I Am Ruth character biographies

RUTH (Kate Winslet):

Ruth is a working middle-class, single parent mother, who is living in the suburbs. She has two children, Freya (17), who is still at school and Billy, who has gone away to university. Her life is centred around her children and doing the absolute best for them. They are of vital importance to her. She has enjoyed a great relationship with them and it has mostly been ok. However, things rather inexplicably have started to go very wrong with Freya. Ruth doesn’t understand it. She can’t believe what is happening and doesn’t know how to deal with it or stop it. She gets so many things wrong, just like many parents who are in this position. Ruth's instinct as a mother is to try and help her daughter, to stop whatever is going on. She can sense that there is some deceit and lying happening and she is struggling to understand it and to take the action she knows she needs to take in order to save things.

FREYA (Mia Threapleton):

Freya is Ruth’s 17-year-old daughter and she is sister to Billy, who is at university. She is, in many ways, an average teenager but Freya has been retreating further and further into herself. She is not communicating with her mother, not even functioning in a very basic way in daily life – she has been falling behind at school. Freya is changing by the day before Ruth’s eyes and Ruth can’t reach her, and Ruth feels very out of touch. Freya is suffering, feeling frustrated with her mother and is very lost. She is really struggling to navigate all of the tricky and complicated feelings and emotions that arise during adolescence, during the end of the teenage years. Ruth discovers that Freya has formed a really destructive addiction to social media.