主播大秀

Charlotte Riley plays Holly Evans, Deputy News Editor of The Herald.

Tell us about your character.
Holly is a journalist. She works at The Herald newspaper and she is a deputy news editor currently. One of the most interesting aspects of her character is that you see how her job has impacted her life and her personal life - and the huge amount of sacrifices that she’s made to get where she is. She’s very intelligent, she thinks very quickly… she’s got a rapid-fire brain. She’s so focused on her work and so focused on her job and what she’s passionate about that she’s slightly blinkered. She has as much weakness as she has strength. That’s what I find interesting about her. One of the things that attracted me to the role was that it's interesting to see somebody, particularly a woman, who is really passionate about their job and passionate about what they do - and then how that leaves them in quite a vulnerable place personally.

What can you tell us about the story of Press?
Essentially it’s about two newspapers that exist opposite each other within a square - and it’s about the journalists that work within those two newspapers and how they tackle the same stories differently.

Describe Duncan and Holly’s relationship?
I think they are as different as they are similar - or as similar as they are different. They are two sides to the same coin. That’s fascinating when you get them both on the same screen together…. they love to hate each other in many ways and that makes for good drama.

Tell us about Mike Bartlett’s scripts.
You don’t often get to read many scripts where you can’t wait to get the next one… and cruelly they only gave me four scripts. So when I went to the audition I had to beg to see the other two so I could find out what happened.

What research did you do for Press and what did you learn?
From the research we did and talking to a lot of journalists, one of the things that seemed to be undisputed was the cost to their personal lives. It’s quite similar to acting: you’ve got to be prepared to miss birthdays and weddings and important moments in your loved ones’ lives for your job. It seems to be the same for journalists. You’ve got to really, really want to do that job. The amount of content that they have to create and how quickly they have to do that is phenomenal. It would definitely give me a panic attack if I had to work at that speed. For example, going down the back bench and talking to the men and women who are actually physically putting the paper together and just repeating the same question again and again: “I don’t understand… how do you do this in a matter of hours?!” And they just do. For us to get our head around the skillset for that - it blew me away.

What’s the biggest challenge you faced?
We had some interesting locations. We did a whole day on tube trains. That was quite fun - jumping on and jumping off tubes on certain lines. We had to shoot some night scenes so we needed to be going through tunnels at a certain point - because we couldn’t shoot at night so we had to be going through a tunnel in order for that scene to work. Watching an entire crew going: “Ok! Everybody get off this stop! Everybody get off!” And then everybody gets off… everybody is carrying the equipment to get on the next train… because you don’t want to miss that train because then you have to wait for another one to be able to shoot more. That was really good fun, it was like guerrilla filming. It was like, ok, ok we’ve got two stops! Let’s get this bit done! I enjoyed that.