Keeping up with the Jones

From a betrayed wife in 'Doctor Foster' to a 19th-century lesbian in 'Gentleman Jack', actor Suranne Jones inhabits beleaguered women like no one else

- Claire Allfree

When, in the opening scenes of Netflix's political thriller Hostage, we see Suranne Jones's Abigail promising her husband Alex that she won't allow the job of prime minister to affect their family, we know this is a vow she'll be unlikely to keep.

Soon enough, the country's newly elected leader feels the pressure from all sides: not just the demands of the job itself, but the inevitable challenge of ensuring the couple's 17-year-old daughter isn’t caught doing something stupid on social media. And then comes the phone call; Alex, a doctor with Medecins Sans Frontieres, has been kidnapped in French Guiana. Abigail, her political career already on a knife-edge thanks to an NHS crisis and now the victim of a cleverly targeted blackmail plot, finds herself in a position of near intolerable stress.

Few actresses excel at portraying women under extreme pressure quite like Jones. In the BBC thriller Vigil, she played detective Amy Silva, leading a possible murder investigation five fathoms deep on an HMS submarine while suffering from a severe bout of PTSD following an accident involving her family, a car and a reservoir. A lesser actor might show it all getting to Silva. Jones preferred to reveal just the merest flicker of strain. It was all in the tight way she walked, dressed in perfunctory monochrome knitwear as though part of the paintwork; in her refusal to rise to each chippy little comment; in her dogged, implacable determination to keep on doing her increasingly perilous job.

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