Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers for episode 3 of ‘The Lady’, available now on Britbox in the US
The way Mia McKenna-Bruce and Ed Speleers’ characters meet for the first time in the second episode of “The Lady,” one might think the series is a romantic comedy.
Filming in the swanky lower level of Smith & Wollensky steakhouse on a sunny day in London last May, the two actors took several takes to get the moment just right. The year is 1998. Jane Andrews (McKenna-Bruce), who has just been fired from her glamorous job as royal dresser to Duchess Sarah Ferguson (Natalie Dormer), is waiting to meet a friend at a bar. Wearing a little black dress and flashy ’90s curls, Jane orders two Cosmopolitans before getting a message that her friend isn’t coming after all.
That’s when Tommy Cressman (who plays Spellers) showed up “like a knight in shining armor,” and her black pumps had been replaced with bright pink platform Crocs, McKenna-Bruce told Variety after filming the scene. When Tommy sees Jane standing alone, he wanders over to the bar and offers to accompany her for one of the “pink drinks.” Although he initially refuses, Jane eventually relents, and the two end up drinking champagne and joking around. It’s like a fairy tale. An unlucky woman meets the man of her dreams by chance. But it’s all about to go horribly wrong.
As anyone who lived in the UK at the turn of the millennium probably knows, Jane murdered Tommy on September 18, 2000, just two years after they first met. After a trial in which her royal connections became tabloid fodder, she was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison (she was later released in 2019). But how did their relationship, which seemed to start on such a hopeful note, get there? That’s exactly the question The Lady, a four-part drama currently airing on Britbox in the US, seeks to answer.
Rather than focusing exclusively on crime, “The Lady” follows Jane’s humble beginnings in the northeast of England until she gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance to work at Buckingham Palace and mingle with high society. When Jane meets Tommy at the end of episode 2, it’s clear that she’s not in the best of spirits, but the show’s creators, including The Crown producer Left Bank Pictures, writer Debbie O’Malley and director Lee Haven Jones, wanted viewers to understand why the two were so drawn to each other and what ultimately soured their relationship.
“This is a drama, and drama humanizes the subject matter,” Haven-Jones told Variety on set between takes. “And we want to try to understand what Tommy saw in Jane and what Jane saw in Tommy. So it’s also important to see the joy and some kind of lightness. There must have been an attraction or some kind of spark between them.”
But the onus was on them to recreate this true story. Left Bank producer Florence Haddon-Cave said Tommy’s family had been consulted and Jane had been consulted through her legal team, but she “didn’t want to be involved in any way”.
“Every step of the way, we had to be fair and honest, and find a way to address things we don’t know without being dishonest,” she says. “Obviously, this is a relationship between two people, and no one who wasn’t in the relationship can know the truth of it. But we’ve constructed other people’s views of this relationship: There are friends on both sides, there’s family, and there’s Jane’s own words that she said in interviews. This was our way of trying to create an image that was as fair and nuanced as possible.”
Below, McKenna-Bruce and Spellers talk more about their portrayals of Jane and Tommy, their empathy for their characters, and what they hope viewers take away from the show.
Mia McKenna-Bruce and Ed Spelius in “The Lady.”
Jonathan Ford/Left Bank/Sony Photography
What kind of research did you do for each character beforehand?
McKenna-Bruce: Personally, I wanted to avoid it as much as possible. There are a lot of documentaries and stuff about this story. I wanted to deviate from the script as much as possible so as not to come in with preconceptions. So I worked with a great writer-director on Jane’s background and what we knew about her, but there was nothing documentary-y about it.[Co-star]Sean Teale gave me a book about her, and I hadn’t read it yet, but he kept saying to me, “Have you read that book?” And I thought, “No…I haven’t done that yet.” And that’s because I was trying not to be swayed by other people’s thoughts about her.
Speleers: I had a chance to talk to Tommy’s family, and I think they were consulted quite a bit. I was very honored to have had the opportunity to sit down with Tommy’s younger brother and certainly get some insight into how they feel about him. But I think it’s very important to emphasize that this is our own interpretation of the story. I think that gave me a little bit of freedom in building the character.
Jane and Tommy’s love story obviously had to be believable before everything went wrong. How did the two of you establish that chemistry?
McKenna-Bruce: That was something we both talked about in the first meeting with Lee and the first rehearsal. We wanted to make sure it was done correctly. We both believed that the characters truly loved each other and tried to show why they were still together despite their tumultuous relationship.
Speleers: Like Mia was saying, it was really important to try to find that lightness of touch there, to try to understand what brings these two people together, to find that playfulness. But what I found in working with Mia is that she allows me this space to just trust myself and still have fun. And what that ultimately does is when things get heavy or you get to a very volatile moment, you’re so free and in agreement with each other that you’re just there to support each other.
