in Dorset. She wasn’t the only one. Co-star David Tennant, who plays DI Alec Hardy, also found it tough going.

They battled their homesickness together by watching videos of their kids.

Olivia said: “The worst thing was being away from home and my family for so long. I don’t think I will ever be away for that long again.

“Stupidly, when I took the job, I didn’t realise it was all going to be filmed away from London. I thought we’d pop off and do the cliff scenes in the West Country but do all the internal stuff in London.

“So it came as a bit of a shock. But David and I got on really well and he feels the same as me. So on Friday nights, after filming finished, we’d leg it to get into the car and head home to our families.

“He totally understands and we’d be looking at videos of our kids on our phones to keep ourselves buoyant.”

Under the glare of the media spotlight, the grim case is investigated by local copper DS Miller and newcomer DI Hardy.

Yet Broadchurch, which begins on March 4, is far more than just a whodunit. It looks at how 11-year-old Danny’s death affects the small, close-knit seaside community.

Former Doctor Who star David revealed how the role also gave him an agonising insight into the lives of grieving parents.

He said: “As actors, our job is to always empathise and think oneself into the emotional situation, whatever that may be.

“This script has great humanity and the writer, Chris Chibnall, shows immense understanding of the human condition in all the different characters and the way the death impacts on the community.

“I think it will have emotional empathy, which is what pulls the audience in whatever it is — whether it’s a murder mystery or something set in the future on Mars. It’s the range of characters and their responses to this horribly heightened situation that make Broadchurch so compelling.”

The drama, which also stars Birds Of A Feather’s Pauline Quirke, has plenty of twists and turns — for both viewers and the cast who were kept in the dark as to the outcome.

David explained: “I had two scripts to look at and knew that other scripts would be appearing throughout the process. But we wouldn’t get final scripts until months into the shoot. It was a gamble.

“But the fact that I read it from cover to cover in one pass and was left at the end of the first episode desperately wanting to know what happens next was telling.

“That initial response is always worth noting. If it grabs you and you want to know more, and if you’re intrigued by the characters in that first moment, that’s always something to be pursued.”

He added: “When you’re playing those initial interviews with characters and you genuinely don’t know what the truth is, you can’t load those scenes with ‘actorly’ tricks.

“You have to play it for what it is, which can only make it more real. You can be as exasperated about the mystery of the characters as the audience will be.

“It’s great to be part of something where all the characters have powerful stories to tell. There’s the whodunit aspect but there are other stories going on and such wonderful people portraying those parts.

“It’s great to be able to see those characters and worlds develop.”

Source: thesun.co.uk – Olivia Colman scenes with dead childs parents left me in tears

Colman: Broadchurch so emotional

142384248GALL Olivia Colman has confessed she had to stop herself bursting into tears on the set of new crime drama Broadchurch, because the story is so sad.

The Peep Show star plays Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller in the ITV drama, who is investigating the murder of a boy found on a beach, and the actress confessed she found Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan’s performances as the bereaved parents overpowering.

Olivia said: “They were amazing, but I couldn’t look at them without sobbing.”

She added: “It’s quite upsetting. But it was lovely. I worked with David Tennant, who is the nicest man in the world, so that was a joy working with somebody so lovely.”

The drama was filmed on the Dorset coast, and Olivia revealed she had been hoping to treat her family to a seaside holiday on her days off, but the terrible British weather got in the way.

She said: “I was going to book a caravan for my kids to come and everything and then it p***ed it down, so we didn’t.”

Source: tv.uk.msn.com – Colman: Boardchurch so emotional