Sue Johnston: We do have fun with the bodies on the set of Waking The Dead

Apr 9 2008 by Emma Johnson, Liverpool Daily Post

Sue Johnston is rarely away from our screens, but her roles could hardly be more varied. Emma Johnson talks to the actress about her success

WE’VE just been shown into a small room not unlike a classroom on the set of Waking The Dead. It all looks pretty normal – apart from a mummified body at the end of the room. After a few shrieks from the gathered journalists, Sue Johnston walks into the room on a break from filming and laughs at our horror.

"They are brilliant, extraordinary," the 64-year-old Royle Family actress, left, says of the show’s art department. "It’s the sort of job where I want to follow them around so maybe some of their artistic stuff will rub off on me!

"There’s one scene in Iraq this series, and when you film stuff like that just down the road from here you think it’s going to be embarrassing. Then you watch it and you can’t see the gap from what you see on the news."

But it’s not just the sets – there’s also the matter of all those dead bodies hanging around, which look horrifically realistic. We are shown one decomposed cadaver as we are given a tour of the "mortuary" which looks so life-like, we have to touch it to convince ourselves it is, in fact, made of fibreglass.

But Sue, who has been playing forensic psychologist Dr Grace Foley on the show since 2000, says none of that particularly bothers her.

"I’m not very squeamish," she explains, pulling her cosy brown cardie around her against the cold. "You just know that it’s not real. Sometimes I look at things that are real and I think they may be prosthetics, you know if I see a terrible accident or something and think, oh, it’s only a play, oh no, it’s not.

"On set, we do have fun with the bodies," she continues. "There’s rather a lot of black humour that goes on around them, which is not dissimilar to real life, really.

"Filming can be very intense because we all want to get it right, so it’s always great to break things up with a bit of a joke or some football harassment," the Liverpool fan laughs.

While Sue doesn’t profess to be an expert in the police field of forensics, she does think she has a far greater knowledge of the science, protocol and psychology of crimes than she did before starring in Waking The Dead.

"I think probably we all have," she says. "When the Madeleine McCann case came on the television, you suddenly find yourself thinking, it will be a lone man who lives with his mother – we all have that knowledge of police work now.

"Also, I remember thinking when I watched that, they haven’t closed the scene, they haven’t taped it off, what are they doing? The knowledge is just there, but only on a limited basis. We couldn’t possibly take it any further."

Indeed, while 64-year-old Sue, who started life as a tax inspector before turning her hand to acting, says she’d have liked to have gone into a vocation like Grace and the team’s, she doesn’t think she’d ever have made it.

"I’d love to have Grace’s intelligence. I love pretending to have it," laughs the Warrington- born actress. "I think it’s a bit like acting in a way, it’s analysing characters, analysing people, and I think that’s why I find it fascinating, talking to people and learning things."

Sue explains that Waking the Dead has numerous on-set advisers who are experts in the field of forensics and DNA, and have worked on many high- profile, real-life cases. These advisers help during the script- writing process, but are also on hand if cast members wish to check a fact, a pronunciation, or just find out more about a particular scientific process featured in the show.

With such a brilliant source for research, Sue says that when real life cold cases come up on the news, she finds herself absolutely enthralled.

One such recent case was the murder of Lesley Molseed, in Rochdale. The 11-year-old was abused and killed in 1975, and tax clerk Stefan Kiszko was subsequently jailed for the crime. However, it transpired that the police had locked up the wrong man and, thanks to DNA evidence, in November last year the correct man, Ronald Castree, was convicted of murdering Lesley.

"I was living in Rochdale at the time," Sue recalls. "I remember the murder very clearly and seeing the footage on the news was just like being there again. That man, that bastard of a man, has let two families suffer so much.