Wild Cherry creator and star Nicôle Lecky reveals real-life inspiration behind BBC coming-of-age drama

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

The seed for Wild Cherry was planted for writer Nicôle Lecky one summer night in Surrey in 2022. “I was driving past a high-end, Home Counties gated community and remember thinking, ‘Who are these people? I didn’t know anyone who lived in one of those mansions – and I just wanted to get in.”

So she did just that. “I wormed my way into the golf club and people-watched."

This is how Lecky builds the worlds in which she tells her stories. “It’s about creating the production design of something as much as it is the people. You just want to be up close and absorb it.”

As for this story, Wild Cherry is about how complex and consuming mother-daughter relationships can be. It focuses on gated community residents and best friends, Lorna (Carmen Ejogo) a self-made businesswoman and Juliet (Eve Best), who was born into wealth.

Naturally, their daughters, Grace (Imogen Faires) and Allegra (Amelia May) are also best friends and all feel comfortably at home in their Instagrammable world where residents appear to want for nothing. That is until an incident at the girls’ exclusive private school brings Lorna and Juliet into conflict, and each goes to extreme lengths to protect their daughter – and their own standing in the community.

With its glamorous setting and mix of adult and teen drama, Wild Cherry recalls the likes of Big Little Lies and Gossip Girl. And like those shows, it’s not just about secrets and glamour – it’s an examination of wealth and class. "Having money doesn’t necessarily make you happier," says Lecky. "You might be able to deal with your problems differently, but those same problems still exist – whether you’re in a loveless marriage or struggling with your daughter."

It’s a world far removed from her own. The 35-year-old actor, writer and singer grew up in Statford, east London, the daughter of an electrician father and a mental-health nurse mother, who passed away when Lecky was 19. Her love of storytelling and performance has been there for as long as she can remember. “I wrote a lot as a child, and I’d always danced and sang – every summer I’d do two weeks of dance or singing. No one in my family performed, so it really came from me. But my dad was a DJ before he was an electrician, so music’s always been big for him.”

Her love of music remains central to her creative process. “Once I start writing something, I usually get one or two songs that are like, ‘this is the show in my head,’” she explains, adding that for Wild Cherry the songs were Diamonds and Rust by Joan Baez and Runo Plum’s slow dance. “I play them on repeat because it keeps me in rhythm. It becomes like white noise and I’m in a groove. The next day I put the same song on and I’m straight back in that world.”

Like Mood – a series on which Lecky was executive producer and writer, as well as being involved in creating the music and starring as aspiring rapper Sasha, who is pulled into the seductive world of social media influencing and, eventually, sex work – Wild Cherry also explores the dark side of smartphones and apps. “I found out about these ghost apps that look like calculators,” Lecky explains. “But when you click them, they’re actually secret message or photo-sharing apps. I thought that was super weird. Who are they aimed at? It just seemed very sneaky and unsettling.”

She’d also read about teenagers sharing explicit images without grasping the legal and emotional fallout. “I’m always interested in whether these girls feel empowered by these apps, or if they can ever really be in control in this world as women.” Lecky’s fascination with women inspires much of her work. “I just love women. We are great. I think we’re really complex creatures in the best way.”

Following Netflix’s Adolescence, which examined the ways boys can be groomed online, does she see Wild Cherry as an opportunity to explore the other side of the same coin and perhaps impart some wisdom about how girls are conditioned to objectify themselves and the devastating consequences that can follow?

“I do feel protective of young women online because I see the pressure I might feel sometimes looking at images on there. But it’s not just social media, it’s the culture around teenage girls and boys and whether they feel they can speak up – and to whom.”

Lecky, in fact, appears in Wild Cherry as Gigi, a life coach and the community’s resident American, who narrates the series.

“I trained as an actor [her CV includes roles in Sky Atlantic’s Sweetpea, BBC stalwart Death in Paradise and the George Clooney film Jay Kelly] but while reading scripts I thought, ‘I could probably do this’. That’s where Superhoe [her one-woman theatre show that begat Mood] came from. There were stories I just wasn’t seeing.”

Writing, she says, is liberating. “It gives you a level of choice, which is particularly hard for actors. You can feel like you’re in God’s waiting room for a long time, waiting for the phone to ring.” For Lecky, the waiting is definitely over.

Wild Cherry premieres on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Friday 15th November.

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