The Herald:

Jessica Raine shot to fame in Call the Midwife

 

How do you think you would describe the experience of overnight success if it ever happened to you? Do you imagine it would be utterly thrilling? Ecstatic, even? A source of deep, deep happiness?
Ask Jessica Raine, who, unlike you and me, knows what she is talking about when it comes to the subject, and she prefers to use the word "weird".
"It's very unique I think, when it happens overnight," the actor says. "I was in a play at the time just tootling along quite nicely and then suddenly public transport is a different experience.
"And it's not like I was going to start getting taxis everywhere because that's really expensive. So you just have to deal with it.
"Also, some people have no idea who you are so you can never presume. Because you'd look a right knob if you're going: 'You might know me from ...'"
But, of course, you do know Jessica Raine. You know her from Call the Midwife, one of BBC One's most successful dramas of recent years and the show that turned her into an overnight success. She was 26 when she was cast in the series as the bicycling nurse Jenny Lee. Before that only friends, family and the odd London theatregoer would have recognised her. Being the star of a Sunday night primetime drama changed all that.

The Herald:

Raine as nurse Jenny Lee

And no, it turns out, she's not a "knob". Anything but. That's good to know, isn't it? What she is, it turns out, is a petite, very self-contained 33-year-old who loves music (the singer Roisin Murphy is "one of my favourite, favourite people on this earth," she says), is a wannabe gardener, polices what she says to journalists as vigilantly as a North Korean border guard and swears occasionally but then apologises for doing so.
I think it's the petiteness that surprises me most. The last time I saw her on screen was in the second series of Line of Duty where, as the hard-drinking, Martin Compston-bedding DC Georgia Trotman she seemed to fill the screen. At least until – SPOILER – she was thrown out of a window at the end of the first episode.
Maybe it was just the piled-up hair. Or the boots. But sitting here in her agent's office in London she turns out to be a slim, tiny, porcelain delicate skelf of a thing.
Filling the screen has become something of a habit for her. Since Call the Midwife she's been a busy girl. You may have seen her earlier this year in the BBC historical drama Wolf Hall and/or in Sky's frozen north thriller Fortitude.
When we speak she's about to decamp north to Yorkshire to start filming Jericho, a historical drama based around the building of the railways. After speaking to me today she is off to meet her accent coach.
But long before that appears on your TV screen you will have the chance to see her in another BBC drama. Partners in Crime, the latest Agatha Christie adaptation, sees her play Tuppence Beresford opposite David Walliams. He plays her husband in a series based on two of Agatha Christie's lesser-known characters. (Walliams makes a "fine husband", she says, by the way.) The Beresfords are a crime-fighting, spy-busting duo. In berets. (Well, she is; Walliams opts more for the pinstripe suit look.)
Raine admits she didn't know the characters before she read the scripts. The original books were set in the 1920s. But the BBC has decided to set it in the 1950s. Hmm. She spent time there before in Call the Midwife. Were there no worries about going back to the same era?
"That definitely was a question I did ask myself. 'Are you ready to go back into the 1950s?' I to'ed and fro'ed but I couldn't put the character down. I felt like it was different to what Call the Midwife was doing. It's lighter and funnier. So it came down to the scripts. I thought, 'You can't not do something because it's in the 1950s.' And we excel at period drama."
She wanted the chance to play comedy, too. There wasn't much comedy in either Wolf Hall or Fortitude. "I really enjoyed both of them, but they're quite put-upon women, both of them. So Tuppence is playful and intuitive and curious and imaginative and she has a lot of qualities that I felt I haven't played yet.

The Herald:

