SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Episode 3 of “The Lady,” available now on Britbox in the U.S.
Based on the way Mia McKenna-Bruce and Ed Speleers’ characters first meet in the second episode of “The Lady,” one would think the series is a rom-com.
Filming on the swanky lower level of steakhouse Smith & Wollensky on a sunny day in London last May, the two actors spent several takes making sure they got the moment just right. It’s 1998, and Jane Andrews (McKenna-Bruce) — who has just been let go from her glamorous job as a royal dresser for Duchess Sarah Ferguson (Natalie Dormer) — is waiting to meet a friend at the bar. Fitted in a little black dress and flouncy ’90s curls, Jane orders two cosmopolitans before she gets a message that her friend isn’t coming after all.
That’s when Tommy Cressman (Speleers) appears “like a knight in shining armor,” McKenna-Bruce tells Variety after she finishes shooting the scene, her black pumps replaced by bright-pink platform Crocs. Tommy saunters over to the bar when he sees Jane standing alone, offering to keep her company and take one of the “pink drinks.” Though she turns him down at first, Jane eventually gives in and the two end up bantering over a bottle of champagne. It’s the stuff of fairytales — a down-on-her-luck woman serendipitously meeting the man of her dreams. But it’s all about to go terribly awry.
As anyone living in the U.K. during the turn of the millennium likely knows, Jane murdered Tommy on Sept. 18, 2000, just two years after they first met. After a trial that became tabloid fodder due to her royal connections, she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison (and later released in 2019). But how did their relationship — one that seemingly started on such a hopeful note — get to that point? That’s precisely the question “The Lady,” a four-part drama now airing on Britbox in the U.S., seeks to answer.
Instead of focusing solely on the crime, “The Lady” traces Jane’s humble beginnings in Northeast England before she gets the chance of a lifetime to work at Buckingham Palace and mingle with high society. Though it’s made clear that Jane is not well mentally, when she meets Tommy at the end of Episode 2, the show’s creatives — including “The Crown” producers Left Bank Pictures, writer Debbie O’Malley and director Lee Haven Jones — wanted viewers to understand why the two were so drawn to each other, as well as what eventually made their relationship toxic.
“It’s drama, and drama humanizes subjects,” Haven Jones tells Variety on set in between takes. “And we want to be able to try and understand what Tommy saw in Jane and also what Jane saw in Tommy. So it’s also important that we see the joy and some kind of levity — there must have been an attraction between them or some kind of spark.”
But the responsibility of retelling this real-life story was not lost on them. Tommy’s family was consulted, Left Bank producer Florence Haddon-Cave says, and Jane was also approached via her legal team, though she “didn’t want to be involved in any way.”
“At every stage we had to be fair and honest, and things that we couldn’t possibly know, we had to find a way to address that without being dishonest,” she says. “Obviously, this is a relationship between two people, and anyone who wasn’t in that relationship can’t really know the truth of it. But we built a picture of other people’s views of this relationship — so we’ve got friends on both sides, we’ve got family, we’ve got Jane’s own words that she said in interviews. It was our way of trying to create as fair and as nuanced of a picture as possible.”
Below, McKenna-Bruce and Speleers speak more in depth about portraying Jane and Tommy, finding empathy for their characters and what they hope viewers take away from the show.
McKenna-Bruce: For me personally, I wanted to steer clear as much as possible. There’s a lot of documentaries and stuff about the story; I wanted to go as much off the scripts as possible so that I wasn’t going into it with any preconceived ideas. So I worked with our wonderful script supervisor on Jane’s background and what we knew about her, but not anything documentary-wise. [Co-star] Sean Teale gave me a book on her, which I still haven’t read, and he kept saying to me like, “Have you read the book?” And I was like, “No… I haven’t.” And it’s because I was trying not to get carried away with other people’s ideas of her.
Speleers: I was given the opportunity to speak to Tommy’s family, and I think they were consulted quite a lot. I feel very honored that I was given that space to speak with Tommy’s brother at length, and I was definitely given an insight into how they felt Tommy was. But I think it’s really important to stress that this is our own interpretation of the story, so I think that gave a little bit of freedom to try and put a character together.
McKenna-Bruce: It was something that we both spoke about in our first meeting and our first rehearsal with Lee. We really wanted to make sure we got that right; that we both believed the characters did genuinely love each other, and make sure we were showing why they’re still together despite a turbulent relationship.
