Call the Midwife's Jenny Agutter on Sister Julienne and the Future of Nonnatus House
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Sister Julienne is a cornerstone of Call the Midwife. The leader of the nuns of Nonnatus House, she serves as both a guiding hand and a moral compass, both for the sisters in her charge and the young midwives in the show's East End. Over the course of 9 seasons, fans have seen many of those characters come and go, but Julienne, played by Jenny Agutter, remains a standby.
But stalwart doesn't mean stagnant, and the most recent season, which just wrapped up its U.S. debut, saw Sister Julienne facing some of her most dramatic challenges yet with the news that Nonnatus House was to be shut down.
"There are practical things that need to be looked at," Agutter said of the struggles the sister of Nonnatus House face in the show's changing times. "If you're not midwives any longer going out to people's homes, if they're suddenly coming into hospitals, you've got to make those changes that make you important within the community. That's what [show creator Heidi Thomas] has really been looking at."
Fortunately, the midwives seemed to have proven their place in the community as of the season finale, when they receive a 12 month reprieve from their forced closure and have their funding restored to continue helping the women of Poplar. But with that 12 month limit, there also looms the possibility of a bigger change down the road for the midwives of Nonnatus.
"We've moved once before, and I couldn't imagine how we could have moved then, but we did," Agutter says, referencing the production's 2013 move from St. Joseph's Missionary College in north London, which served as the original Nonnatus House, to Longcross Film Studios in Surrey. "I think the threat will remain there in the next series, but no one at the moment has said, 'Oh, we've got to be somewhere else.'"
Of course, the danger to Nonnatus House wasn't the only tribulation facing Sister Julienne this season. One of the character's defining moments of this chapter came when fans got the chance to see Julienne step out of her habit and into plainclothes after a woman accuses her of not understanding the experiences of the female citizens of Poplar.
"The younger women, the nurses, belong in the '60s. [Julienne] belongs to another time and is coming into the '60s," says Agutter. "Things are changing enormously, but not necessarily at Nonnatus House. There's very little change within it. And it's only when someone suddenly goes, 'Well, what do you actually know about the world?' that she sort of realizes that she doesn't."
"It was just wonderful to get out of the habit, actually get into costume and makeup," Agutter laughs. "Not that there was much makeup done, but it was nice to go try on some costumes for the designer. It had to be very, very plain, obviously. What it would look like if one had put it together from the basket of clothing that would be [donated to Nonnatus], but what would fit into a crowd and at the same time feel quite individual."
In the end, they chose a piece to harken back to Julienne's own personal style. "You didn't really see it all the time, but it was a '30s dress. It would have been much more of what Sister Julienne remembered of her own youth in her own clothes, her own civvies," explains Agutter. "She wasn't used to wearing anything from the '60s. She certainly wasn't going to get into a miniskirt."
It was a powerful episode, and one Agutter says she particularly responded to because it doesn't drastically change the characters or the realities of their lives; rather, it simply gives the perpetually composed Julienne an experience in the world that's very different from the one she was raised in.
Before taking on her role in the show, Agutter says, she got some unexpected inspiration for the ever-practical Julienne from a nun who had helped take care of her mother in the hospital. "I said, 'What if you have a doubt about something or you're angry about something? And she said, 'Well, you just get on with it.' She was so surprised by any question of doubt because it just seemed like the practicalities of having to do things were most important, and that's what I will tend to draw on for Sister Julienne, just the practicalities of what you have to do to make things work."
And making things work has certainly become a theme for the show, both on and off screen. Though the cast and crew would typically be in production for the show's annual Christmas special at this time of year, all filming has been temporarily put off due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
"At the moment we just don't know," Agutter says about when the show could begin filming again. "Everybody's keeping very much in touch. There's a lot of talk about starting again." In the meantime, she says the cast is keeping up with each other, social distancing-style through group messages.
"It would be very interesting to watch a Zoom version of Call the Midwife," she jokes. "The only way it would work if it was a fantasy of Sister Monica Joan's and we're out in space. Send them to, not the mother house, but the mothership!"
While the timeline might not be clear, Call the Midwife fans can rest easy knowing their favorite midwives will be back (on Earth!) when it's safe for production to begin again—before the 9th season even aired, it was announced that the show has been picked up for a 10th and 11th season.
You Might Also Like
