Sinead Keenan: ‘There are roles for older women

Sinead Keenan: ‘There are roles for older women

When it comes to creating a popular crime drama, having a formula is no bad thing: the comfort of knowing what you’re going to get is a big part of why we tune in. With ITV’s Unforgotten, it is the discovery of a long-dead body and, in the words of star Sinéad Keenan: “There’s always a group of four people where you go, ‘How in the name of God are they connected?!’”. 

When Keenan joined series five of Unforgotten in 2023, she was stepping into the rather large shoes of Nicola Walker, whose beloved DCI Cassie Stewart had been killed off, to the collective heartbreak of fans.

Initially, Keenan had turned down the role, but was convinced by scripts that gave viewers a gentle introduction to Cassie’s replacement, DCI Jessie James (yes, like the outlaw). “Chris [Lang] had written it in a clever way where you weren’t necessarily supposed to like her initially,” explains Keenan. “And that’s as it should be.” 

But as the series progressed, Jessie found her feet with her fictional colleagues – most importantly Detective Inspector Sunil “Sunny” Khan, played by Sanjeev Bhaskar – and audiences alike.

“Jessie and Sunny are very much working in tandem,” says Keenan. “She’s much more at ease with her position and her job.” At home though, Jessie is not having such a smooth ride: after discovering last series that her husband had had an affair with her sister, we left her teetering over whether or not to give the relationship another go.

“It turns out that she’s made the decision to plough on through, but something like that is gonna leave a stain,” says Keenan. “It’s still in a precarious position, the marriage.”

The sixth series opens with part of a spine found buried in a marsh and this time, the group of seemingly disconnected people are a news commentator, a university professor, a young autistic man and an asylum seeker.

Previous outings have covered police corruption and child abuse, but this series in particular feels like Lang is speaking to the current climate, with the right-wing news agenda, immigration, online radicalisation and cancel culture all interwoven in the story. “I think Chris is very good at being political with a small ‘p’,” says Keenan.

Sinead Keenan as DCI Jess James with Sanjeev Bhaskar as DI Sunny Khan in the new series of 'Unforgotten' (Photo: Jonathan Ford / ITV)
Sinead Keenan as DCI Jess James with Sanjeev Bhaskar as DI Sunny Khan in ‘Unforgotten’ (Photo: Jonathan Ford/ITV)

It’s not the first time that Keenan’s work has touched on polemical subject matter. She has previously starred in Three Families, the BBC drama about abortion in Northern Ireland and Little Boy Blue, the 2017 series about the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool, for which Keenan received an RTS award for her performance as Rhys’s mother, Melanie.

“As an actor, I’d be lying if I sat here and said, ‘Yes, everything that I do must have a message,’ because nobody has that luxury,” she says. “But I have been very lucky in that some of the things I have done are a reflection on a particular state of the nation. It’s always a bonus… It’s nice to feel like you’re doing something that’s – I don’t want to say ‘important’ because we’re just fannying about in front of a camera – but something like Mr Bates [which led to the Post Office inquiry] did show that TV can have an impact. It can alert people to things they may not be aware of or propel things to the front of people’s minds.”

Keenan now lives in Stratford-upon-Avon with her husband, the TV director Chris McGill, and their two sons aged seven and nine-and-a-half (the half is “very important”). It’s not a deliberate actorly pilgrimage to have chosen to live in the hometown of Shakespeare, but Keenan and McGill did meet there 20 years ago when both were doing a season at the RSC: “We were in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was playing Hermia; he was playing a fairy! He was the understudy Lysander to my Hermia.”

Keenan grew up in Dublin with her parents and younger brother Rory and sister Gráinne, both of whom are also actors (Gráinne actually plays Keenan’s on-screen sister in Unforgotten).

“It’s our normal, but I suppose it is unusual for three siblings to be in the same job… It’s punishment for something, I’m sure!” says Keenan. “I was very shy. They were both a lot more gregarious and chatty. We were sent to speech and drama classes – I think more for them to harness whatever that was and for me to come out of my shell a bit more and get a bit of a personality.”

Her character in 'Unforgotten', DCI Jess James, was not immediately likeable, says Sinead Keenan (Photo: Jonathan Ford /ITV)
Her character in ‘Unforgotten’, DCI Jess James, was not immediately likeable, says Sinead Keenan (Photo: Jonathan Ford /ITV)

Not that their mother and father were pushy stage parents. Instead, when Keenan first floated the idea of acting, it “didn’t go down very well” and she ended up studying history and sociology at University College Dublin.

But she kept a foot in the door with a local youth theatre, and in her final year, found herself playing Eliza Doolittle (with her younger brother playing her father). It must have been quite the performance, because it convinced her parents that she should give acting a go. Her first role was in the Irish soap Fair City, which Keenan says was “a brilliant training ground… It’s like an apprenticeship really. You’re learning on the hoof.”

When she left the soap, she moved to London and her breakout role came with Being Human, the supernatural comedy-drama in which Keenan played the werewolf wife of Russell Tovey’s character. After that, jobs included roles in Doctor Who, Silent Witness and the Channel 4 comedy London Irish written by Lisa McGee, creator of Derry Girls.

“Lisa did a couple of episodes of Being Human and then I did London Irish, then obviously, I did a cough and spit on Derry Girls,” says Keenan of her cameo in the show’s final series. Now the longtime friends are reuniting once more: Keenan went straight from making Unforgotten into filming How to Get to Heaven From Belfast, McGee’s upcoming Netflix series expected later this year.

Keenan leads the cast, alongside Roísín Gallagher and Caoilfhionn Dunne. The play three school friends who embark on a trip through Ireland following the death of a fourth friend.

Although Keenan can’t say much about the show – miming Netflix’s tight leash when I ask – she does offer a tease: “There’s a little bit of everything. A little bit of every genre. It’s a caper! It’s madcap, with that Northern Irish sense of humour.”

It is evidently a wildly different role to Unforgotten, for which 47-year-old Keenan is grateful: “It’s always nice to keep moving, never staying in one place too long”. She appreciates that the industry is clocking on to the need for better roles for actresses over 30 but admits: “There is that thing in the back of my head going, ‘You’ve got to make hay while the sun shines because you never know.’ I do think it’s better than it was. You think of shows like Happy Valley and Mare of Easttown – there is scope, albeit those roles will go to the Sarah Lancashires and the Kate Winslets. But at least they’re there!”

And at least she has not shared the experience of Keeley Hawes, who recently commented that she was being offered grandmother roles at 38. Keenan gasps: “What? I have thankfully not been offered a grandmother role yet! I did do something when I was younger where the woman playing my mother was six years older than me.” She pulls a face. “At least I know what’s coming down the line… Jesus!”.”

The sixth series of ‘Unforgotten’ starts on Sunday on ITV1 at 9pm

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