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Privacy NoticeJenna Coleman is beaming with joy as she poses on the BBC’s red carpet – but it’s not just her upcoming detective drama The Jetty that she’s excited to show off. The former Doctor Who star is cradling her baby bump, having announced last month that she’s expecting her first child with partner Jamie Childs. After having high-profile relationships with The Bodyguard’s Richard Madden and her Victoria co-star Tom Hughes, Jenna, 38, has now found happiness with filmmaker Jamie, 35. They started dating in 2020 after the pair worked on Netflix’s fantasy drama The Sandman together. With a baby on the way, Jenna’s latest project has been the perfect preparation for motherhood. She stars in BBC One’s intriguing new crime series The Jetty as Ember Manning – a detective and mum who begins to discover her late husband’s mysterious past when she works on a decades-old missing person case. “She’s investigating a case which becomes very personal to her,” Jenna says. “It’s a very character, human and relationship-driven drama that’s wrapped up as a detective thriller.”
(Image: BBC/Firebird/Ben Blackall)
(Image: Dave Benett/Getty Images)
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When a lakeside property in Ember’s Lancashire town is destroyed by a fire, Ember learns that it is connected to the case of Amy Knightly, a teenager who disappeared years before after an illicit relationship with an older man. “The Jetty asks probing questions about identity, sexual boundaries, sexual politics and the awakening of one’s self,” Jenna adds. While Jenna is pregnant in her late thirties, her character Ember had her teenage daughter Hannah (played by Bridgerton’s Ruby Stokes) when she was just 17. The Blackpool-born actress admits that she learnt a lot from a friend, who was a young mum, for the role. “The scenes I love the most are Ember with her daughter,” Jenna says. “I actually have a friend who had a daughter when she was 18 and their dynamic was really interesting. It is that line between, ‘We’re friends but sometimes I have to pull the mum card.’ The dynamic also becomes a lot more about Hannah taking care of Ember as well. It felt very natural.” Just as Jenna is heading into the new territory of motherhood, Ember is “rediscovering herself” after the death of her husband. “Ember is going through an awakening and really finding herself,” Jenna says. “Her husband, who she was with from a very young age, died a year before the series starts so she’s rediscovering herself.”
(Image: BBC/Firebird Pictures/Ben Blackall)
(Image: Dave Benett/Getty Images for The Ambassadors Theatre Group)
Jenna adds, “The more she unravels the case, the more she has to re-examine and redefine her own past, and in doing so her own past relationships and her own identity.” Since Jenna first rose to fame as Jasmine Thomas on Emmerdale nearly two decades ago, the actress has enjoyed a star-studded dating history as her career reached new heights. At 18, Jenna stepped out with her first celebrity boyfriend, then 23-year-old Karl Davies, who played Robert Sugden on the soap. The pair were secretly an item for eight months before going public in May 2006, with Jenna telling The Mirror at the time, “We didn’t tell people at first because I didn’t know how they’d react.” However, Jenna and Robert are thought to have split in 2009. Jenna began an on-off relationship in 2011 with Game Of Thrones star Richard Madden. Although they parted ways in 2015, the former partners are still friends – and even holidayed together in Spain earlier this year. Jenna was rumoured to be dating Prince Harry in 2015, however she later clarified that the royal was just “a friend”. One year on, she began a relationship with her Victoria co-star Tom Hughes, but after it reportedly “ran its course” the couple split in 2020 — shortly before Jenna found romance with her partner Jamie.
Filming on The Jetty began just nine months before Jenna confirmed her pregnancy and she admits that it was a joy to be surrounded by so many women on set, including writer Cat Jones and producer Elizabeth Kilgarriff. “It was all women and it was great. It felt like a very feminine story right from the origins,” she says. Jenna admits that she has avoided taking on detective roles in the past, however The Jetty’s captivating script drew her to the drama. “My reluctance in the past, as much as I love detective thrillers, has been where you become a vehicle with which to turn the cogs of the story,” she explains. “Whereas for me, I felt I knew who Ember was as a human from the first page. It felt like a human and emotional story as much as a detective thriller – the two co-exist together. That completely hooked me and also the beauty, the themes, the waters of conscious trauma, blurred boundaries, memories. It felt so dense and rich.” Describing Ember as “prickly, stubborn, proud and free-willed”, Jenna reveals that her character’s complexity made the job “more interesting and easier”. She adds, “There are certain scenes where she could bounce off in so many different directions and the flaws are what I love about her the most. Her pigheadedness and impatience is her Achilles heel. She is driving that arson case and charging forward but at the same time unravelling her whole past.”
(Image: BBC/Firebird Pictures/Matt Towers)
As well as Jenna, The Jetty stars Scott & Bailey’s Amelia Bullmore as Ember’s free-spirited mother Sylvia, I May Destroy You’s Weruche Opia as true-crime podcaster Riz and Gold Digger’s Archie Renaux as Ember’s colleague Hitch. “Ember’s relationship with Hitch is really fun,” Jenna says. “I loved filming those scenes with him. She’s quite challenging of Hitch and calls him out all the time, so there’s this constant banter and back-and-forth between them. Ember gives him a lot of tough love.” Meanwhile, Ember’s dynamic with her own mother is also far from ordinary. “It’s so reverse engineered,” Jenna explains. “It’s like the mother is the teenager and the daughter is the grandmother. Everything is not set out in a very obvious path, which is what I really loved about it.” She adds, “Her relationship with her deceased husband is interesting as well, and a key focus of the show, as Ember spends the series reframing her relationship with him, putting a new lens on it in retrospect.” With The Jetty and her first baby about to arrive, Jenna is entering a new period in her life – although she won’t miss the horrendous weather that plagued the show’s set each day. The Jetty’s Chilean director Marialy Rivas admits that she felt terrible for filming Jenna in the atrocious rain when shooting in Yorkshire. “There was a scene where I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is not happening. I can’t believe I’m doing this to Jenna.’ It has to do with the weather and intensity,” Marialy laughs. “Shooting was crazy, it was like a roller coaster. The crew was laughing at me because I was thinking, ‘How can you shoot in the rain?’” Jenna adds, “Marialy was like a Russian doll. I’ve never seen such a small head with so many coats on top, there were 10. It grew every day!” The Jetty airs Monday 15th July at 9pm on BBC One, or stream the whole series from 6am on BBC iPlayer.Story SavedYou can find this story in My Bookmarks.Or by navigating to the user icon in the top right.Follow OK! MagazineFacebookTwitterCommentMore OnDoctor WhoEmmerdaleGame Of ThronesNetflixDramaJenna ColemanPrince HarryRichard Madden
