Timothy Spall and Sarah Lancashire on winning BAFTA TV Awards
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Two of Britain’s biggest stars won top honors at the BAFTA TV Awards on Sunday: Timothy Spall finally prevailed in the Best Actor race after three previous bids while Sarah Lancashire collected a bookend Best Actress award for the third and final season of “Happy Valley”; she’d won for season 2 back in 2017 and has a supporting prize for “Last Tango in Halifax” as well.
Backstage, Spall readily admitted, “I’m over the moon about this. I just am. So often the bridesmaid, today I catch the bouquet.” He then pondered the importance and meaning of awards ceremonies. “When you keep losing them, you think they’re a load of bollocks. And then you win and you think well, actually… Really, I suppose, in a way, they are both — they’re magnificent and they are an in-house thing. But it’s a profession — a dodgy, shaky, insecure profession that occasionally celebrates itself, which is lovely. But it also celebrates something that we do very well — we make very good telly. And it’s one of the oldest awards, too.”
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Spall won Best Actor for playing Peter Farquhar in “The Sixth Commandment,” the true crime limited series that tells the tragic tale of Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin (played by Anne Reid in the series), who were victims of murderer Ben Field (portrayed by Éanna Hardwicke). Spall acknowledged the material he won for was important.
“I’m privileged enough to have been in a beautifully written, beautifully heartfelt piece of work. It was a massive responsibility to get right because of the human beings who were alive, real human beings, and the people who were left who were still grieving. The genius of the whole package of this thing was how beautifully written it was, how unpretentiously made it was. Considering it was a sensational tragedy, it’s unsensationally made and it was just honest,” Spall said.
Spall is probably best known for playing Peter Pettigrew in the “Harry Potter” series, appearing most prominently in the franchise’s third entry “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” He also appeared in several Tim Burton productions, including “Alice in Wonderland” and “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” However, those were fictional characters he played. He won this BAFTA for portraying a real person, a challenge he spoke about at length backstage.
“It’s a double-edged sword because you’ve got the template. You’ve got some footage. I managed to study him, the way he spoke, the way he delivered his lines and more importantly, to stare into his eyes. Then you have to make the question: am I impersonating or am I trying to embody this person? You got to try and fix your soul to their soul and see if takes care of itself and if you get it right, it often does,” Spall said.
Lancashire is no stranger to depicting a real person herself, having played Julia Child in the HBO Max series “Julia.” She took home the Best Actress award, however, for the final edition of the beloved fictional BBC police series “Happy Valley,” which follows the personal and professional life of Yorkshire Police Sergeant Catherine Cawood. Lancashire was quick to praise series writer and creator Sally Wainwright for being the ultimate reason behind the show’s success.
“Her writing is extraordinary and musical and symphonic. She is so attuned to dialogue and to character in a way that I’ve never encountered before, which has never come my way before. From an actor’s perspective, that’s everything you hope for, really,” Lancashire said.
The show first aired in 2014, meaning it has now been a decade-long journey with the character and show. That journey has now, sadly, come to an end as season three is the final season of the show. Lancashire spoke about letting go of Catherine and how she feels about the show ending.
“You’re kind of ready to let a character go. You know it’s the end of that character when they’ve traveled their full life span, in a sense. Because of the nature of this writing, because of the nature of this beautiful story arc, it was really designed to take us through these three seasons. And, also, she was retiring, which felt like a very fitting, rightful end to her really,” Lancashire said.
She continued: “What is hardest to walk away from is the company of actors you’re working with. We’ve been working together very closely for a long time over 10 years and you feel extraordinarily privileged to have had their company for such a long time. They were rather irreplaceable, to be honest.”
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