Sally Wainwright (“Happy Valley”) has reclaimed Anne Lister in a bold way in the HBO limited series “Gentleman Jack.” Suranne Jones (“Scott & Bailey,” “Doctor Foster”), at the top of her game, plays Lister, a woman who wore a long black coat and a top hat and made it clear in her prolific diaries — part of which were written in code to cover up her relationships — that she would never marry a man. Jones’ Anne is a woman far ahead of her time. Comfortable with her sexuality in a world where it cannot be spoken, she devotes her time to finding a woman with an income that she can build her life with.
Wainwright wrote and created “Gentleman Jack.” She also directed alongside Sarah Harding and Jennifer Perrott.
Women and Hollywood spoke to Wainwright and Jones about where Lister’s nickname, “Gentleman Jack,” came from, their previous collaborations, and creating compelling female characters.
“Gentleman Jack” will premiere tonight, April 22, on HBO.
This interview has been condensed and edited. It was transcribed by Gabriela Rico.
W&H: When I found “Scott & Bailey,” I literally devoured every single episode on YouTube. Was that your first collaboration?
SW: No. The first thing we did was in 2007. I wrote a [TV movie] called “Dead Clever: The Life and Crimes of Julie Bottomley,” and Suranne played the lead in that. But I wasn’t involved in production, so I don’t think I met you then.
SJ: No, I don’t think you did. But it was brilliant, and that, again, was way ahead of its time, I think.
SW: Yeah it wasn’t really appreciated.
SJ: It was a dark comedy, and it was so far ahead of its time in its tone and style.
SW: And then I wrote a three-part thriller called “Unforgiven” that Suranne played the lead in. And then Suranne invented “Scott & Bailey” and asked me on-board to write.
W&H: You created “Scott & Bailey,” Suranne?
SJ: With a friend of mine. I did the treatment with Sally Lindsay, who ended up playing my sister. We took it to a company, and then Sally read the treatment, and I think you did a first draft of it and then you met [writer and producer] Diane Taylor.
SW: That’s right! I wrote the first three seasons, and then Season 4 I had moved on to “Last Tango [in Halifax]” by that point.
W&H: I think the theme is that you are ahead of where everybody else is, and I still feel like you’re ahead of where everybody else is. Why aren’t other people catching up and creating the types of characters that you’ve always created, that you’ve always played? What is the problem?
SJ: It’s good for us though, in a way.
SW: We’re both quite lucky in that we can pick and choose what we do, and we can both choose to just do things that we feel passionate about. I think I’ve always felt very excited and passionate about writing women for women, and I think that’s quite rare. I think most people think if you’re going to create a complex, powerful character it’s a man. I think even women think that.
It’s odd because some of the greatest minds in history — Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee — understood and loved writing about women and put them center stage. And yet in our current TV climate predominantly, I put on Netflix and see what’s on, and I see just male faces. And the old token woman is still how I feel. There’s very few things out there for me, a 55-year-old woman, to watch.
For ages I didn’t realize that what I was doing was quite unusual. I thought I was just doing what I was turned on by — putting interesting, flawed, powerful maybe, but complex women center stage, because that’s what excites me. That’s what I want to see on television. And I’ve only kind of slowly become aware that that’s actually quite unusual.
SJ: And with “Scott & Bailey,” I remember being interviewed back then actually, and they’d say, “Wow, this show is about two women.” Me and [co-star] Lesley [Sharp] would often say, “Would you sit there and say, ‘Wow this show is about two men, two detectives?’”
Or even with “Gentleman Jack,” it seems that when there is a complex, brilliant, three-dimensional character created like this, that people kind of go with banners out and lead the charge. [It will be great] when we get to a place where that doesn’t happen, and it won’t be such an amazing thing that someone has written these characters.
As an actress, I have a company with my husband, who also likes writing for women. We create things together and bring development things together. And I think a lot of actors are doing that now to try and generate their own work. That’s just something that I’m interested in, because I don’t want to take work at my age, with a small child that’s going to take me away from him, if it’s not an important piece.
W&H: Coming to “Gentleman Jack,” where did you find the passion for this project?
