After 20 years away from UK screens, Anna Friel makes her career comeback in a dark and complex new Scandi-style drama

Words: Colin Crummy
Photography: Rankin

A female detective with a strong collection of chunky knits. Cityscapes painted various shades of grey. A serial killer on the loose and a complex web of sociopolitical and personal intrigue that leads to them. Sounds like The Killing. Except it’s not.

Marcella, an original new ITV drama from the pen and mind of The Bridge creator Hans Rosenfeldt, has the same tropes we’ve come to expect from Scandi-noir drama, but this time the setting is closer to home: the streets of east London to be geographically specific. But the show also welcomes an invigorating, homegrown talent to the genre: Anna Friel.

It might be a surprising career move for Friel, but it’s certainly a very smart one. The eight-part drama, also starring Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael, fuels our insatiable appetite for grip lit – psychological thrillers such as The Girl On The Train and Gone Girl – with the boundary-pushing, stereotype-breaking nature of Scandi noir. A maverick male detective struggling with life is not for this genre; instead it’s gifted us layered female leads from Borgen to The Bridge. Women who are ambitious and career-orientated, strong and independent, yet flawed and real. Whose presence has added a layer of humanity to dark crime stories. Which is just what we see in Marcella. The series is centred around a serial killer case that has reopened after a fresh batch of similarly gruesome murders. Friel plays a police officer who left the force to bring up her two children, but is drawn back into the fray.

As well as indulging her own personal love of Scandi dramas (“I watched all of them. The Killing, Borgen, all of those things,” she says in her still fresh Mancunian accent), filming the show also meant a chance for the Rochdale-born actress, now 39, to stay in London for an extended period after a 20-year transatlantic career across film, TV and theatre. Now Friel lives in Windsor with her 10-year-old daughter Gracie, who she had with her former partner, actor David Thewlis. But with homes in LA and Mallorca and a career defined by big US primetime parts in shows such as Pushing Daisies (for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe) and most recently, thriller American Odyssey (Friel starred as an American Special Forces soldier), she has felt more of a British success abroad than a familiar face on our screens. But that’s about to change.

Step aside then, Sarah Lund. And welcome home, Anna Friel.

For a British audience, this feels like a homecoming for you? Do you sense that?
For British TV, yes. And I knew it had to be something really, really good for me to accept that. It was a new agent who said, look you haven’t done British television for a long time.

Is it nerve wracking?
I’ve done my best, I’ve worked f***ing hard. I’m really, really tired and I deserve a holiday now. Is it nerve wracking? I hope people like it. I hope people relate to Marcella.

Take two: Anna Friel makes her career comeback in a new Scandi-style drama