‘I Was Completely Thrown in the Deep End’

Jodie Whittaker has gone from playing a Time Lord to doing Time.

The former Doctor Who star joins The Last of Us’ Bella Ramsey and The Long Song’s Tamara Lawrance for Season 2 of the British prison drama, now set in a women’s correctional facility in Northern England. Whittaker’s character, Orla, is a single, working-class mother of three, struggling financially, whose world crumbles when she’s sentenced to six months behind bars. Her crime: “fiddling the leccy,” slang for tinkering with the electricity meter to lower her bill.

That nonviolent offense lands Orla in the middle of an unfathomable world—confinement with prisoners like Kelsey (Ramsey), a heroin addict, and Abi (Lawrance), a convicted killer—and plunges her even further into an abyss as she tries to hold her family together, with only her alcoholic mother to depend on. Still, it wasn’t hard for Whittaker to connect to Orla, despite their vastly different circumstances and the poor choices she makes.

“I am so close to this and so far removed in so many ways,” she says. “I’m from that town, I’m that age, and I’m a mother. But I am not on the breadline and I am supported within my community. It was interesting to play someone whose need to survive and to take care of her family would sometimes override the rational or best decision for her, but also you see what a difficult system that is to navigate.”

Whittaker also found herself tossed into an unfamiliar situation as she began work on Time. The actress had been making a movie in Australia and arrived on the set a couple of weeks after filming started. “I was completely thrown in the deep end,” she says, a scenario that seemed appropriate for playing Orla. That’s also why Whittaker avoided speaking to people who’d been incarcerated — so her immersion to Time’s rough, bleak world would be all the more striking. “The absolute shock and lack of knowledge and out of depthness was everything I had to play.”

Tamara Lawrance, Bella Ramsey and Jodie Whittaker (BritBox)

Like the first season of Time, which starred Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, Season 2’s three episodes are not for the squeamish. The scripts by series creator Jimmy McGovern (Accused) and Helen Black don’t shy away from depicting the brutality of prison life, but Orla, Kelsey, and Abi find companionship and support in each other, even though panic and rage sometimes push them to the breaking point.

Whittaker sings the praises not only of her costars but also of the young actors who played her children, Isaac Lancel-Watkinson, Brody Griffiths, and Matilda Firth. They had emotional moments to play when their characters visit Orla in prison. In one scene, Firth sat on her lap, played with her hair and, Whittaker recalls, “When they had to go, she wouldn’t let go of me, and I had to physically take her off me. That was an instinctive young actor.”

Still, the cast found moments of levity when the cameras weren’t rolling. Whittaker has said she attaches a song to each project she works on and for Time it was “Apricots,” a pulsating track from EDM duo Bicep: “We would play it in the makeup truck. It has a certain build to it that really energized us all.”

As for her most high-profile project to date, Whittaker, who made history as Doctor Who’s first female lead, says she’s watched and enjoyed last year’s installments, which starred David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa, the 15th Doctor.

“You leave this thing and you grieve it, you have this strange feeling of, ‘I never want anyone else to have those shoes.’ Then the people that take over it, smash it, so yeah, I’ve loved it,” she shares.

Whittaker feels the same about her journey from fantasy series to unflinching drama and a character whose punishment seems harsher than her crime.

“It felt like such a fascinating thing to play someone in prison who is technically guilty of their crime,” she says. “But if someone said to me, ‘Are you playing a goodie or a baddie?’ [I’d say,] ‘I’m a goodie — the system’s the baddie.’”

Time, Season 2 Premiere, Wednesday, March 27, BritBox