SW: I became aware of Anne Lister in the 1990s. I grew up in Halifax, so we’re very familiar with Shibden Hall [Lister’s home], but Anne Lister was kind of hidden away in mystery for a long time. And in the ’90s, people started to become a lot more aware of her. But it was still quite hard to find information about her — this was pre-internet.
When I read Jill Liddington’s book [“Female Fortune”], which was published in 1998, that was the first time I got a really big hit of just who Anne Lister was. And as soon as you start to find anything out about Anne Lister, you go, “Oh my god this is gold!”
W&H: How did she get the nickname Gentleman Jack?
SW: It’s an oral tradition in Halifax. It’s not written down anywhere, “Gentleman Jack.” It’s an insult. She was a social climber, and she was considered to be quite snooty. She did keep her gaze above [polite society] — she had to. It was kind of her carapace to deal with the fact that when she walked through Halifax, she was a very unusual figure. So, gentleman because she was a bit snooty, and Jack was sort of the equivalent slang term for dyke.
I became aware of Belinda [O’Hooley] and Heidi [Tidow’s] song “Gentleman Jack,” [which says] “behind her back she’s Gentleman Jack.” So, it’s like she took advantage of the fact that she was hiding in plain sight. She was so open about who she was, but nobody had any language for it except for very vulgar language, like insulting her with “Gentleman Jack” or very sort of highfalutin language like “wintering in Rome.”
SJ: I’ve never asked you actually — were you reclaiming that as a name?
SW: Yeah, [I was] reclaiming it.
W&H: Oh, I thought the “gentleman” was more about the gender nonconforming piece of it. So how did you come to that distinctive walk, look, and mannerism? Talk a little bit about kind of how you got the groove of Gentleman Jack/Anne Lister.
SJ: I think I had to be brave with my choices. The last couple of things that I’ve done were quite internal pieces where I knew the camera would find what I was doing. Certainly “Doctor Foster” was a psychological piece, so my work was with the camera team a lot. Sally did do that at times [with “Gentleman Jack”] when we needed to do that and to really be in the thoughts and the relationship with Ann Walker [played by Sophie Rundle].
But Sally pushed me out of my comfort zone [to find] someone who was an “oddity,” in Anne Lister’s words — someone who stood out in the crowd. We know from her journals that she walked fast and upright. She was mistaken for a man. She had masculine features and a low voice. She was unusual looking, and she was fiercely intelligent and charismatic. We had a lot of evidence to go off before we built her up.
With the voice, not only did I lower the tone, but then, because she was a social climber, we felt that she would try use it, along with the clothes, as armor. With the voice she is essentially a snob, so we kept the flat notes of the north, but we just moved her to slightly posher, depending on who she was talking to. Which, again, made her different when she came back to shabby little Shibden, so that she could look down on that.
W&H: So were a lot of the trips that she took out of her class in society?
SJ: Yeah.
SW: A lot of people assumed that she was quite wealthy because she was a landowner. She wasn’t. People think she had this class confidence that allowed her to just be gay, and that she had that ability to be shameless because of the class confidence. But actually, Shibden wasn’t the biggest and her income was quite small, she just made it go a long way.
She was very good at appearing to be things that she wasn’t, and she was a very astute social climber. She was very lower landed gentry. She was what we used to call yeoman. She was below the landed gentry, but she ended up hobnobbing with royalty in Denmark because she was very charming, very charismatic, and a great conversationalist.
SJ: We didn’t put it in the show, because there’s just not time to put all the detail in, but she didn’t like the fires lit to save money. She did darn her own clothes to kind of keep them looking well, rather than send them off and pay for someone to do it. And she cleaned her own boots and stuff, as well as her servants doing that. What we see of her is armor. It’s kind of an affected persona that she has. And we see that drop with the 29 different relationships that we see her in.
We got the mannerisms [like] the watch checking, because in her diary she’s always put in the specific times, so we knew that she was obsessed with that. She always checks out of scenes before she finishes conversations because she’s on to the next thing that she’s doing. Being very close to people, checking them out so that she could notice like dirt under fingernails. It’s like you’d describe her as Sherlock Holmes in a way just because she’s socially fascinating and awkward, but also taking in as much information. She’s like a sponge in that way.
W&H: So she’s always on guard?
SJ: Yeah.
W&H: And I guess that’s a lot about the sexuality stuff, too. Like the fact that all her diaries were in code and then somebody deciphered them and then hid them away because they realized that she was gay.
