Former EastEnders star Jill Halfpenny left with ‘awful, emotional hangover’ after filming ‘nightmarish’ The Drowning
JILL Halfpenny will front new Channel 5 drama The Drowning tonight - but unfortunately shooting the gritty scenes wreaked havoc on her mental health.
The former EastEnders star plays grieving mother Jodie, whose world is turned upside down when her son - who has been missing for nine years - mysterious reappears.
Now a teenager, she spots her son, taking on the new name of Daniel, on his way to school.
However, she struggles to prove that he really is her son - leading her down a dark and traumatic path.
Halfpenny said she had no trouble grappling with the horror of Jodie's predicaement, but struggled to leave the negative emotions on set.
“Even if you don’t have children, it’s pretty easy to imagine that that is the worst thing you can go through," she told .
"It’s sort of every parent’s nightmare, isn’t it? It’s a true nightmare. So it was easy for me to kind of understand that.”
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic made filming the show difficult, with breaks in filming an inevitable part of the social distancing process.
However, during this downtime, Halfpenny struggled to switch off.
“I think when you sort of leave a character and know it isn’t finished, even if it’s a couple of weeks you’ve got off filming and you have to go back, you can never quite let them go, because that’s the point," she went on.
"The point is, you have to sort of stay with them. So she [Jodie] was percolating the whole time."
Halfpenny explained that getting into the character's mindset meant that shaking off feelings of grief, anxiety and self-doubt bled into her private life and even her health.
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“I’m always really relieved to come home and be with my son again. And then I just sort of think, ‘Oh, God, I feel really heavy.’ It’s sort of an emotional hangover. And you think, ‘Oh, God, I feel awful,’" she continued.
“I’ve got one friend in particular who’s like, ‘Yeah, there’s a reason for that. You’ve been living in this person’s head for three months, and they’ve not been particularly nice thoughts.’
“You always cringe a bit as an actor to say that, but your body doesn’t know that those feelings that you’re creating are not real. So your body is literally creating stress, tension, pain, grief. But you sort of have to go, ‘But it’s not mine! Or is it?’"
She concluded: “Because actually, as actors, we do kind of use our own pain anyway. So it’s a real mix. But I think what you have to do is, you have to be sensible about it, and go, ‘OK, I’ve got to try and shake this off a bit, and do a little bit of what actors do’ – because we all have different things to just shake that off, and go onto the next…”
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Halfpenny's feelings were recent echoed by the likes of Nicole Kidmand and Anna Friel.
Kidman expained that during her time on gritty Sky thriller The Undoing she was left "physically sick" by her character's inner turmoil.
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Meanwhile Friel found herself "vomiting and poisoned by stress" while working on Marcella's third season.
The Drowning kicks off on Channel 5 tonight at 9pm.