Emma Thompson: The spy thrillers I read as a teenager told me women should fall in love and get killed

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

There’s something a bit Jane Austen about Mick Herron...

Before the admirable Jane Austen Societies on both sides of the pond club together and take out a hit on me (they tend to the purist), let me explain. Like Austen, he doesn’t suffer fools, can skewer their folly with the flick of an adjective but also deeply enjoys them. He will keep coming back to them, keep giving them more to do. His world is as darkly witty and as drily unsentimental as hers.

His monsters, like hers, are all too human. He confines himself to very specific social territory. If Austen described herself as working on two inches of ivory, Herron works on two inches of knackered linoleum: people trying to be as decent or as contemptuous as they can within sadly beaten-down or absurdly over-blown institutions. His streets are paved with gum.

Neither he nor Austen ever gets “above themselves” either in style or content, which is how they would probably both put it. They are both incorruptibly humble. You can argue with me, but I fell in love with Herron quite as deeply as Austen when I first read her.

I found Down Cemetery Road in 2016

It was under the “staff recommends” in my local bookshop and I read most of the book standing in the shop, sniggering and snorting to myself.

I was thinking as I read – much in the way of those oft-repeated scenes in thrillers when someone (generally a man) does something unexpectedly violent in a brilliant way and someone else (generally a man but sometimes women are allowed to say it, too) says: “Who IS this guy?”

Which segues uncannily into my next best thrill – women get to do stuff and say stuff. His books pass the Bechdel test (they have at least two women characters who talk to each other about something other than men) with lots of room to spare, you get the feeling he knows what we are capable of, and there were precious few thriller or spy writers doing that while I was growing up.

I read and re-read all of Alistair MacLean, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, John le Carré and Arthur Conan Doyle while a teenager, so it’s astonishing that I grew up into someone who believed in female power. By the laws of probability, I should still be looking for parts that require me to seduce and get killed, fall in love and get killed, be naked and already dead or manage a cigarette holder without burning myself.

But I loved the thriller form – the darkness, the drives, the addictions, the hidden nastinesses. I was hooked from very early on.

Herron’s work provides all of this but with a vital and unusual added ingredient – he’s extremely funny. Like Austen – he makes me laugh out loud. How can a thriller set in this kind of world be so funny? The thriller as comedy? But it’s not as simple as that. He just – again, like Austen – knows this world and its human elements to be absurd, often surreally so. Self-interest, self-absorption, pompous humbug, patriarchal idiocy, mind-numbing entitlement he presents with gleeful brio. His heroes and heroines are highly unlikely.

And I am equally unlikely as a private investigator

Quite apart from my historical devotion to Herron, that’s the reason I said yes immediately to playing Zoë Boehm, a super-bright, cynical, damaged Exocet of a woman who, for some reason in her distant past, decided she didn’t have to be a good girl. She didn’t have to be polite and assuage her way through life, apologising for her existence and trying not to take up too much space.

She’s more likely to have a decent cup of char than a dirty martini (which she would consider an overpriced beverage) and to use her laptop as a weapon because why carry a gun, it’s only going to get you into even more trouble. You’re not going to find her hanging off a plane, put it that way.

She’ll use her wits as her guarantee of survival, not that she’d ever put it like that, nor that she’d ever expect to survive or to mind much if she doesn’t.

But she’s good at taking necessary risks. She’s rude, straight-talking, and not good at general conversation, uninterested in people’s private lives, highly moral while presenting as somewhat amoral, and fascinatingly resistant to affection.

Zoë was intriguing to create

I was helped a lot by our wildly creative costume designer Annie Symons. Annie looks like an eccentric Classics teacher who’s had an affair with Martin Amis. She’s got edge. She turned up one day and threw a three-quarter-length black leather jacket at me – it was a bit battered and lined with old red silk.

“Found this in a bin-sale in Camden Town,” she said. Of course she did. I suddenly realised that Zoë might have gone to school in that gnarly part of London – full of addicts and proper, red-faced, steaming tramps and men who exposed themselves at the girls’ school gates. I knew that world, that was where I grew up – the jacket went on and was so right. All I needed was a pair of knock-off Doc Martens and I was back there – stomping about Camden when the market was a hole in the ground, people sold vinyl from ragged stalls and everything was made of cheesecloth.

Then my mate Naomi Donne, make-up and hair guru extraordinaire, came over and said, “How do you want her to look?” I said, “Like she doesn’t care about her hair.”

Naomi sat me on a chair in my back garden and jabbed at my head with some scissors for a bit. It was a nail-biting experience. It’s like having your hair cut by Zorro. Then, as is her wont, she stepped away and chucked the scissors onto the lawn. “It’s not what you’d call a haircut,” she said, “but it says something.”

