Joanne Froggatt says she drew on her own feelings of being an “outsider” starting out in Coronation Street for her latest role as a manipulative journalist.
The Downton Abbey star, who got her big break on the soap when she was 16, plays the scheming Frances who wheedles her way into the family of a famous novelist after witnessing the death of his wife.
Alys, Always, based on a novel by Harriet Lane, follows her transformation from the ignored office junior at a Fleet Street newspaper to an all-powerful senior executive as she assumes the glamorous life of the dead woman.
Froggatt said she was intrigued by playing a character “wired slightly differently to the normal person”.
She said: “It’s a psychological thriller but it’s also a story about someone that’s on the outside looking in … getting a job in Coronation Street, I felt like the little mousey outsider. I was not the most confident 16-year-old and all of a sudden people recognise you and you’re working with all these actors that you’ve seen all your life.”
The actress, who has not been on stage for eight years since her last performance at The Bush theatre in west London, said playing Frances had been “a freeing experience”.
“She is so completely different from me. I enjoy being in her head. I don’t know what that says about me because I quite like it … it’s completely different to being in my head,” she said.
