The time has come for the iconic bucket hat, muddy boots and shabby brown mac to be packed away – Brenda Blethyn is saying goodbye to the role of DCI Vera Stanhope.
After 14 years, the much-loved series ends with two feature-length episodes. The finale, which centres on a violent, deadly attack on a young student, brings back memories of her childhood for Vera, poignantly weaving past with present, and making for a compelling farewell.
In an exclusive interview with TV WEEK, Brenda tells us about her decision to leave and her emotional last day, as well as her fondest memories.
The Oscar-nominee has hinted in the past that she might be ready to quit the show. Why did she decide that now is the right time?
“Filming is usually six months of 16-hour days, minimum. I’m in nearly every scene, so it’s hard work and I’m not getting any younger!” Brenda, 79, tells us. “It was really just to spend time with my family, who are also not getting any younger.”
She continues: “I realised I hadn’t had a summer off for 14 years, so I was missing that.”
But the actress has managed to keep Vera close to her heart since the final emotional day of filming.
“I have Vera’s hat and mac that I took home on the last day,” she says.
“Will [Nicholson], our producer, had cleverly contrived to shoot the very last scene in the incident room – simply because all the team and most of the crew would need to be there.
“There was a round of applause at the end and a lot of speeches and my dog, Jack, was there. I got so emotional.”
The celebrations then carried over to a “lovely” wrap party in a hospitality suite at Newcastle United’s football stadium, St James’ Park.
It might be more than 15 years ago that Brenda signed up to play Vera, but she still remembers being “very nervous” at the read-through of the first script in 2010. She felt the pressure to get everything right for the character to work, especially Vera’s accent.
“That particular accent from the north-east of England is quite difficult to grasp,” Brenda explains. “I’d been having lessons, but I wasn’t sure I’d got it. And then I spotted Ann Cleeves [author of the Vera Stanhope novels] sitting there and I thought that they would cast somebody else as soon as I’d finished!”
Fortunately for Brenda, a lot of the actors in the first episode were from that north-east region, and they helped steer her in the right direction to master that specific accent.
Brenda is immensely proud of Vera’s popularity around the world, and pleased that its quirky main character, who looks unlike so many women seen on TV, has resonated with fans.
“It’s been hugely gratifying that the show has been so popular,” she says. “I think it’s because Vera is not your normal run-of-the-mill detective. She’s not wearing stiletto heels and doesn’t look like she’s stepped off a catwalk. You can kind of relate to her. If she wasn’t a detective, she’d be like loads of other people on the street.”
And Vera’s fans are never far away. Brenda recalls a funny moment when they were filming a scene at a fairground and the director wanted to do a long tracking shot right through the middle. The shot took a long time to set up and they had to make sure that every member of the cast and crew was where they were meant to be.
“We rehearsed and rehearsed until they were ready to shoot,” she says. “Then there was a shout for ‘action!’ and the camera moved brilliantly through the fair until it got to the end, by the public toilet, and a little old lady emerged, totally unaware we were filming, calling out, ‘Vera! I love you!’”
Brenda reveals how the production team belatedly learned the importance of duplicating Vera’s clothes.
“They got several copies of her mac, because sometimes we needed a double for a certain scene, or at other times the clothes would get dirty,” she says. “One time we were in a slurry where a body was found and the dirt splashed all over Vera’s mac and it had to go to the dry cleaner.
“If the take isn’t good enough, we have to do such scenes again, so they eventually had several macs lined up for me to change into. But there was only one hat for quite a while, because I’d bought it at the start from a fishing tackle shop in Newcastle and it was difficult to find anything exactly the same.”
There was one horrifying time the hat actually went missing. Brenda recalls there was a break in filming and the famous bucket hat was nowhere to be found.
“I blamed the wardrobe department,” she confesses. “I said, they’ve taken it and I don’t know what they’ve done with it!
“But I had left it somewhere… and we had to wait while it was retrieved. After that, we got some spares and I think they might have had them specially made.”
As it turns out, Brenda’s dream of putting her feet up and enjoying retirement didn’t last. She “flopped down” at her home in Kent, only for her agent to call with another job.
“She told me: ‘It’s called Dragonfly and starts next week. It’s with Andrea Riseborough, and written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams.’” Brenda says of the project, helmed by the Broadchurch director, which is currently in post-production.
“I said, ‘Ooh, OK, I’ll have a read,’ and I liked it – so I didn’t bother to unpack!”
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