Post by Ripley on May 19, 2017 10:15:46 GMT -5
EW
"Joanne Froggat is trading in her maid's uniform for a poisonous teapot. The actress, who captured hearts as kindly ladies’ maid Anna on Downton Abbey, is shedding her sweet image and going dark (and brunette) for her latest role. Froggatt takes on the life of Mary Ann Cotton, the true story of Britain’s first female serial killer, in the new Masterpiece series Dark Angel, premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on PBS (it aired in Britain on ITV last fall).
Directed by Brian Percival (Downton Abbey) and written by Gwyneth Hughes (The Girls), the two-part mini-series, based on a book by criminologist David Wilson, dramatizes the story of the notorious Victorian poisoner. Using arsenic and an unsuspecting teapot as her murder weapons of choice, Cotton killed somewhere between 13 and 21 people before her crimes were discovered, vastly outranking her more famous male counterpart Jack the Ripper...
...ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is a huge departure for Downton fans who are used to seeing you as the kind-hearted Anna. Was that intentional when you were choosing to do it or something that particularly drew you to the role?
JOANNE FROGGATT: People kept saying to me when we were finishing off the last series of Downton, they just kept saying, “What do you want to do next?” And I kept jokingly saying, “Oh, I don’t know, something completely different like playing a murderer or something.” And then lo and behold, the script for Dark Angel just sort of landed on my door, and I was like, “Oh, well, here it is. Here’s what I’ve been saying I wanted to do and it’s here.” So I sort of had to put my money where my mouth was. I just thought Gwyneth Hughes had done such a fantastic job with it. It was such a page-turner. It’s quite a difficult feat to have a protagonist in a story that does such terrible things, and the trick is, “Why do do we want to watch her? And why do we want to know what happens to her?” … It threw up a lot of questions — whether she would’ve behaved that way if she was born in our times and she had the luxury of birth control and education and a career, or was she just a psychopath and would she have always done those terrible things?..."
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"Joanne Froggat is trading in her maid's uniform for a poisonous teapot. The actress, who captured hearts as kindly ladies’ maid Anna on Downton Abbey, is shedding her sweet image and going dark (and brunette) for her latest role. Froggatt takes on the life of Mary Ann Cotton, the true story of Britain’s first female serial killer, in the new Masterpiece series Dark Angel, premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on PBS (it aired in Britain on ITV last fall).
Directed by Brian Percival (Downton Abbey) and written by Gwyneth Hughes (The Girls), the two-part mini-series, based on a book by criminologist David Wilson, dramatizes the story of the notorious Victorian poisoner. Using arsenic and an unsuspecting teapot as her murder weapons of choice, Cotton killed somewhere between 13 and 21 people before her crimes were discovered, vastly outranking her more famous male counterpart Jack the Ripper...
...ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This is a huge departure for Downton fans who are used to seeing you as the kind-hearted Anna. Was that intentional when you were choosing to do it or something that particularly drew you to the role?
JOANNE FROGGATT: People kept saying to me when we were finishing off the last series of Downton, they just kept saying, “What do you want to do next?” And I kept jokingly saying, “Oh, I don’t know, something completely different like playing a murderer or something.” And then lo and behold, the script for Dark Angel just sort of landed on my door, and I was like, “Oh, well, here it is. Here’s what I’ve been saying I wanted to do and it’s here.” So I sort of had to put my money where my mouth was. I just thought Gwyneth Hughes had done such a fantastic job with it. It was such a page-turner. It’s quite a difficult feat to have a protagonist in a story that does such terrible things, and the trick is, “Why do do we want to watch her? And why do we want to know what happens to her?” … It threw up a lot of questions — whether she would’ve behaved that way if she was born in our times and she had the luxury of birth control and education and a career, or was she just a psychopath and would she have always done those terrible things?..."
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