SW: They weren’t all in code. We think about a sixth of [all of] it is in code. Do you know about the diaries? They’re vast. There are 27 volumes, 300 pages in each volume — very densely written. She was a compulsive writer. The level of detail is shocking, it’s almost like you’ve got a video camera following around every sentence with her. Not only did she live this extraordinary, remarkable, action-packed life, but she wrote it all down as well.
SJ: And we had them in our hands as well, because we took out the artifacts [from the Halifax library]. Sally had seen them a few times before, but then when she took me up, we were able to take them out. They’re beautiful and they look quite new, don’t they?
SW: Yeah.
SJ: They’re really well preserved. And to actually read the pages that she wrote, where her hands had been. And Sally could read the code as well.
SW: We’ve been talking a lot about how the speaking straight to camera, for me, is like a version of what you feel like when you read the real journal. It’s like that immediate, intimate connection with Anne Lister. So for her to turn to the camera and talk towards it, I hope there’s that emotional effect of what it’s like when you have that.
And you can be the first person to have looked at that since she wrote it. So much of the diary hasn’t been transcribed. A lot of them have, but there’s a fraction of the journal, just about, that has been transcribed in publications that exist.
SJ: And we use the stuff that was in the secret code and then the detailing of her lesbian life very delicately I think, because we got an intimacy coordinator on. We took excerpts from her diary. We talked at length about how we were going to portray the love affair aspect — the other girlfriends that she’d had, [such as] Marianna Lawton [Lydia Leonard].
In the end, we did all that research and we were very true to the diaries. She didn’t like to be penetrated, she didn’t like her breasts to be touched, because she felt she was being womanized. Like I said, we’re really delicate with that stuff.
We felt like we didn’t need to see too much, because otherwise it becomes a different show. And what you see is more about a complex relationship developing rather than just the sex.
W&H: I want to talk a little bit about the female gaze a bit, because it’s something that is also being reclaimed. Because of the male gaze, which Laura Mulvey wrote about so long ago, people are really talking about the female gaze now and demanding things be seen from a female perspective.
SW: Well that was really poignant, particularly with the sex scenes. I wanted to make a point of saying you can convey intimacy, sexiness, love, all that, and you don’t have to be graphic about it. You can do it really subtly and beautifully, and you don’t have to be explicit.
W&H: Do you have any thoughts on your directing more now and putting your vision out there in a different way?
SW: I guess it’s just an instinct. It’s something I have always wanted to do. When I started writing at university, I was directing at university as well. And then my writing took off, and I always thought directing was something that people trained to do, and I haven’t been trained. And then I had children, so it was difficult to be away from home.
When I started directing five years ago, it’s something that had never really got away from me. I feel it’s like an extension of writing. I know some writers just like to hand it over and let someone else step in, but I’ve always hated it when I’ve had to hand it off to someone else.
SJ: And our other directors are brilliant — Sarah [Harding] and Jen [Perrott] — but I’ve got to say, we did miss Sally, because she just filled us with so much information every day. The nuances that you could put into scenes when she was there were just gold dust.
W&H: You said in an LA Times article that “we’re all pleased that there are more female characters, but most of the stories are very masculine, driven by male characters.” Do you want to say anything more about writing women, the need for us to see some more women on screen, and where the movement for this is going now?
SW: I think, as I said, that more people need to be genuinely excited about writing for women and putting complex women center stage. I think these days people are latching onto this, and often you see dramas that pretend to be about women and they’re not. They’ll put all of them center stage, and then they’re about four men there who are actually what people are really excited about. I think we need to move on from that. We need to have stories where even if it’s about a complex, interesting woman, there are other women there as well.
I remember when we did “Scott & Bailey,” what blew people away was that they had a boss who wasn’t horrible to them. She was a woman and she wasn’t a bitch. I think that women have been written as types for so long that women in real life started imitating the types they see on TV. It’s become more self-perpetuating myth that all women are interested in men, clothes, makeup shit. Women need to write about real women who are you — complex and interesting and are interested in other things besides those things.
SJ: ERA 50:50 is about the equal and fair representation of people in society. And I don’t think there’s enough of that, exactly what Sally says, so that people can see images or portraits of people that they would like to be.
