Everything you need to know about Sky's new historical drama Jamestown

This is a big moment for Sophie Rundle. Although she’s been a constant presence in Peaky Blinders, playing Ada Shelby since the first episode in 2013 (and currently filming series four), her character has always been rather overshadowed by the looming presence of her gangster brothers.

But in Jamestown, Rundle’s story is right up front. She plays Alice, one of the “maids to make wives” who sailed around 3,700 miles across the Atlantic in order to marry a stranger.

Are there any similarities between Peaky Blinders’s Ada and 17th-century Alice? “They look the same!” jokes Rundle. “They come from totally opposite sides of life, but both women have guts. There’s a fight in them. They’re both strong and determined, and not pushovers.

“In the first episode,” explains the 29-year-old, originally from Bournemouth in Dorset, “Alice is raped by her Henry, her husband-to-be. I’ve filmed a few scenes like this, but it never gets any easier. As much as you rationally understand it’s not real, your body goes through something. But Max [Beesley, who plays Henry] is a really lovely man and he was such a gent about it. You have to be conscious of what you’re doing so that you tell the story properly.

“That’s the funny thing about this job. Some days you turn up, do a bit of speaking and go home. But there are other days when you really earn your money.”

There were further challenges in filming Jamestown. “We shot it in Hungary, an hour’s drive outside Budapest, over about five months. When we first arrived it was quite cold, but over the course of filming it became swelteringly hot — up in the 30s. At one point the temperature got so ridiculously high that we had to change the shooting hours because we just couldn’t work in the heat. All the girls had to wear long skirts and corsets… I sweated in places I didn’t know I could sweat!”

This article was originally published in May 2017