In a surprising shift from his gritty hit Adolescence, writer Jack Thorne's new romantic drama Falling explores forbidden love between a nun and a priest. Stars Keeley Hawes and Paapa Essiedu open up about researching controversial love that the church couldn't allow.
A Convent Garden Setting
The drama is set in the convent garden of a closed order of nuns in a UK location with a maelstrom of social problems. Hawes plays Anna, a nun who makes regular forays into the real world to do good works at food banks. She moves with unobtrusive poise, radiating peace even as she grows cabbages in the walled garden. Hawes, known for period dramas like Wives and Daughters and Our Mutual Friend, channels a range of gorgeous guileless expressions. 'That was the most difficult thing – to play someone of my age [50] with no experience of any of the life that someone of my age would have lived,' says Hawes.
Essiedu plays David, a younger, more worldly priest with demons similar to his breakthrough roles in I May Destroy You and Gangs of London. Despite his character's desperate boredom during confessions, there is a burning purity to him. 'Sometimes their cars break down,' says Essiedu. 'Sometimes they need to go and buy socks.'
Researching the Roles
Neither Hawes nor Essiedu were raised Catholic. Hawes spent time with an ex-nun researching the role. 'She is my sort of age, and had the same experience of what they call jumping over the wall,' says Hawes. This phrase describes the hard decision to leave the convent and rejoin a changed world. Hawes asked all the funny little questions: how do nuns come by sanitary products? How do you find things out without Google?
Essiedu had his own real-life hot priest as a mentor. 'He was so fit. He was the same age as me [35], had incredible style, took his jack russell everywhere, and was just cool. Incredibly charismatic. Really up for talking about the contradictions in his faith and work.'
The Forbidden Love Story
David arrives at the nunnery to get a teenager out of an abusive home. He's frustrated by rules, and Anna makes him an omelette. Their hands touch accidentally, and then all hell breaks loose. 'There's something passionately and violently present within them that's both drawing them together and pushing them apart,' says Essiedu.
Anna's work vanishes when she leaves the convent. At a job centre, she says: 'I could do a CV but it would just say nun. Employment history: nun.' But David's work is non-stop; he gets punched in the face and falls off the wagon. 'Sometimes we get lost with the idea that religious leaders are fanatic people who just follow doctrine. But these are real people.'
A Timeless Drama
Everyone else in the drama is fully in the world – abusive husbands, good fiancés, sisters, congregants. It's recognisable as society yet you can't place it in time. 'It's quite good that it sits in this slightly liminal, adjacent world,' says Essiedu. The wholesomeness of the surrounding cast – churchgoers close-harmonising on a coach trip, David's deaf sister Susan who reads facial expressions as her superpower – is a high-wire act. Sophie Stone, the first deaf student admitted to Rada in 2005, gives a magnetic performance.
Love vs Duty
Anna starts with ardent certainty, feeling destiny when she meets David. 'She has a kind of naivety, like a teenager, she thinks this is how it works,' says Hawes. David is wide-eyed with horror that he's turned a nun. 'She puts him in a position where he's almost playing catchup with his own feelings,' says Essiedu. Guilt looms large, driving the question of what love is, whether it trumps duty, and whether duty means anything without it.
'It might not be a romance story at all, but a love story – filial love, the love a priest has for their flock, the love within the sisterhood, the love one must show to forgive one's mother before her last rites,' says Essiedu. 'And the love of God,' Hawes chips in. 'Well, if you'd just let me finish,' Essiedu says, 'for the love of God!'
Falling starts on Channel 4 on 19 May at 9pm.
