Sophie Rundle on Maternal Instincts and Murder Mystery in After the Flood

We were recently joined by the effervescent Sophie Rundle, who stars in the crime drama series After the Flood as Joanna Marshall, a small-town detective obsessed with uncovering the story behind a local man’s drowning. Sophie, as someone who was recently pregnant before the start of filming, took pride in playing a pregnant leading woman who was unafraid to take risks in the name of justice (such as diving straight into a rising flood in the first shot of the series). In playing Joanna, Rundle highlighted the character’s “fierce moral compass” and allowed Joanna’s idolization of her father to influence her detailed moment-to-moment scene work. 

Though her character is the protagonist of the show, After the Flood challenges the audience to see all characters’ points of view, which opened Sophie to a challenge as well: She wanted to keep the audience engaged by a character who is an intimate part of her community, but is also navigating the difficulty of sussing out who amongst them is lying. The series brought exciting challenges behind the scenes as well, where Sophie was deliberately swept downstream in a high-speed water course under the supervision of the local water services team. Ultimately, Sophie worked to instill her performance with a sense of urgency, whether it be from an external natural disaster or the internal changes her character is facing.

Watch the full conversation below.

When Joanna finds an unidentified man dead in a lift in an underground car park after a devastating flood, police assume that he became trapped as the waters rose, but she is obsessed with discovering what happened to him.