After the Flood's Lorraine Ashbourne talks Sherwood twist, Riot Women season 2 and living at home with her adult children

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

As an interview icebreaker, I wish Lorraine Ashbourne a happy birthday for the previous day. She frowns and peers into her computer screen at her home in north London. I panic – was it a faux pas to mention her age?

“Fake news!” she declares, before bursting into laughter. “I’ve had quite a few birthday messages, but I’m an Aries. I’m not 65 until April.” As it turns out, Ashbourne is perfectly happy to be hitting her mid-60s. She is, after all, in her prime – in the past 18 months or so she has been in four huge TV shows.

In After the Flood, the ITV murder-mystery set against a backdrop of environmental breakdown, she plays a widowed mother with a can-do attitude. She stunned us all in the second series of Sherwood with the big reveal that her character Daphne Sparrow was a former covert spy cop; she didn’t tell a soul about the twist and relished keeping the secret.

“It was delightful! The hard part was the intensity of the role, playing a character trapped with a past she can’t escape. But I never take my work home; I’m very in the moment, very practical.”

Across two series of Alma’s Not Normal, Ashbourne played a grandmother in leopard print for whom we care so deeply that her diagnosis of lung cancer was utterly heartbreaking. In true Ashbourne style, she ended last year with a bang as Jess in Sally Wainwright’s smash-hit BBC series Riot Women, playing the drums in the eponymous punk band of menopausal women.

All of which suggests that there’s been a shift in terms of casting older women in interesting parts. Just over a decade ago, Meryl Streep revealed that she had been offered three roles as a witch in the year she turned 40.

“My mid-life years have been very kind to me, and I’ve grown into myself,” says Ashbourne. “I agree that there’s been some kind of shift, with writers realising there is value in older people. We are interesting. We are fabulous. We are brilliant. I’ve been saying for years that older people have more to say, more to offer.

“I’ve often watched a TV programme and thought it’d be more interesting if it was played by an older woman. Sometimes I get disheartened when I see someone young and sexy in something, because it’s just not that interesting. Nothing against beautiful young people!”

As Ashbourne also acknowledges, she is “dead lucky” – not every female actor her age can co-star in four killer series in just over a year. Then again, not many have her prodigious talent, her ability to channel emotional reality in all her roles, to slip from pathos to comedy to fury so easily.

Sally Wainwright, who was a writer on Kay Mellor’s Playing the Field in the late 90s, recalls writing for Ashbourne’s character, Geraldine, but didn’t properly meet her until Riot Women. “I knew I’d get a fabulous performance from Lorraine – incisive, witty, down to earth. There’s a deep truth in what she does. As you say, she can turn on a sixpence, from being funny to ‘Oh my God, I’ve just had my heart broken’.”

Wainwright reveals that when they were filming Riot Women in Hebden Bridge, Ashbourne stayed in Wainwright’s Yorkshire home with the writer’s drum kit. Due to work commitments, Ashbourne came on board late and only had three weeks to learn the drums – as opposed to the other actors in the band, who had five months to learn their respective instruments – and still managed to pull it off.

“My neighbour, who is very ethical and environmental, was impressed with Lorraine,” adds Wainwright. “She didn’t have to remind her to recycle, among other things. Lorraine cares deeply about everyone and everything.”

Although Ashbourne enjoys her long-running role as the Featherington family’s housekeeper Mrs Varley in Bridgerton – after the interview she is dashing off to be fitted for a dress for the Paris premiere of the new series – she relishes “any opportunity to show women making decisions and being in control.”

In the second series of After the Flood, which concludes this week, her character Molly Marshall has become a councillor for Waterside, intent on raising awareness about moorland fires threatening further environmental catastrophe to the fictional Yorkshire town.

“Climate change is at the heart of the story, which I really like. [Writer] Mick Ford finds entertaining ways of showing us just how desperate things are. The world needs people like Molly, who are fighting for change. She’s feisty and I feel powerful in a similar way. I don’t care what people think any more.”

She also loves the relationship Molly has with her daughter Jo [Sophie Rundle], a detective, if only because you “never quite know who the parent is”. Ashbourne herself knows a thing or two about parenting. She met her future husband Andy Serkis in 1989 after she’d been to drama school in her native Manchester and they were in a play together at the Royal Exchange.

They have three grown-up children, all of whom are actors and go by the surname Ashbourne Serkis: Ruby, 28, will appear in the Peaky Blinders film The Immortal Man later this year; Sonny, 26, was in Masters of the Air; Louis, 21, was a “cute young hobbit” in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at the age of eight and was most recently in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

All three kids live at home, alongside Ashbourne’s parents. “Bizarrely, as I get older, I’m taking on more. But it’s exciting, it’s thrilling. I just wish there were more hours in the day.”

I say I can’t imagine what it’s like having five actors in the house. “It’s chaos! The kids come in at different times. I’m thinking, ‘I’m menopausal, I need more sleep, I’m off to bed,’ but then one of the kids will come in at 10.30pm and I’m like, ‘Hi, sweetheart, how was your day?’ I’ll try to go up again and another kid will come in with a friend who I haven’t seen for ages… It’s 1am before I’m brushing my teeth and then I’m anxious I won’t sleep because it’s so late.”

Did she grow up in a chaotic household? “Not at all! My dad was a plumber who was home by teatime. I feel pulled in lots of different directions as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife, but I’m dead happy – I feel very blessed.” It’s quite something to stay with the same bloke for nearly 40 years, especially when acting requires so much time away from home. “It’s true! But we’re still together and I don’t mind him.

“Maybe there’s a bit of me that thrives in the chaos. The house is always a mess. My husband is about to go to New Zealand for a year [to film Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum] and all I can think of is how much I’ll get done while he’s away!”

When the kids were younger, the family lived in New Zealand, while Serkis was shooting earlier films in the franchise. “My parents were brilliant at looking after the kids, but I’ve never said no to a job; Andy and I have dragged our kids everywhere with us. We’ve had them on set as babies and put them in school for nine months in New Zealand. Taking off for a year could’ve been a terrible thing for my career, but I just picked up where I left off. I took a risk, trusted my instinct and it all worked out OK. The kids have fantastic memories of being there.”

Ashbourne will take the grown-up kids to see Serkis at some point this year, and then she’ll take her drum kit out of the basement and start practising again ahead of the second series of Riot Women. Was she surprised by the success of the first series?

“It caused a mini revolution! People come up to me on the street, saying it hurt them to watch it, but that it really helped.” As a way of talking more openly about the menopause, ageing, female friendship, motherhood? “All of that, yes. Sally is really quite hard on the opposite sex, which might have been hard to take. At one point I did worry that it might be unpalatable, but it’s not at all; men absolutely love it.”

She is, she says, fascinated with writers. “I can’t write – I tried but couldn’t do it to save my life. Sally fascinates me; her understanding of human nature, of who we are, of men and women, is extraordinary. It’s why her work is such a success, it’s so relatable. I don’t often watch the stuff I’m in – I get very defensive with my family if anyone says anything [negative] – but I watched all of Riot Women with my dad and he loved it. Everyone is, I think, screaming for the second series.”

Ashbourne is, in a way, a director’s actor. When she auditioned for the acclaimed 1988 Terence Davies film Distant Voices, Still Lives, she was fresh out of drama school, and it was her first screen job. Davies auditioned her himself, “got very emotional” and gave her the role on the spot. Perhaps, then, it makes sense for Wainwright to have the last word. “Directing Lorraine on Riot Women was pretty breathtaking. She always surprises you; you get what you think you’re going to get plus a ton more. She’s utterly unique.”

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After the Flood is available to watch now on ITVX.

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