David Williams and Jessica Raine in Partners in Crime


"I feel if you do one thing and if you do it well you'll probably get cast in something similar for a little while and I understand it. But the aim is to punch out of the box as much as you possibly can. That's what I want to do. Tuppence is funny. The programme is funny. And I don't think I've done that yet."
Would she make a good detective in real life? "Terrible. I'm not good on plot. I'm flighty with my attentions. Get distracted easily."
OK. Of all the professions she has played, which would she be good at in the real world Midwife? Nanny (The Woman in Black)? Burlesque stripper (she played one on stage in the play Earthquakes in London)? "I'd go into gardening."
Hold on. When did she play a gardener?
"You mean in all the roles? Oh my god, I don't know."
So if she does decide to chuck acting, gardening is her fall-back position. Has she got green fingers, then? "Fingers of death," she laughs.
I'm not sure that's going to look good on the CV. Let's look at the alternatives again. How was her burlesque stripping? "I excelled," she laughs. What kind of training do you need for that exactly? "Just loads of dancing. We had a choreographer and he helped me with some sexy dancing ... which I actually found quite difficult."
Now that she's playing a wise-cracking detective, I have to ask if she has a criminal record. "I haven't broken a law. Not to my knowledge ... Or I haven't been caught yet."
On the wall of Jessica Raine's parents' house there is an old sepia photograph. It is a family picture. From her mother's side. Faces and names of people from the past. One of the people in the picture is called Raine. Jessica Lloyd liked that name so much she decided to steal it when she was told there was already a Jessica Lloyd on the books of Equity, the actors' union.
Raine grew up in Herefordshire, a farmer's daughter. "Me and my sister and I had two cousins living down the lane. We were all girls and we were all the same age and we were all tomboys. We'd all just troop off together or separately to explore the farm and make dens. Quite boyish things, really. There weren't many dolls. It was all getting out there and poking dead things."
Dead things apart, that sounds almost idyllic. I'm imagining it as a kind of Famous Five existence. "A bit darker. Because we had BSE and foot and mouth."
Ah, yes. That's not Enid Blyton material at all. It was a really terrible time, she says. Devastating, even.
"My dad still has very anxiety-making dreams about farming. He's stopped now but it goes deep. If you grow up in the countryside it's really in you."
She paints a picture of herself as a timid, even withdrawn child. "I was really shy. It's boring for interviews. Hideously shy and weirdly would ask permission for the strangest things. 'Can I make a phone call?' So kind of tentative and not very sure of myself, probably. And not an actress in any way."
She wasn't performing behind the sofa, then? "Maybe on my own, with no-one watching. But never in front of people."
In the past she's mentioned that when she was around nine her mother Sue, a nurse, was very ill for a time. It's not something she's keen to talk about today, but she does accept that might have had an impact on her too. "I think it does. You're more aware of things. Aware that life's not easy, probably."
The teenage Raine spent her time in her room, listening to the Beastie Boys, PJ Harvey and Blur (Damon was her favourite). She did OK at school. "In sixth form I had a very good teacher who knew which buttons to press. He'd do that kind of reverse psychology. 'You're not going to get an A.' And I saw red."
Her voice drops to sotto voce. "'I'm going to get the best f****** A in the class now!' He knew what to do."
The same teacher also taught her that you can tell every aspect of life through theatre. And so that became her goal. She studied drama and cultural studies at university but she wasn't really academic. And then every drama school she applied to turned her down first time around.
You would think that might have knocked the girl she was back on her heels. What do you do if you're a shy girl who is knocked back from doing the one thing you love? It turns out you go to Thailand to teach. Obvious, really.
Well, actually, no, it isn't. Jessica, I say, I can't really square that spirit of adventure with the shy girl you say you were. "I think there is a strange imbalance in me sometimes where I was really shy but I also knew there was more to it than that and that there was more to me. And there was something in me that goes 'push it a bit'.
"It was important to go out on my own and to not rely on anyone and to make sure I could cope. And I did cope. I was fine, totally fine. I found myself in a taxi at one in the morning. He dropped me off at a bar and there were loads of western men with Thai women and I went: 'Hello, is the teaching place around here somewhere?' I wasn't panicking at any point. It felt like: 'I'm OK.' You've got to step up.
"Getting shoved up in front of a big class of Thai children, I loved it."
I wonder if that's when she started feeling comfortable in her own skin. It's more to do with getting older, she thinks. Getting over life's hurdles, she says, makes you realise how strong you are. "I think you go through s****y times and you think: 'There you are. You coped with that all right.'"
Coped with what, Jessica? "Um, I can't. They're too personal to share. I suppose to do with acting ... Not being able to do it for a long time. Because no-one was letting me. Someone has to give you permission to act and I found the more I didn't do it the more it was like a hosepipe with a kink in it. I was like: 'Oh my god, I've got to do this.' It wasn't just: 'I want to do it.' It was: 'I need to do it.' The first roles I got out of drama school were quite angry teenagers. And I think that was because I was quite angry. I just had s**** to say and the writers I was working with at that time had s**** to say as well."
She takes a breath. "I keep swearing. It's terrible."
What is it about acting that she likes so much? "It gives you words to say, a narrative to be in and I find that sometimes easier than life. It's something in me. I want to be part of the story."
That sounds like a form of hiding perhaps. But she sees it more as something essential. "I still can't think of anything else I'd rather do. Maybe gardening. There is still nothing that would replace it. It's like a need. It's like a terrible need."
She looks at me. "That's the headline, isn't it?"
These days she lives with her fellow actor Tom Goodman-Hill, who is best known for ITV1 drama Mr Selfridge. "We just keep ourselves to ourselves" is as much as she will offer on that front.
This is clearly the downside of being in the public eye for her. "Interviews are funny because you've constantly got a monitor on your shoulder going: 'What can be taken out of context there?' It's not even like I hate it. It's just ... meaty."
So perhaps it's no surprise that she doesn't seem to want to essay too many opinions today. Anyway, she says, a lot of the time she doesn't feel qualified.
Still, from the perspective of a girl educated in a comprehensive, does she feel acting remains open to everyone? Is this another area of the culture that's becoming less accessible to all?
"All I could say is when I was at drama school it was open. I got free meals. Amazing, you know. They made it possible.
"I'd say there has been a trend in dramas for RP-speaking people and I think that's to do with commissioning. I have to say the fact I can pull off a good RP accent, that's really helped."
What's her normal accent? "I'm doing it now." Ah, yes.
The thing that thrills Jessica Raine most in life is stepping on stage. "There's nothing like it and I hope I will be doing it again soon." The thing that scares her most? "Boredom. I hate stagnating. I feel like my brain turns into mush if I'm not doing anything. I love working hard and I'm not shy of it."
That'll be from her days on the farm, presumably. "I didn't help out very much on the farm," she says, laughing.
In the years to come she wants to take more control, find projects she wants to tell, be more proactive. "There are so many stories," she says. But now she has an accent to learn.
And tomorrow? "I'm going to see Roisin Murphy. I cannot wait. I'm going to go and dance on Saturday night."
It may not be burlesque dancing. It may not even be "sexy". But then it's only for fun. She's got a job she loves anyway.
Partners in Crime will air on BBC One soon.