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Jason Watkins: ‘Losing a child doesn’t get easier over time’

Jason Watkins as Bernard Fortescue, the editor of The Daily Telegraph, in the BBC's new adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days - Peu Communications
Jason Watkins as Bernard Fortescue, the editor of The Daily Telegraph, in the BBC's new adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days - Peu Communications

The first time Jason Watkins was nominated for a major acting award was back in 2001. It was for his performance in Goldoni’s 18th-century comedy A Servant of Two Masters at London’s Young Vic. He has fond memories of the play. One night, the former chancellor Geoffrey Howe was in the audience with his wife, Lady Howe, and Watkins, whose role demanded that he hand out piles of laundry to selected playgoers, seized on the opportunity. He gave a stack to Elspeth Howe, and ad-libbed, “You’ll need an iron, Lady,” before turning to Sir Geoffrey: “I know you got rid of yours.”

The quip relied on knowing the decisive role that Howe’s resignation speech in 1990 had in toppling Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Watkins didn’t scoop the Olivier that year, but he did get a letter from Howe saying how much he had enjoyed the play. The story comes up over a video call, when I ask Watkins, who played Harold Wilson in season three of The Crown, who he would choose if he could come back for season five, set in the 1990s. “I’d play him,” he says, “because he did stand up and say what he felt. It absolutely sunk her, didn’t it? But I think that it was the right time.”

Watkins is a man of hidden talents. He played football at semi-pro level, won the “accent” prize at Rada (he thinks he could hold his own against Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan in The Trip) and came close to breaking a world record for walking on his hands when he was 13 (which once led Alan Bennett to ask him to do a handstand on a zimmer frame). But, at the time of the Howe incident, he was still scraping a living, taking part after part, rarely turning anything down. “I’ve done about 100 plays,” he says. “It was a struggle.”

The masterful character actor was also “getting little bits of telly” that would soon become lots of telly. This Christmas we’ll see him playing the editor of The Daily Telegraph, no less, in the BBC’s big-budget adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic 19th-century adventure Around the World in 80 Days; and already this year, he’s appeared in the second series of crime drama McDonald & Dodds, as the nerdily brilliant DS Dodds (he’s shooting a third series in Bristol when we speak), as well as tackling the real-life climate scientist Phil Jones in BBC One’s The Trick.

But the role that changed his life, he says, was his Bafta-winning turn in the 2014 ITV drama The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies. He played the retired Bristol schoolteacher, arrested on suspicion of the murder of 25-year-old landscape architect Joanna Yeates at Christmas 2010, who was paraded by the tabloids before his release without charge.

Watkins as Christopher Jefferies - ITV
Watkins as Christopher Jefferies - ITV

Watkins’s performance was informed by a great tragedy in his own life. “I connect emotionally with that piece because I lost my daughter,” he says. “At the heart of it, someone has lost their daughter and I understand what that is. All my efforts in doing it were fuelled by a sense of grief.” Watkins’s two-year-old daughter Maude died from undiagnosed sepsis on New Year’s Day 2011. Watkins and his wife had twice taken her to A&E with respiratory problems.

Does he feel anger that they were sent away both times? “No. I mean, that’s one of the big fears, isn’t it? Did I do enough? And the answer is always, ‘Yes, you did’, because you only do what’s right in that moment, and I attribute no blame to anybody at all. The fact that we were sent home from the hospital on those two occasions was about the difficulties in diagnosing and treating sepsis.”

Has time made what happened any easier to cope with? “Time doesn’t… I think the important thing is you’re able to function as a parent to your other children, if you’re lucky enough to have more children, and you’re able to cope with the world and work. When you’re in the trauma of losing a child, you can’t imagine that that will ever be the case. Time offers you that. And you’re able to hold the tragedy with you, you have it as part of your life and that becomes manageable.

“But I don’t know that it gets easier. Sometimes it gets more confusing because you think you should be able to not react to seeing a child that was very like your child in a playground. Or that holding your son’s hand reminds you of…” He stops. “It still does.”

Watkins, right, as former prime minister Harold Wilson in The Crown - AP
Watkins, right, as former prime minister Harold Wilson in The Crown - AP

Watkins and his wife Clara Francis (co-founder of the fashion label O Pioneers, beloved of the Prime Minister’s wife, Carrie Johnson) have a daughter, Bessie, now 15, who was four at the time, and Gilbert, nine, who was born after the tragedy. Watkins also has two children from an earlier marriage.

All will be in the target audience for Around the World in 80 Days when it starts on Boxing Day. Verne’s tale famously leaps off from a discussion at London’s Reform Club about an article in The Daily Telegraph estimating the time it would take to circumnavigate the globe, which leads the unassuming Phileas Fogg (David Tennant) to take a potentially ruinous bet that he can complete the journey.

Watkins’s character, the elaborately whiskered Bernard Fortescue, has been created for the eight-part drama, as has his suffragist daughter, Abigail Fix (Leonie Benesch, who incidentally played Prince Philip’s tragic sister Princess Cecilie in The Crown). Fix demands to be recognised as a journalist in her own right and stows away to report on Fogg’s odyssey.

The adaptation, a British-French co-production filmed in English, is a rollicking take on the source material. Fogg’s flit to Paris to change trains, for instance, now finds him amid the battle between the Communards of the National Guard and soldiers loyal to the Third Republic. Verne purists – his fellow Frenchman President Macron, perhaps, who has a black Labrador named after Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – may not approve.

Has Watkins ever been in anything as freely adapted as this? “I’ve been in plays that have been freely adapted from Shakespeare,” he says, “and sometimes one’s wary of those. But in this… it’s not a particularly huge book, and it’s full of this great adventure and wonder, written with great verve, so [the question is] ‘Why change that?’ All I can say is that I think it’s hugely successful, you are completely transported… and it liberates all these great themes.”

Of course, some will see changes, such as the addition of feminist Abigail Fix, as tampering with the story to make it fit more closely the cultural imperatives of today.

Does Watkins have any sympathy with those who see the BBC as so determined to update everything according to a liberal world view that they themselves feel alienated by it? “No I don’t,” he says. “If we had been doing Shakespeare in doublet and hose for the past 500 years, it might have disappeared. I really think the world is changing… and a lot of it is about time.”

I wonder what he thinks the BBC’s “director of strategic governance” Simon Harwood, whom he played in W1A, would say about the culture wars? He laughs. “Well, he would do his classic, ‘You’ll know more about how you want to deal with this than I do.’ He’d hand it over to somebody else, and tell them, ‘Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.’ He would never put his head on the line. There’s a lot of people having to put their views on the line a bit now. He would never do that.”


Around the World in 80 Days begins on BBC One on Boxing Day at 5.50pm