Unforgotten star Sinéad Keenan: ‘I thought it would be foolish to take this on’

How do you keep a television series going after killing off the character everyone loved? In the case of Unforgotten: replace her with a character that most of us will hate.

Nicola Walker bowed out of the ITV series in 2021 after six years as DCI Cassie Stuart, owing to an unfortunate run-in with a car (Cassie) and a desire to act in other things (Walker). But the show has returned with new arrival DCI Jessica “Jessie” James, played by Irish actress Sinéad Keenan. It is not a like-for-like swap. Jessie is brusque, in no mood to make friends, and appears to have little interest in the business of solving historic murders. The fact that her marriage has imploded as she is about to head off for her first day at work doesn’t help matters.

“I fully anticipate that, for at least the first half of the series, nobody’s going to like me,” grins Keenan. She’s talking about the reaction from Cassie’s team, who are still grieving for their colleague, but also from viewers, who will miss Walker.

“With the team, she’s constantly measured against the brilliance of Cassie, and their love for her: ‘You picked this eejit?’ And the audience will be doing the same.” But it’s testament to Keenan’s own likeability that the character earns our sympathy as the series goes on.

Did she hesitate when offered the part? “I saw the reaction when Cassie died and I thought, ‘Oh, God, woe betide anyone who takes that on.’ Then I got a call from my agent saying that the people from Unforgotten wanted to give the script to a handful of actors, and would I put my name in the pot? I said, ‘Thank you very much, I’m delighted that they thought I’d be able, but no. Nicola Walker is fantastic and so well-loved – who’d be the fool?’” But she was persuaded to read the script, and realised that the writing was too good to turn down.

The double act between Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar, who plays DI Sunil “Sunny” Khan, was intrinsic to the success of the show. When Keenan got the part, Bhaskar contacted her on Twitter. “The grown-ups [producers] had organised a proper lunch with everyone, but Sanjeev very kindly said, ‘Look, do you want to meet up before then? Because you might feel a bit awkward.’ Which was really thoughtful and lovely. So we had an hour-long chat on Zoom, and he could not have been nicer.”

Keenan, 45, is a supremely easy person to get along with, a lively and unpretentious soul whose conversation is peppered with exclamations that signpost her Irish roots. “What in the name of Jesus?” “The notions!” Raised in Dublin, she didn’t come from an acting family, but all three children have gone into the profession (her brother, Rory, was in last year’s acclaimed Channel 4 drama Somewhere Boy). “People think we must be loud and obnoxious and ‘jazz hands’, and we’re not. In real life we’re quite dull,” she laughs.

Keenan didn’t go to drama school, instead studying history and sociology at university and assuring her parents that she would get a proper job if the acting didn’t work out. But she quickly landed a tiny role in the 1999 film Sunburn, as Cillian Murphy’s girlfriend, and then a regular gig in a Dublin-set soap, Fair City, playing “a feisty barmaid – they’re always feisty, aren’t they?” Thereafter she worked steadily in television, film and theatre, including a stint at the RSC – just around the corner from where we meet, as Keenan lives in Stratford-upon-Avon with her husband, theatre director Chris McGill, and their two sons.

Robbie Coltrane gave her an early lesson in how to be a team player when she appeared with him in a 2001 film, On the Nose. She and another young actor were with Coltrane, who was the big name on the production, when an assistant director came in to tell him that the day’s shoot would take longer than expected. “He said, ‘Sorry, Robbie, we’re going to run over, is that all right?’ [Coltrane] said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’ Then the assistant director left the room and Robbie called him back in, very loudly, and said, ‘There are two other actors in the room – you have to ask them as well.’  It was so nice of him. He was a gent, a lovely man.”

At first, Keenan was resigned to playing the sister or best friend, not the lead. She is 5 ft 1.5 in – “the half is terribly important!” – and her height probably ruled her out of certain jobs. “I went for a role a few years ago as a prison guard. Ridiculous! I would be overwhelmed in a minute.” Although, she notes, it’s true what they say, about most actors being shorter than you would imagine. “Even as a small person, when meeting other actors, you think, ‘God, you’re quite small…’”

She made her breakthrough in BBC Three’s Being Human, the supernatural comedy-drama with Russell Tovey and Aidan Turner. But her performance in Little Boy Blue as the mother of Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old shot dead while walking home in Liverpool, was a game-changer. She won a Royal Television Society Best Actress award and a Bafta nomination. Emotionally, it was a difficult job: Keenan remembers going to visit Rhys’s parents, Melanie and Steve, and being moved by the sight of the little dents in their garage door where Rhys had kicked his football.

Unforgotten, however, is her biggest proposition yet, a show that regularly pulls in five million viewers. When so many police dramas feature women being murdered, this one is a refreshing change. “Shows with young female, or just female, victims – that, in and of itself, is a bit of a genre. There are so many of them.” Later in the conversation, she muses that if you’re a woman in a police drama, “you’re probably dead”.

We need more shows with great lead roles for middle-aged women, Keenan says – the move away from women as sidekicks is going “at a snail’s pace”. “People go, ‘Oh, look at Happy Valley’, and it’s brilliant, but it’s one. Just one. Also, there can be terrible snobbery about soaps, but they do much better with representation, in terms of gender parity and a greater swathe of ages. Those shows have matriarchs, and they’re watched by millions. So, producers and commissioners, take note.”

Keenan has her fingers crossed that ITV will commission Unforgotten for another series. Chris Lang, the show’s writer and executive producer, believes viewers will develop an affection for DCI Jessie James. “If you create a character [that] people take into their hearts, as I think they did with Cassie, there’s a real sense of loss when that character dies. I’ve felt that myself a million times when watching a show where the lead leaves,” he says.

“But I had Sinéad in mind right from the word ‘go’. She did a brilliant audition. After that there was no debate. And I think people will love her.”

The new series of Unforgotten is now streaming on ITVX