She had one of the most notorious sex scenes in TV history. But the actor is now making waves as an upstanding cop in The Tower. She talks about intimacy coaches, on-set innuendo and cracking America
Deadlines meant I saw ITV’s twisty police corruption drama The Tower as a rough cut, featuring on-screen notes about final editing perfections, computer-generated backgrounds, extra lines of dialogue – and the instruction: “Hide pregnancy bump.”
This related to the increasing evidence of Freddie, now four weeks old, and sleeping between feeds in a pub garden near the London home of his mother, Gemma Whelan, who is amused to hear of this prenatal technology. “Wow!” she says. ‘“How are they going to do that? Paint it out? Or cut in a waistline from earlier?”
Despite high-level acting credits – including Yara Greyjoy in Game of Thrones and Kate in BBC Two’s Upstart Crow – the 40-year-old says she is never recognised in the street: “People sometimes say, ‘Do I know you from the bus stop?’ or, ‘Were we at school?’ That’s it really.”
Whelan enjoys her ability to transform into her her characters, whether with Yara’s breastplate, war paint and mouthy scowl – “it would be almost insulting to be recognised from Game of Thrones” – or, in BBC One’s The Moorside, as Karen Matthews, the Yorkshire woman jailed for faking the abduction of her daughter, so physically transformed that it fooled Whelan’s mum. “She said: ‘Strange they used so much original footage of her!’, and I said: ‘That’s all me, Mum. There is no original footage.’”
Whelan is taking minimal maternity leave partly because she is self-employed but also because, like most actors, she endured a year during lockdown of not doing very much. A West End version of Upstart Crow was shut down three weeks into the run, after which she spent “a year doing audiobooks and voiceovers”. She then filmed next year’s second series of BBC One’s Gentleman Jack – playing Marian, the sister of Anne Lister – before The Tower.
The main shoot lasted through the second trimester. With actors who are visibly pregnant when their characters are not, the convention has been to shoot them mainly from the neck up. “Yeah. It’s a great way of getting loads of closeups!” laughs Whelan who, during the final season of Game of Thrones, was carrying Frances, now four. “But there also were a lot of wide shots in The Tower. I think you’d only notice if you knew I was pregnant and, if you do notice, women have babies, who cares? It was refreshing to be able to not worry about it.”
