Life

TV Quickfire: Julia Ormonde on new BBC 'domestic noir', Gold Digger

Julia Ormond stars in Gold Digger, a new BBC drama about a woman falling in love with a much younger man. We quizzed her to find out more about this domestic noir.

Julia Ormond as Julia Day and Ben Barnes as Benjamin in Gold Digger
Julia Ormond as Julia Day and Ben Barnes as Benjamin in Gold Digger Julia Ormond as Julia Day and Ben Barnes as Benjamin in Gold Digger

WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT GOLD DIGGER?

GOLD Digger is the story of a dysfunctional family and the events that happen when Julia Day, my character, meets a much younger man, Benjamin Greene [Ben Barnes], and starts a relationship with him.

It is about how all the people who are close to her have an opinion about it and how that really pushes them and challenges them as a family to confront their demons and their relationship to Julia, their 60-year-old mum, who really, to them, is somewhat invisible.

HOW ARE VIEWERS INTRODUCED TO JULIA?

When we first encounter Julia, she's really quite wounded and bruised from the falling apart of her marriage. Her ex-husband, Ted [Alex Jennings], has left her for her best friend and two out of three of her children have left home and moved on in life so she's somewhat lost and struggling with low self-esteem.

The story kicks off with Julia's 60th birthday and each one of her children successively either forget it or can't turn up and so she takes herself to the British Museum where she used to work and she runs into Benjamin, who shows an interest in her.

WHAT APPEALED TO YOU ABOUT THE SHOW?

It's provocative and it challenges us in terms of how we see women who have devoted their life to motherhood – then what do they do when that phase is sort of coming to an end?

To Julia's children, there is a sense that Benjamin is a threat to their inheritance and a feeling that there is something off about him, but it's founded in this disbelief that he could genuinely love her.

Despite the fact that we're very used to seeing older men with much younger women, to see the reverse throws into sharp relief our societal expectations of women.

DID YOU ENJOY SHOOTING IN DEVON?

We were on this promontory with cliffs dropping on either side and I was a bit anxious about it because I have found that all sorts of things that didn't concern me before in life, for some reason, since becoming a mum, have started to. So they had all sorts of protective equipment and we had stunt guys attached to all of these cables.

A portion of the story also occurs in London and so there's a section of it that we got to shoot in extraordinary locations. We had an amazing day at the British Museum where we turned up early and no-one else was there – it was definitely one of those rather jammy moments that you have as an actor.

HOW WOULD YOU SUMMARISE THE SERIES?

It's been described as a 'domestic noir', which I thought was very accurate. There is a grittiness to the tone mixed with moments that feel quite pedestrian and normal, very English – there are lots of cups of tea – but at the same time it becomes quite searing.

It doesn't shy away from the darker things people are dealing with as individuals; and at the same time there's this beautiful kind of dance that they're all doing as a family, in terms of what they're withholding from each other and the private agonies that are going on within.

There is also something quite extraordinary about the way Marnie [Dickens] has written the impact of trauma on this family. There is something about trauma and how people deal with it in their lives that has a long-term effect and impact on their ability to love, love themselves and love someone else.

:: Gold Digger starts on BBC One on Tuesday November 12