Speleers: It was really important, as Mia’s saying, to try and find that lightness of touch in there and try and understand what is bringing these two people together and to find that playfulness. But what I found about working with Mia is she just allows this space where you can just trust in yourself but also have fun. And what that ends up doing is, when it has to turn heavy or it gets to a really volatile moment, you’re so free and on point with each other that you’re just there to support each other.
McKenna-Bruce: There’s nothing specific I personally do to get into that mindset. We did the work beforehand to really build these characters and know our characters, [and] you just kind of — for me anyway — exist as much as possible in those moments. When you’ve got a really great working relationship as we did with all the crew and cast — like, it was a really special experience — you’re just allowed to go to places that are emotional and vulnerable without thinking too much about what you’re doing. I’m a bit rubbish with stuff like that because I don’t do anything to like, get in. It’s just kind of hoping it works.
Speleers: But it’s sort of true. Mia is. She has a natural ability to turn it on in every which way possible, and it’s so freeing to watch and be apart of and be around.
McKenna-Bruce: One of the hardest ones was when Tommy went away on the stag do. There’s a bit at the end of that section where she’s on the phone like, “You bastard!” And then she sits on the stairs. Working with Lee in those moments, we were like, “OK, let’s just kind of see what happens.” I think I made that stuff up — shouting “you bastard,” I don’t think that was quite in the script. And the bit when I sat on the steps was literally like, “Lee, I have no energy left to be angry, I’m just so emotionally drained.” Because we had done like, a week of a lot of emotional stuff. It kind of actually worked, because Jane by that point had been through this whole spiral of finding emails and all sorts. So we ran with the sitting on the steps and actually being exhausted by it, as opposed to, I think it was written that she was screaming and shouting more. But I was like, “I haven’t got any more!”
Speleers: I think it’s those closing scenes in Jane and Tommy’s relationship, post coming back from France. There’s two or three scenes in quite quick succession that are like, you sort of have to run the emotional gauntlet as actors. But I think just the subject matter, what’s discussed is really raw, just having to explore things within yourself and each other that are just very emotive and challenging and volatile. It’s a funny thing as an actor because you weirdly enjoy doing those scenes, but when you take yourself out and look back in, you sometimes question what people have to go through in their own lives and relationships and how tragic things can be and how volatile things can be at times. And I think that’s one of the takeaways from it. And again, because of this amazing environment we had, of course it’s all safe and fine and you are just acting, but those were scenes that definitely pushed buttons in ways I wasn’t expecting.
McKenna-Bruce: Yeah. For our character of Jane, I had huge empathy for her. And I think I’d be doing my job wrong if I didn’t. It was one of the reasons I didn’t want to go too much into the documentaries and stuff about it; I wanted to work with the character that Debbie created. Because when I first read those scripts, for me she felt really familiar, like I could really resonate with her. So it was fascinating to me — where did things turn? Where was the ball dropped that it ended up the way that it did? There were so many moments I saw in our scripts where I was like, “Ah, I wish someone could have seen in that moment that she needed more help.”
Speleers: I’m incredibly grateful that I was allowed time with the family. I think the thing I enjoyed the most when speaking to Rick was hearing all the positive things about his brother. For me, the one thing I wanted to try and take from that — and I think Deb’s done an amazing job of putting that in the script — is to really understand that sort of playfulness. He had this energy, a lust for life, and I think it was really important for me to try and honor that and find a way to show that lightness.
McKenna-Bruce: The reality is we’ll never know what happens between two people behind closed doors. Only those people who were in the room will ever know that. So I think that was a great way to kind of highlight that this is a dramatization. And for all of the conversations that Jane had with any of the characters in the series, we will never know exactly what was said or what went down.
Speleers: Also just from a storytelling point of view, I think it’s more intriguing and perhaps classier. We don’t need to depict that. As much as this is our own story of events and our own interpretation, there’s so much drama and tension that’s gone into this story anyway that we don’t need to see that final moment necessarily.
McKenna-Bruce: I think a big takeaway is like, you never truly know what a person is going through. And understanding and reaching out for help and getting that help when needed is highly important.
Speleers: I actually hope that audiences will not be fully expecting what takes place. Until we had a screening for it a few months ago, I had no conception of what Episode 1 was like and the journey from Episode 1 to 3 and beyond. We go on this journey that I don’t think we expect — especially not in this genre of true crime.