On the other hand, there are some very heated scenes between you guys, especially the fight before Tommy calls the police. How did you prepare for that?
McKenna-Bruce: There’s nothing special I personally do to get into that mindset. We did some work upfront to really build these characters and get to know the characters. (And) you’re just being as present in the moment as possible for me anyway. When you have a really great working relationship, like we did with all the crew and cast, and it’s been a really special experience, you’re allowed to go to emotional, vulnerable places without thinking too much about what you’re doing. I’m a bit rubbish at things like that because I don’t do anything I like. Please join us. I hope it works.
Speleers: She’s a very nice person.
McKenna-Bruce: No, no, no!
Dr. Spellers: But it’s true in a way. Mia is. She has a natural ability to turn it on in every possible way and is so free to look, to be away, and to be close.
McKenna-Bruce: Thank you, Ed.
What was the most difficult scene to film?
McKenna-Bruce: The hardest part was when Tommy left in the stag do. There’s a part at the end of that section where she’s on the phone and she’s like, “You son of a bitch!” And she sits on the stairs. When I was working with Lee at the time, we were like, “Okay, let’s see what happens.” I think I made up the yelling “you bastard,” but I don’t think that was in the script at all. And there was a moment when I sat on the stairs and I was literally like, “Lee, I don’t even have the energy to be angry anymore, I’m just so emotionally drained.” Because we’ve had a week where we’ve been through a lot of emotional stuff. It actually worked because by that point Jane had gone through a spiral of emails and all sorts of searches. So we sat on the stairs and ran, actually exhausted by it, whereas I think it was written that she was screaming and yelling more. But I thought, “There’s nothing left!”
Speleers: I think it’s the last scene of Jane and Tommy’s relationship after they return from France. It’s like two or three scenes in pretty quick succession and you have to be emotionally challenged as an actor. But I think it’s just the subject matter, the content that’s being discussed, that’s really raw and that we have to explore some very emotional, challenging, volatile things within ourselves and each other. It’s funny as an actor that it’s weirdly fun to play those scenes, but sometimes when you put yourself out there and reflect, you question what people have to go through in their lives and relationships, how tragic things can be, and how volatile things can be sometimes. And I think that’s one of the lessons that comes from that. Again, because of this great environment that we had, of course everything is safe and fine and you’re just acting, but those scenes were definitely scenes that pushed my buttons in a way that I didn’t expect.
Mia McKenna-Bruce and Ed Spelius in “The Lady.”
Jonathan Ford/Left Bank/Sony Photography
Mia, did you feel sympathy for Jane?
McKenna-Bruce: Yeah. As for the character Jane, I felt a lot of empathy for her. If I didn’t do that, I think I would have done the wrong thing. That was one of the reasons I didn’t want to get into documentaries or anything like that too much. I wanted to work with the characters that Debbie created. Because when I first read those scripts, she felt very relatable to me and I could relate to her very much. So, that was fascinating to me — where have things changed? Where did the ball fall that led to that outcome? There were a lot of moments in our script where I thought, “Oh, I wish someone could have realized in that moment that she needed more help.”
Ed, how did you accept the responsibility of playing someone who was killed?
Mr. Sperias: I am very grateful for the time I have been given to spend with my family. I think the most enjoyable part of talking to Rick was hearing all the positive things he had to say about his brother. For me, one of the things I wanted to take away from that was really understanding that kind of playfulness. I think Deb did a great job of incorporating that into the script. He has an energy and a desire for life, and I think it was very important for me to respect that and find a way to express that lightness.
The show chooses not to show the murder itself. What did you think about this decision?
McKenna-Bruce: The reality is you never know what happens between two people behind closed doors. Only those who were in the room would know that. So I think it was a great way to emphasize that this is a dramatization. And for every conversation Jane has with characters in the series, we’ll never know exactly what was said or what happened.
Speleers: I also think it’s more interesting and probably classier from a storytelling standpoint. There’s no need to depict it. This is our own story of events, our own interpretation, but there’s so much drama and tension in this story anyway that we don’t necessarily need to see its final moments.
What do you hope viewers take away from watching “The Lady”?
McKenna-Bruce: I think the big lesson is that you can never really know what a person is going through. And it’s very important to understand, ask for help, and get help when you need it.
Spellers: Actually, I don’t want the audience to have complete expectations of what’s going to happen. Until a screening a few months ago, I had no idea what Episode 1 would be like and the journey from Episode 1 to Episode 3 and beyond. We’re on this journey that I don’t think we expect, especially in this genre of true crime.
