‘This priest was worthy’: Keeley Hawes and Paapa Essiedu on nuns, hot priests and their tale of forbidden passion | Television

The is a nunnery of a closed order of nuns, the place is somewhere in the UK with social problems – which, let’s be real, could be anything. Anna Keeley Hawes, a nun, is not a self-righteous cloistered; they go out into the real world to do good work in food banks. But he is not about this country. They move with an unpredictable calm so it takes a beat to realize what is reminding you: obedience. The Bride of Christ, remember? He wears his faith lightly: when he is in a fenced garden, it is planting cabbage and not praising God’s creation, but he still shines peace, and his leaves shine back to him.

In the 90s, Hawes messed up one play after another: Wives and Daughters, Our Friend Together. For Falling – a wonderful project from the writer-creator Jack Thorne, who made a strong statement about the situation today and the problems with Youth that the MPs argue with in the parliament – directs something I have not seen since those days. His good looks are without guile.

“That was the hardest thing – playing someone my age (50), but not knowing the life that someone my age would have,” says Hawes. He only came here when he was 18 years old. And that has been his life.

Enter the steps of the convent Especially Essiedu like David, the priest, younger, more worldly. The character has his own demons – as Essiedu did well in I May Destroy You in 2020, as Kwame, the best friend of Michaela Coel’s Arabella, and Alex Dumani’s relative in Gangs of London. But while his David is an outsider priest – exhausted when he hears confessions – there is a fiery purity to him, as there is to Anna, who is a book. We would be calling him Hot Priest if it wasn’t already mentioned by Andrew Scott at Fleabag.

So it would be a mistake to say that real Catholic events have never been shown on TV, but it is a very unusual part to see people made of cloth. Essiedu says: “Sometimes their cars break down. “Sometimes they have to go buy socks.” Hawes and Essiedu are talking to me from the same Zoom room, and they have a picture of their computer screen, kind of weird: what country are you from – and how do I live there?

However, David arrives at the convent with a purpose in mind: he wants to get a young man out of a house of abuse to spend a little time there. He is abandoned, frustrated by the rules that run the whole machine, and Anna makes him an omelet. Their hands touch, so accidentally, that all hell breaks loose.

“There is something in them passionately and violently that unites them and separates them,” says Essiedu, “that bears fruit.”

Neither Hawes nor Essiedu were raised Catholic – they were not religious at all and attended the Anglican church as a child, but “stopped going in late adolescence, when you start to take your personality in life”. Hawes spent a lot of time with the former nun, researching the position.

“He’s my age, and he had an experience called wall jumping,” says Hawes. I don’t know if this is self-explanatory – it’s a puckish, Beatrix Potter-style version of a difficult decision: leaving the convent and re-entering a world that has probably changed a lot since you last saw it and decided it wasn’t yours.

Hawes refers to this ancient figure as “my sister”, a messenger from another world where everything is the same but completely different, orbiting a different sun (Lord, obvs). “The unstoppable conversation I was able to have with him, asking funny little questions: How do nuns come up with hygiene products? How do you know if you can’t use Google?”

It seems, that jumping the wall – I think you can call it divorce Christ or uncoupling in mind, but they probably would not like it – happens a little among young nuns, so there is a long period of calm before another conflict in the middle ages. There is a subtle but obvious sense of puberty in Anna’s sudden abandonment of what she ordered, the growth of her desire.

“It’s not always clear when it’s menopause,” says Hawes. But I talked to my sister about how difficult it is for many women in convents, not knowing what is going on, not having access to the help that we take for granted.

Essiedu had his real hot priest of a mentor, “actually, he was enough. I felt like I knew that kind of person – hairy, hairy, clear, the priest I remembered from the church when I was a child. This was a young man who was the same age as me (35), who had his indescribable character, and the way he acted, and the way he acted, and the way he acted. Very surprising because he talked about the contradictions he faced, his faith and his work.

Anna’s job disappears the moment she leaves the convent – in frustration, at the workplace, she says: “I can make a CV but it just says ‘nun’ Job profile: ‘nun'” – but David doesn’t stop. They get slapped in the face, literally, figuratively, constantly. He’s fallen off the wagon, he’s getting back on. He is surrounded on many sides by the cold, unchallenged values ​​of the church. “Sometimes we can be misled by this idea that religious leaders are fanatics who only follow doctrine.

Everyone in the play except David and Anna are completely, effortlessly down to earth – abusive husbands, good boyfriends, sisters, Sisters, congregations, AA meetings, parents, friends. It is recognized as a group but you cannot put it all in time. It’s not because the protagonists don’t have cell phones, or because nobody watches the news. It is more that the protagonists are in conflict between the present and their eternal lives, so whether it is 2010 or 2020 they feel unknown, irrelevant. “I think it’s great to be in a neighboring country,” Essiedu says.

If the internal turmoil of the nun and the priest seems unusual, the kindness of the people around, the beauty of their events – the churchgoers are very close to each other on the coach journey, David’s sister, Susan, who is deaf and says that reading the facial expressions of people is her greatest strength – and high performance, impressive speech. How do you create good people, put them in context and challenges, give them experiences, keep them from being saccharine? Often times in the early stages it’s a little difficult, for all those readings, but when it comes together it feels like the real thing, the whole drama a little bit. Sophie Stone, who was the first deaf student admitted to Rada in the fall of 2005, provides a magnetic, stable energy that contributes greatly to the atmosphere: good but not wet.

I don’t want to mention the Hot Race, because really, again? And in almost every way, Fall is not the same as – no hot sex, zero in Canada, lack of sports (again, this makes the time timeless. If it were today, someone, maybe many people, would be wearing fur). But there’s something in the drama that makes it, like the hockey smash, feel more like a romantic fairy tale than TV. Anna begins with a strong determination, she feels like an object for a man, that is, she is the future: she has “a kind of ignorance, like a teenager, she thinks that’s how it works”, says Hawes. David is so scared that he has become a nun. Essiedu said: “They put him in a position where they just want to take his point of view. Maybe because their conscience is so big in the play that the guilt is like an individual, all their actions seem to raise the question of true love.” andwhether it is sufficient to do the work of the trumpet, whether the work means anything without them.

Is love one constant feeling, in different relationships, or is it like cancer: as soon as we understand it well, we start giving each name? Essiedu said: “It cannot be a story of love, but a story of love—childhood love, the love that a priest has for his flock, the love of a relative, the love that a man must show to forgive his mother before his last rites are read.” “And for the love of God,” Hawes chimes in. Oh yes, I forgot about God. Essiedu said: “You should have just let me finish for the love of God!”

The Fall starts on Channel 4 on 19 May at 9pm.