Suranne Jones On The “Magical” Experience Of Making ‘Gentleman Jack’ With Sally Wainwright

While Suranne Jones has been well-known and beloved by TV fans in her native UK for the better part of two decades, it seems somewhat poetic that America’s finally getting to know and adore her in what might be her best work yet. As the star of HBO’s Gentleman Jack, which follows Jones as the 19th-century landowner and prolific lesbian diarist Anne Lister, she brings one of history’s most fascinating and rich figures to life in vivid and brilliantly authentic detail in a performance guaranteed to be remembered for a long time to come. (Especially now that Gentleman Jack Season 2 has been greenlit.)

Decider had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with Jones about her portrayal of Lister, her experience filming at Lister’s former home at Shibden Hall in Halifax, West Yorkshire, as well as how she fell more in love with the quirky character she played the more she got to know her.

DECIDER: Sally Wainwright mentioned that you had quite a lot of time to rehearse before beginning filming. How did having the luxury of so much preparation inform what you were able to bring to the role? 

SURANNE JONES: I think with TV and film projects, more time should be given to the writer, director, and actor before they get on set because to be able to get feedback directly from the writer and have a real dialogue like I could with Gentleman Jack was just priceless. Sally had been working on this for 20 years, so she had all this experience she introduced me to our historian, Anne Choma, who wrote the book that goes alongside the show, who knew everything about Anne Lister.

Having that prep meant that Sally could see me in situ, stomping the grounds of Shibden Hall and the whole of Anne Lister’s properties and eventually where she sunk the coal pit. This was wonderful for me because I got a real sense of where she had to walk, the amount of time she spent walking from place to place, and you don’t get that scale from just talking to somebody—you have to go out and put that work in. Then there was the work we did with Tom Pye, our director of costume, and it was just thrilling.

You also got to film in the real Shibden Hall, where Anne Lister lived and worked. That must have added a whole other element to your ability to get in character.

I think if it had been anybody other than Sally behind the show, we wouldn’t have been allowed to film in Shibden Hall, but the Yorkshire people and the people of Halifax love Sally so much and what she brought to Halifax, the work that she’d created, the tourism, the love for her scripts, that they said yes. It was just a real privilege to be there every day, just stomping through the grounds.

I have a 3-year-old who was able to come and visit me because Shibden is a real family place now. It has a boating lake and cafe and a wonderful play park, so it really felt like home. Plus, to be able to read some of the excerpts from the diary that were just being decoded as we were filming was fantastic. I’d get an email of a bit more information that Anne Choma had just transcribed herself, and then to be sat in the actual living room that she’s talking about writing a letter in one of these excerpts… it was just so magical.

Anne Lister herself really seemed to have a deep love for Shibden, despite her sort of self-deprecating descriptions of the place.

It’s a character in itself, Shibden Hall, and I think that it’s really captured on screen the way that she loves it. She’s very snobby about it but you know she’d never sell it because she absolutely loves the people there, and I don’t think we should ever get her wrong about. She calls it “shabby little Shibden,” she bosses her staff around, but there’s a deep love that I think you see as you go on in the episodes. We had such a wonderful summer there, picnicking and enjoying the beauty of the place.

There are moments of great humor in Gentleman Jack, sort of little quirky moments that really make you chuckle, like when Anne is heckling Marian (Gemma Whelan), for example. How much of that sense of humor did Anne Lister actually have?

Oh, she was funny! Her travel letters that describe her relationship with her dad and Marian that she writes to her aunt who she absolutely adores are hilarious. She writes something like, “Oh God, I’m with Marian and Dad and I’ve actually sneaked out because I can’t bear to sit with them for the whole of the evening! They’re doing my head in!” She’s always calling Marian ridiculous and she kind of takes the piss out of the people in the town.

