Alexandra Roach on D.S. Joy Freers interview
Alexandra Roach discusses how becoming D.S. Joy Freers is something her family have been waiting for...
Joy is a nervous soul, quite fragile. She's finding her feet in the sergeant role which she's been given in Episode 1, unexpectedly over her best mate Dinah. She's learning by making mistakes, but she also goes by the book. She looks up to Deering a lot and she sees herself one day becoming a Ma'am. Dinah and Joy are close and have been friends for a while, and the real dynamic of the pair continues when Joy gets the promotion over her.
Throughout the series she grows a lot as a character. Joy is putting on a brave face, but she's also becoming a bit more confident. She does know her stuff, she's a good police officer - but she does it in a different way from everyone else. They all follow their instincts, following their heart, whereas Joy doesn't have that at all. She follows every rule in the book. She hates following her instinct and that's why her and Dinah are so different. The arc of her journey through the series is her becoming a better policewoman and finding her feet in this cop shop.
The team are incredibly close and I did wonder how we were going to get that across, because you can't really act that. So for the first couple of weeks we got to know each other and go out for drinks, and we really became a tight unit. Everyone's got their different characters and characteristics within the group that just make it work.
It's fun playing a copper. I grew up being surrounded by coppers. My dad was a policeman, my sister has just left the police force and my brother's still in the police force and my best friend is a PC, so I'm surrounded by them! When I got this job I did ring my dad and say "I'm finally a cop dad". One time Joy had to flash her warrant card and it should look like something that she's been doing for years. But of course I've never done that. So I FaceTimed my brother and asked if he could get his warrant card and flash it to me. And I was like "How do you do it? Do it again!" and I got the team around the phone saying "This is how you hold a warrant card," because we don't know these things - why would we?!
I've only done one job before in Manchester, when I first left drama school. So this time round it was just revisiting the accent, hoping it was still in my muscle memory. I met Celia Imrie when I was about 11 and asked her for advice. She said that if you are ever working in an accent go to that town, go into a shop, talk to the shopkeeper and order something in that accent. If they give you a funny look you haven't nailed it but when they stop giving you funny looks that's when you can feel confident that you've got the accent down - and that's what I did! And it is really scary because at the start people do look at you funny if you haven't got the sound quite right. But finding Joy's voice was important. She's not got a broad Mancunian accent - she's quite self-conscious, so she wouldn't let herself be lax or lazy with the accent. So it was just trying to find that Mancunian accent within this tight stressed character.
I first came across Paul Abbott at drama school. They told me to speak in an RP accent and that I should love Shakespeare and Jacobian plays. I was really homesick. I was living in Camden and went to a second hand book shop and there was Series 1 and 2 of Shameless. I bought it. And I swear that's what got me through my first year because I'd watch James McAvoy and Maxine Peake and think "This is what I want to do." - so Paul Abbott taught me that without him even knowing!
Paul's writing is so brave you can't go in half-arsed or half-hearted with it, you have to throw all your eggs in and hope it works.
No Offence is unlike anything I've worked on or read before. It is really dark at times with the cases we try to solve, but you'd want these people solving these cases because they are all good police officers.