Juliet Stevenson is tired of playing grieving characters.
The 59-year-old actress portrays a single mother of three, whose youngest son is brutally murdered, in the new drama ‘One of Us’ and has admitted she was initially sceptical about taking on the role as she thinks she’s played too many weepy roles throughout the duration of her career.
Speaking to The Daily Telegraph newspaper, she said: "The big, big challenge of this job is that since it’s so bad from page two, where do you go? I was worried about that when I took it. I thought ‘The world has seen enough of me crying.’ It’s not long since I did ‘Accused’, in which I lost my son and went on a grief-propelled rampage.
"I was laughing when I spoke to my agent. ‘God’ I said, ‘do I really need any more grief in my career?’ People will say ‘Oh there she is weeping again …’ "
However, although she is a little fed up of playing emotional characters, Juliet felt like she could relate to the story because she has two children of her own in real life.
She said: "Louise is ferocious, as most women are, about her children. At the very beginning, I talked to the writers and said ‘I think you know we have to make her a little bit more active,’ because she was extremely passive in the first draft. Most women who have single-parented three children really can’t afford to be that passive.
"I don’t think you have to be a mother to play a mother – I played lots of mothers before I had my own kids. But there are things you discover when you are a mother that you just simply could not have imagined. There are several things that are very hard to imagine before you’ve actually experienced them. So I think having children helps enormously in all sorts of ways, because it puts you in touch with such atavistic impulses."
Juliet Stevenson is sick of playing the victim
