Straight from her incredible performance in Hostage, Suranne Jones is once again lighting up our screens with yet another pitch-perfect outing, in ITV's Frauds.
As Bert in the six-part heist thriller, Suranne's fellow leading lady is Jodie Whittaker, who stars as Sam. Beneath the action and the perfect pairing of the formidable acting duo, the underlying message of Frauds is very clear - there aren't many things on this earth more complex than female friendship.
In fact, the idea for the show even came about after a conversation about friendship between Suranne Jones and series writer, Anne-Marie O'Connor. Great friends themselves, the pair were chatting about the "nightmare friends" a lot of people will experience at some point.
"Female friendships are intense, lifelong, important, all those things, but there can be a toxicity to female friendship that I don't think you necessarily get in male friendships," Anne-Marie explains.
She adds, "As we talked around it, that was the idea that we started wanting to put at the middle of this — one about that friend that you can't get rid of, the one you can't shake off, who's a nightmare, who's got their claws in at some point and the screw just gets turned."
For those tuning in to the series, you'll know that Bert and Sam met as teenagers, and had that immediate feeling of completing each other. Sam was pregnant at the time, and eventually gave her daughter up for adoption.
Bert had been breezy about them being a family with or without a child, and wanted Sam in her life, however she came.
That intense and intoxicating feeling of finding a platonic soulmate turns toxic as the pair get older and their needs change.
To complicate things in their present, Bert has just served a 10-year stint in prison and is out on compassionate leave as she's dying. While the pair have been forcibly parted, they understand they shouldn't really reunite but are compelled to do so by old bonds and the fact that Bert's life is about to end.
"I think we've all had Berts or been Berts," explains Suranne. "At the time, it feels amazing and it brings out a side to you that you wouldn't necessarily know was there, but then when you've outgrown it, you need to move on for your own development," she adds.
"The trouble is if it's still there and it keeps coming back into your life, the only way you can cut it off is by literally cutting it off, and that’s like removing a limb."
While the pair filled a void in one another, they had as teens, Sam's gaping void remained, and only Sam could fill it.
To Bert, Sam is the "holy grail of love and acceptance and validation". However, Sam is at a point in her life where she wants to find the daughter she gave up, and to feel completed by a real family that doesn't necessarily include Bert.
"She needed Bert less and less," Jodie Whittaker says of Sam, continuing, "But Bert couldn't understand why things had changed — because basically Bert's still a teenager."
Another big part of the show for Suranne was flipping the usually male narratives to show them from a female perspective. Heist dramas are usually male-led, and she thought it was time to see women at the helm of something always associated with masculinity.
However, the idea of putting friendship front and centre was the most important element for the show's creators, even though Suranne acknowledges that not everyone tuning in will take that away.
"On a level of me and Anne-Marie being creatives and wanting to tell female stories, telling the story of a toxic female friendship in all its complexities was really important to us," she says.
Suranne concludes, "We knew that not everyone would take that away, so we had to make it fun and big as well and have those elements. But actually, the main thing is we hope people will understand why we felt it was important to tell that story and show that relationship [between Bert and Sam]."
