'We're all a bit of a mess, blundering through stuff'

After the success of ‘Happy Valley’, Siobhan Finneran talks to Katie Rosseinsky about stepping up to a long-overdue leading role and juggling hard-hitting drama with comedy

- 

Siobhan Finneran reckons she’s “not very good with dates”. But she can remember exactly what she was doing the morning after the first episode of Happy Valley’s final season aired – because she ended up having to do an accidental victory lap of one of the North West’s least glamorous locations.

“It was at the start of ’23, wasn’t it?” recalls the actor, who played Clare Cartwright, recovering addict and younger sister to Sarah Lancashire’s indefatigable police officer Catherine Cawood, in all three series of the brilliant, Bafta-winning drama. “I was flying to Iceland to make a film called The Damned, so I was at Manchester airport. I have never experienced anything like that, because in most of the queues I stood in to get on the aeroplane, everybody had watched it the night before.” They all seemed to want a post-show debrief, from the security officers screening her luggage to her fellow passengers. “Everybody loved it, so you can’t moan about that, can you?” she reasons. “I just went red a lot, and felt a bit sweaty.”

Speaking over Zoom, Finneran’s perched on a chintzy floral sofa, a vape just sneaking into the camera frame (she’s recently quit smoking). Chatting with her is enjoyably straightforward and entirely free from actorly earnestness, delivered in that recognisable Oldham accent (she was born in Manchester, then her family moved out to Saddleworth, near the Pennines, a few years later; she’s still based there now). Whether she’s playing someone like Clare, who is at once endearing and deeply frustrating, resilient in some ways but fragile in so many others, or a larger-than-life comic creation shot through with realism, as she does in shows such as Alma’s Not Normal or The Other One, Finneran has a habit of making her characters feel like people you actually know. They seem like someone you might bump into at the shops or, indeed, in the airport queue.