There’s a brilliant excerpt we read when we were in the library—we got to actually hold one of the real diaries, which was a real moment for me because my hands were touching where her hands were and I was kinda blown away by that!—and in it, she goes to have her image drawn by a local artist and she’s not happy with it so she goes back and asks to have the mouth changed. The image, which is actually in Anne Choma’s book, makes her look like she has a five o’clock shadow. She kept asking the artist to draw the mouth but she mentions in her diary that everyone she ever showed the portrait to just laughed at it. They’re just on the floor because it’s the most ridiculous image but she loved it because it was different.

So she had a healthy sense of humor then!

Exactly! She could be very self-deprecating and she loved the fun in life, so I think finding those moments is so important, especially because when you’re experiencing the troubles that Anne had and the complex relationship she had with Ann Walker, you sort of need it to survive. I mean, you don’t go through a day being completely morose, and I think that’s what makes the tone of this period piece very real, very human. People talk over each other, people have funny moments.

This is a big performance from me—it pushes the boundaries, but there’s no other way I could have played it and Sally could have directed me to do it because it had to stand out because she did. If I hadn’t pushed it, I would have felt that I wasn’t doing her justice.

It would have seemed wrong if the performance wasn’t larger than life, as you say. I can’t imagine a toned down Anne Lister!

She was an oddity and she called herself an oddity, which I think was fascinating because that can refer to the fact that there wasn’t a word for lesbian. She knew that she was odd in that way, but I think she just knew she was “other,” so to speak, in every way possible.

One of her most famous quotes that I love was, “I am neither man nor woman in society; I’m the missing link between the two.” She wrote that in the early 19th century and as far as we’ve come with our conversations on gender and gender non-binary people, I think it’s staggering that that sentence was written back then it’s amazing.

Anne Lister could be quite buttoned-up, but it was clear she had a much softer side. We’re all human and we’re all complex, but she seemed to have so many layers. 

I think it’s interesting because we meet her at 41, so by the time we see her on screen, she’s done a lot of exploring. She rented her rooms out so that she could study Biology to actually study her physical being because she was so curious about herself. She experimented with her brother’s clothes when she was younger. There’s a reference to her being kind of wild in her youth—she was expelled from her grammar school, so by the time we meet her, she’s decided how she was going to speak, how she was going to present herself, how she was going to dress. 

It’s taken her 40 years to put this armor together, so she can be quite well-mannered and austere but she’s an entrepreneur and a very astute businesswoman so she has to have these armors to run her day to day. It’s hard enough being a kickass businesswoman in 2019, so to be that then, when it was so unusual, while not conforming to gender or social norms… that’s why she was so fascinating. We know from her diary that things hurt her. People would say terrible things to her but she put her armor on and got on with life.

She did seem to take it all in her stride, in a sense.

Yes, well, she had incredibly good mental health. Using the diary as an outlay for her emotions and feelings enabled her to get on and not give a fuck in that way. It allowed her to realize that there’s more than one way to be happy and live life to the full and be true to herself and that’s what I love about her. She was authentic and was able to live as what we now know as a lesbian in those times and a businesswoman. It’s just staggering.

You said you knew early on that Sophie Rundle was “your girl.” What was it about her that you felt made her such a perfect Ann Walker?

We had to read some scenes together, and one of the scenes was at the end of episode four. It was great because that’s when you understand why she has mental health issues and that she has trouble trusting people. That scene was part of the chemistry test and yes, Sophie looks beautiful and delicate and I’ve always loved her work, but she also has a real strength about her.

You have to have someone who challenges Anne Lister and I think Sophie had the backbone and that balance of strength and delicacy. I just loved what we brought to each other. We got on so well and she’s just great company and we were able to push ourselves to the limit. The other girls were brilliant, but there was just something special about Sophie. 

Your chemistry is definitely very evident on screen.

You know, what’s so gorgeous is I’ve had a lot of messages from young girls or women in same-sex relationships that have sent messages saying, “Thank you so much for this relationship, it’s so tender, it’s so well done, I feel seen, I feel represented” and that to me has been the most rewarding thing, that we have created something that the lesbian community has taken to its heart, especially in America.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor from New York who cares too way much about fictional characters and spends her time writing about them.

Stream Gentleman Jack on HBO