Jason Watkins has had an intense start to 2018. The Bafta winner spent the first six weeks of the year preparing to inhabit the skin of ‘a very unpleasant character’ for a gripping new play, Frozen.
There were also visits to Grendon Prison in Buckinghamshire and meetings with David Wilson, a professor of criminology renowned for his research into serial killers.
Watkins chooses his words carefully when we meet in a pub near his home in Camden, London. Frozen hasn’t yet opened in the West End. He doesn’t want to give the game away for audiences. Nor does he want to compromise the performances of his equally heavy-weight co-stars, Suranne Jones (Doctor Foster) and Nina Sosanya (Last Tango In Halifax).
Jason Watkins has spent the first six weeks of the year preparing to inhabit the skin of ‘a very unpleasant character’ for a gripping new play, Frozen
‘Suranne’s character’s daughter goes missing, and Nina’s character is a criminal psychologist who comes over from America to study criminals and the criminal mind,’ says Watkins, 51, of the plot of Bryony Lavery’s award-winning psychological thriller. ‘My character is a seemingly regular guy, and he’s responsible for the central crime – or crimes – in the piece. But it’s not without humour, unbelievably.’
This contradiction plays to Watkins’s strengths, as he can certainly do light, funny roles. He’s best known for his performances in sitcoms such as BBC spoof W1A and comedy Trollied, and in the Nativity series of children’s Christmas films.
But he can play troubled, conflicted and downright chilling, too. Watkins won a Best Actor Bafta for the 2014 TV drama The Lost Honour Of Christopher Jefferies, a biopic of the retired Bristol teacher who was wrongly accused of the 2010 murder of landscape architect Joanna Yeates, and last year he was a police forensics officer at the heart of the grisly mystery in Line Of Duty.
He likes playing parts that are more than they initially seem – and Frozen certainly fits the bill. ‘It’s almost like The Silence Of The Lambs meets a Ken Loach film,’ he says. ‘It’s poetic and frightening, but also straight and simple. It’s inspired by real criminal acts. And that gives it even more potency.’
Watkins in The Lost Honour Of Christopher Jefferies. Watkins won a Best Actor Bafta for the 2014 TV drama
Even without hearing the gory details, Frozen sounds strong stuff. He nods ominously. ‘I’ve said to Clara: this is going to be a bloody tough watch.’ Clara Francis is Watkins’s wife, and his caution is more than simple spousal support. In late 2010, the couple’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Maude was suffering from a bad cough. It wouldn’t go away, and was diagnosed as croup. After being sent home from hospital for a second time, the actor put her down in her cot. The next morning, New Year’s Day 2011, the couple’s other daughter, Bessie, four at the time, came into their room. She said she couldn’t wake her sister. When Watkins went to check, he found Maude dead. It later transpired that she had been suffering from sepsis, in which the immune system reacts to an infection by going into overdrive, attacking the body and causing organ failure.
At the time, Watkins was in rehearsals at London’s Royal Court theatre. Despite his grief-stricken state, his first impulse was to keep working, because ‘if you’re self-employed, how do you get money in? We tried to get support from the state, but there was nothing.’
But it was too much too soon, and he quit the production.
Then a few months later, the supermarket comedy Trollied came along. ‘I was incredibly determined to get it,’ he says. ‘I thought, I’m going to carry my family through this, I’m going to provide! It’s all a reaction to the grieving. You get this energy, and it’s irrational and not always effective, but it’s certainly there. It took my mind off it. I was able to start piecing things back together. Trollied got me back into the world of work.’
Watkins with Thandie Newton in Line Of Duty. Watkins likes playing parts that are more than they initially seem
Watkins with his wife Clara. In 2011, the couple lost their daughter Maude to sepsis
Since their terrible loss, Watkins and Francis have campaigned for better awareness of sepsis. They’ve also become involved with groups Child Bereavement UK and Surviving The Loss Of Our World (SLOW), a north London-based charity that supports bereaved parents.
Watkins insists he doesn’t mind talking about their ‘cataclysmic’ tragedy. Anything that spreads understanding of the dangers of sepsis and offers support to others enduring similar traumas. But still: given their loss, did he have concerns about what Frozen’s core mystery might bring to the surface for him?
‘There’s the idea of the moth to the flame,’ he says. ‘But I am aware that agreeing to do it might seem slightly foolish – because you’ll lay yourself open.’
He acknowledges that the play is bleak, so much so that Professor Wilson said to Watkins early on: ‘The first thing you must do is get yourself a therapist.’
At this, Watkins laughs lightly. ‘That scared me a bit! And I do have somebody waiting in the wings in case I get…’ he tails off.
Broadly though, he insists that engaging with such topics, in real life and on stage, brings him some comfort.
‘A couple of months before we started rehearsals for Frozen, I went to a fundraising gala for the charity Missing People. And on my table were the McCanns,’ he says of Kate and Gerry, parents of Madeleine.
‘And Gerry came round and said, “I just want to thank you for all the Nativity films because you got my [younger] children through a very difficult time.”
‘When you hear something like that, you think, there’s the “how” of what you do. And by offering comfort and perspective to other people, I’m helping myself.’
Watkins with Suranne Jones. Jones (Doctor Foster) is one of his co-stars in the play Frozen
Frozen is the start of a busy year for Watkins. He’ll be seen on the big screen alongside Emma Thompson in an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Children Act. He’s also shot Stephen Frears’ A Very English Scandal with Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw, a BBC depiction of MP Jeremy Thorpe’s 1979 trial for conspiracy and incitement to murder. Comedy-wise, he’ll also be back on the small screen this week for the BBC’s Hold The Sunset, in which he stars alongside John Cleese – the Python’s first sitcom since Fawlty Towers.
Working with comedy legend Cleese, did Watkins feel a pressure to be funny? ‘Well, as you say, it’s his first sitcom since Fawlty Towers, so the pressure’s all on him,’ he jokes.
‘But it’s very funny looking across the rehearsal room and thinking, “Oh, there’s John Cleese…” – slightly rounder these days, but just as tall!
‘It was an absolute joy. But, yeah, I did have to stop that fan adulation.’
When we speak, Frozen’s opening night is a couple of weeks away. He’s aware that there is a chance of upset.
‘We’re doing the first full run-through tomorrow, so I’ll be listening for the first time to Suranne’s monologues about losing her daughter.’
He’s taking nothing for granted, something he’s been brutally forced to learn to do.
‘I’ve read them on the page, and we’ve done our scenes together, and that has given me an idea of how I’ll feel.
‘But I think once I’m over the shock of first hearing those monologues, I’ll be able to find my way around dealing with it.
‘Which is a metaphor for any trauma, really,’ concludes Jason Watkins, focused, as ever, on hope. ‘You have to find a way of having it in your life.’
‘Frozen’ is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, frozentheplay.com