Interview with Elaine Cassidy for No Offence series 2

5 December 2016

 

No Offence is not a marathon it’s a triathlon. This series starts several months on, and has new characters and a completely new through story.

Dinah’s journey this season is very much on the job. She’s always been married to the job and we are seeing that more. As ever Dinah jumps and thinks later. She’s livelier than I had anticipated this season, never staying still. Dinah’s intuitive and instinctive, and a lot of the time she’s bang on the money but sometimes she gets it wrong and has to deal with detrimental consequences. She’s human and flawed. That’s real life. All these characters are brilliant at their jobs but they do make mistakes and have to deal with where that takes them.

No Offence is not Walt Disney and the characters aren’t always going to get everything right. So the series feels truthful and that’s why people enjoy the show because they can identify with them at times. Deering, Joy and Dinah know each other so well, they protect each other. They can almost read each others’ minds. We see that at the start of series 2 when Dinah can tell that Joy doesn’t want to know exactly what happened to Deering’s dead husband, as she knows Joy can’t handle the truth.

Being on location in Manchester, it makes the shoot more authentic. It also makes it harder as you find yourself fighting the elements. The cast and crew are brilliant. We all have melt down moments at some point or another which can happen on a long job. There was such comradery; we all go through it together. It’s very much like the characters: they all have each others’ backs, they protect each other.

Once they say “action” you’re in it and everything disappears until they say “cut” – it’s brilliant and nuts. Being on location you get great colour of the community. I really enjoyed a fight we had in the middle of a high street on location (episode 7). It’s always tricky – especially when hand-cuffs are involved! When you read it on paper it’s easy but when you are actually doing it…!

The fight choreography isn’t that difficult but putting hand-cuffs on someone is no easy feat. In reality, you wouldn’t be putting cuffs on someone repeatedly but, of course, when filming you have to do the action over and over again. You then have to find a way to make the arrest look convincing and for it to be safe and pain free for the other actor. Cuffs can really hurt so we had to be careful when we were doing this action. In these sequences it is a collaborative event, like a dance, you have to work together. For a punch to be believed it’s as much the responsibility of the person receiving the punch, to sell it.

When learning a fight sequence you start off doing it at half the speed of what it will end up being. You break it down and learn it in stages. As you get more familiar with it you start speeding it up. Very much the same as learning a dance routine; and then you have to say the lines, with a different accent thrown in for good measure. It’s like being a one-man band, cymbals and all! Initially fight scenes can be quite daunting to make them look authentic, but when you get in the groove of it, it’s a lot of fun. Also, I don’t have time to go to the gym with a schedule like the one on No Offence, so I get to kill two birds - or maybe even a few!!