It says that Zoë probably cuts her own hair in the back garden (she doesn’t have a garden by the way) but it also says that she’s artistic without knowing it. That was all I needed.

Plus a bit of smudged old mascara from the night before – this is not a woman who bothers with skincare.

Morwenna Banks’s wonderful adaptation gave me a lot more action than I had anticipated

Wen and I go back a long way and actually were both writing sketch comedy in our 20s, when we first met. When I say a lot more action, what I mean is a lot more than – occasionally, on the eight-month shoot – was entirely welcome. I realised quite early on that starting a career in this action form at the age of 66 was in fact reckless and possibly even stupid.

I also realised, as I was being dragged by the ankles out of rat-infested tunnels, running on wet sand past exploding bombs that aren’t real but sort of do explode (it took me weeks to get the sand out of my ears), walking in and out of the Atlantic fully clothed in February and spending eight hours on a fishing boat in rough seas pretending to vomit while everyone else is actually vomiting, that this was where the resemblance to Austen abruptly ceased.

But my luck was in – I had the doughtiest of companions in Ruth Wilson, a woman of mickle might who will happily do anything dangerous without demur. There were nights when we would meet over a stiff drink and, looking over the rim of our glasses into each other’s bloodshot peepers, say, “What was THAT?”

We barrelled up and down the country with abandon, running, hiding, kicking and screaming our way through the story, wondering sometimes how we’d get through it but knowing all the while we would, because we had each other. But we were permanently astonished by the level of our exhaustion. It was a great comfort to me that Ruth also got tired because she is a good 20 years younger. But she also had more to do.

I mean, I had prepared myself as far as possible – I trained more than usual, for instance, and tried to eat less pie. I lifted weights and did my squats and wore one of those watches that measures your heart rate and is constantly disappointed in you.

I practised feeling pessimistic about human nature and only smiling when I felt like it, which was hard. I said no to a lot of things I felt I really ought to do, which was less hard.

Zoë was a good influence in many ways.

I’ve a penchant for trying to make everything better all the time and she would jeer at me for it. I ingested as much of her cynicism as I could manage and realised that if you don’t expect too much from life/humans/pie, you can often be pleasantly surprised.

She’s a true Stoic though. Absolutely happy with a decent cheese sandwich and a bag of Wotsits as long as somewhere in the future there’s the odd glass of single malt. And as for sex – well, she can take it or leave it.

One of the greatest things about doing a long-form telly is the wonderful cast of actors

They come in and out of the story, weaving their own inimitable flavours into it and I was very lucky because Zoë’s sometime-squeeze, a copper called Bob Poland, is played by a cracking Scottish actor called Steven Cree. Who, on our first morning, cheerily stripped off down to just a strange little nylon bag over his genitals (we both decided this made them look weird and sinister) to do a post-shag scene where Zoë makes a chilling discovery. Imagine the craic.

Other casting joys included Fehinti Balogun, who plays my nemesis, a frightening psychotic who wants me as dead as his soul. Oh, how we laughed. No, seriously. We laughed all the time – we would fight to the death in a blown-up church and then go back and Fehinti would cook an incredible Caribbean meal for me and whoever else was hungry. These are the true joys of filming on location.

Then there are those – the locations

We had about a million different ones. My favourite was in Cornwall – a place called Polperro. Those of you who already know it will be emitting those groans of pleasure that the perfection of the place inspires. It has the best pub pretty much in the world. The Blue Peter – which serves wonderful chips and seafood and has a great real ale called Tribute.

I am quite strict with myself when shooting and try not to drink, but by the end of our two weeks there I was nipping into the Blue for a cheeky half of Trib in between takes. Maybe that’s why, in the scenes we shot there, Zoë seems that teeny bit more cheerful.

I’ll leave you with the last diary entry I made

Monday 3 February 2025: My final day. Started this dang thing on 10 June 2024. That’s mad. In London at King’s Cross, we ended the day on my last exit which was kind of weird. Mick H and his wonderful partner Jo were with us. Walking through the back of shot arm-in-arm and being delightfully sheepish about it. I feel grief and relief in equal measure.

Our core crew are – miraculously – still alive and we clutched each other and expressed long-held affections, which was warming on a chilly platform in February.

I have finished but feel like I haven’t or can’t or shouldn’t. Isn’t that Stockholm syndrome or something?

My two saving graces, Fay (de Bremaeker hair and make-up) and Viv (Irish, PA) give me a hug at the end of the day. “Come on,” I say, “let’s paint this town red! It’s the end of eight months! We’re still here! It’s time to celebrate! Let’s break out!”

In the end we share a couple of bags of Quavers and a negroni from a tin.

“I hope people watch this bloody thing,” says Viv.

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