Interview with Lesley Sharp as Hannah Laing in Before We Die

18 May 2021

Lesley Sharp as Hannah Laing

Character Biography
Hannah Laing (Lesley Sharp) is a Detective Inspector with the South Western Police’s Organised Crime Unit and is fiercely resisting a transfer to desk duties as retirement approaches. She has become a by-word amongst her colleagues for hard-core parenting, having engineered the arrest of her son, Christian, which led to him serving a 21-month prison sentence for possession with intent to supply. Divorced from Christian’s father and estranged from her son, Hannah now lives alone but she’s having an affair with a married fellow officer, Sean Hardacre.

1. Why did you want to get involved with Before We Die? What drew you to it? 

Usually you’re sent scripts and you make up your mind from reading a character on the page, but I was sent a cut down version of the original Swedish series and asked to watch it.
The proposition was ‘this is a TV show and what do you think of it? Would you like to be in our version?’ It was a no brainer, I couldn’t stop watching the Swedish version, it was fantastic. Hannah is a superb role and the show built a brooding sense of suspense.

The police genre is capable of holding and shaping many forms of storytelling. Our show investigates a character at the centre of a crime thriller who is also trying to learn something about all the mistakes they’ve made as a partner, a mother and a colleague.  It unwittingly sets in motion a dark trail for her to follow into the crime underworld, endangering her own life and the life of a child she loves but is estranged from.

2. Having watched the original Swedish version, how does the UK version compare?

You’re immediately in a world of noir when you’re watching shows like The Bridge or The Killing. I think that the aspiration for the show is that it doesn’t look or sound like a UK cop drama. European shows are unafraid of investigating philosophical questions on behalf of their characters or elevating imagery or letting moments play out. I think that whilst there will still be those elements of ‘who did what’, in our version, hopefully the audience will get engaged with the psychology of these characters, invest in them and want them to find resolution and forgiveness.

We shot a lot of the show in and around Brussels, but the setting is Bristol. There’s a marriage of winter in the UK with the euro lowlands and the aspiration is to make the UK landscape look as troubled and bleak at times as the world our characters are trying to move through.

3. Tell us about Hannah. Who is she? We understand she is ‘troubled’ – why is that? 

Hannah is a police officer and has been very committed to her job for years, but she is, like a lot of hardworking people, flawed.

She’s got it wrong with her ex-husband and with her son. She and her husband couldn’t make their relationship work and their parenting was caught up in the fallout of that. 

She’s involved in a clandestine relationship with a married colleague at work. She’s reaching the end of her career, wondering what lies ahead of her. Her boss is young, great at her job and ambitious. When we meet Hannah, she’s isolated herself from her colleagues, there’s a sense that the team isn’t quite working as it should. Hannah doesn’t want to stop working or be put out to pasture. I think she’s asking ‘how do I find meaning and purpose at this stage in my life when others, my colleagues and family doubt me?’ Hannah is not easy or comfortable in her skin.

4. When you’re creating your character for Hannah what aspects do you work on first; do you decide the voice, the way she walks, her clothes? Do you always have the same process or is it more organic than that? 

Every job that you do is different.  It depends on so many factors – the creative team, what is expected of the character, time available etc, depending on the rest of the creative team and what is required of you is different.

With Before We Die, the psychology of the characters and their relationships with one another was key.  Over the course of the six episodes, their characters experience micro adjustments as more is revealed to them.  I like to go through a script very carefully to understand the story and the path of the character I am playing. Then you ask the questions about how that manifests for someone physically... are they neat at work and messy at home or vice versa... we decided Hannah had a very controlled “outside” to keep all the inner doubt and pain under control.

5. Hannah has a complicated relationship with her son, what happened there? Where does the show pick up? 

The show starts with a flashback to an incident that happens two years prior to the main action kicking off. The back story is that Hannah and her ex-husband have not parented their son well. They have not been able to help Christian at a crucial stage in his life and in trying to make that right, Hannah makes a catastrophic mistake.

Ironically, given that she is a police officer and has an interest in staying on the right side of the law, her son takes a different path and gets involved in criminal activity. In an attempt to shake Christian up and make him realise the bad turn his life is taking, Hannah decides to give him a fright, in the hope that it makes him rethink his actions, but it doesn’t quite go as planned and Christian ends up in prison.  Not what Hannah had intended, as she merely hoped to give Christian a taste of reality and maybe just get a police caution. Whilst he’s serving time, he connects with someone who is part of a dark, dangerous crime family and then…off we go! Hannah unwittingly sets that in motion. It is this seemingly well-intentioned but misguided misstep by a mother that ends up putting her beloved son in the most horrendous danger – and herself. It is akin to Greek drama – a mistake, the wrong turn at the crossroads, it is a terrific premise, and all this happens in the first ten minutes of the show!

 6. On the one hand Hannah is very moralistic but there are times she’s willing to break the rules – what drives her?

What drives her increasingly, is the old story of Yin and Yang. The crime family do the most despicable things but what they have is complete and utter family unity and loyalty when they are together. Ironically, a strong family bond and warmth, which is totally absent in Hannah’s life. Hannah has to face what has also been absent in Christians life as she watches how drawn he is to the comradeship and validation he receives from killers.

 7. The working relationship with Billy is intense throughout – how did you navigate that? 

Billy, played by the wonderful Vincent Regan, is a character operating outside the parameters of the police department as he has been brought in by the NCA (National Crime Agency) to investigate the Croatian drugs gang. He’s able to carry out and get approval for covert behaviour that would not be approved of by the police department. As Billy’s partner, this means that Hannah’s able to do this too. After initially being suspicious of one another’s capabilities, Billy and Hannah develop a grudging respect. It is vital to Hannah that Billy and Hannah have each other’s backs whilst her son is in such danger.

8. You have an amazing cast surrounding you, what was it like working with them on Before We Die? 

 I think what was interesting about going back into the workplace after being in isolation and lockdowns and not seeing many people, was that there was that slight sort of trepidation of ‘have I got anything to say?’. The great thing about our job is that you all get together and talk about the work. All of us loved the show, we were geeks about Before We Die and making it the best we could possibly make it. So, we bonded over the work. Paddy Gibson who plays Christian is 25 and plays my son – I’m old enough to be his mother and he is young enough to be my son, but he was the most incredible colleague. I learnt so much from him in the way that we tried to unpack the relationship between Hannah and Christian and how we could make it as complicated and unapologetically difficult as we possibly could. We were also all working away from home in a foreign city, so that made us feel very much part of a team and we became a unit.

 9. What are you wanting the audience to take away from Before We Die? 

I hope people will watch it and that they will be on the edge of their seats most of the time thinking ‘how on earth are they going to get out of this?’.  I hope people will enjoy the unravelling of a really great thriller and a really heartfelt and complex family dynamic.