Did you sleep last night? If you didn’t, one of the characters in Insomnia, a new six-part British psychological thriller, feels your pain.
Emma Averil (played by Line Of Duty and Trigger Point’s Vicky McClure) is a rising lawyer and mother-of-two who appears to have the perfect life. But, as her 40th birthday approaches, her life slowly starts to fall apart.
Trapped in an unsettling web of sleeplessness, Emma descends into a realm where the truth isn’t what it seems. And to complicate things, Emma’s sister, black sheep Phoebe (played by Leanne Best), turns up out of the blue.
Actress Leanne Best talks about her role in the thriller now streaming on TVNZ+
What first appealed to you about Insomnia?
I think Sarah Pinborough’s work has translated brilliantly from the novel to the screen, and I was interested in that family dynamic between sisters.
I was fascinated by intergenerational trauma and the notion that you can have these two very close individuals who faced the same traumatic experience as kids, but it altered the trajectory of their lives in such different ways.
This gives us loads of scope to explore relationships — between sisters, mothers, daughters, and families. It’s fertile ground for a great character-driven psychological thriller, and it’s great stuff to play.
Phoebe feels quite enigmatic at first — did you find it hard to get under her skin?
We managed to get some rehearsal time at the beginning of the shoot, which was lovely and definitely helped me to find the character. We had the chance to get around the table and really explore these characters’ relationships and their dynamics before we got to set.
It was especially good to do a deep dive into Phoebe and Emma’s relationship, how they deal with the shadow of their mum looming over their lives, and the spectre of their childhood hanging over them.
‘Rewarding, effortless chemistry’
What was it like working with Vicky McClure to create that dynamic?
Vicky is amazing. She’s always so prepared and diligent and I was really looking forward to working with her again.
We met on Line of Duty and have done lots of very different jobs since then. I was very much looking forward to playing this dynamic together of two sisters who really love each other but who have been really altered by their childhood. Their relationship has been forged in this trauma that has impacted their adult lives.
We both have very close relationships with our sisters, so we were able to draw from that. We have a rewarding, effortless chemistry, so it was great to play an extreme relationship.
Emma and Phoebe deal with the emotional scars of their childhood in very different ways, don’t they?
Yes, they have both processed the events of their childhood in ways that have allowed them to deal with them.
Phoebe has absolutely acknowledged what happened. She has been unsparing in confronting the trauma and its repercussions, whereas Emma has just shut the door on it and never wants to think about it. She has resisted it so massively that it has bubbled up inside her.
Phoebe has taken a very stark look at what happened, but in her 40s, she still hasn’t managed to do the things she wanted to do in life, so both sisters still struggle. They’re in direct opposition in terms of how to handle the past, which leads to great drama between them.
The incidents in their childhood led to them being placed in very different dynamics: Phoebe had a much less structured childhood because she was in and out of the care system in London, while Emma was raised in a different place.
They’ve grown up quite separately, but they have managed to maintain a relationship. Emma has lent into stability and given herself the safety and structure of the family unit that she didn’t have access to as a child, whereas Phoebe has really struggled to do that as an adult.
Instead, Phoebe has led an unconventional life with a huge amount of freedom. She’s not married, she doesn’t have children, and she doesn’t even really have a base — she’s a photographer and just pitches up wherever she likes to work.
For both of them it comes back to working out what you inherit through your family and the impact it has on your life. The strain of what happened with their mother is hard to ignore.
They are trying to figure out what fate is and what is in their control.
Is Phoebe happy with the choices she has made?
The family sees her as this fun, Bohemian auntie who is always on an adventure, but as the story unfolds, you see that she’s not necessarily in the middle of a life that she’s chosen for herself. She’s actually just running away from a life that she doesn’t quite understand or know how to make peace with.
So, Phoebe is in a really interesting place because she’s in her 40s, looking at what it would be like to have more stability, to have a family and put down some roots — she’s thinking about it all much later than her sister did. Then you throw the situation with her mother into the mix, and there’s a lot of chaos that she’s trying to make sense of.
‘Make peace with her past’
There’s lots of talk of Phoebe trying to make peace with her past, and we find out over the course of the drama whether she manages to do that. It’s very believable — some people go through life prioritising the adventures they want to have, and then you get to a place where you realise you didn’t have a family, and you wonder what that looks like going forward.
Phoebe has really embarked on what she sees as a new phase in her life. She wants to try to put down roots and find what she has been missing, which feels very real to me.
Many people do have very fractured family relationships and grow up with difficult legacies from their own parental relationships, so it rings very true to me that this has informed a huge amount of what Phoebe has done with her life. But now she’s consciously taking control of it and wants to try for a family of her own.
Phoebe receives a lukewarm welcome from Emma when she turns up at her house – how disappointed is she that Emma isn’t more invested in their relationship?
Phoebe pulls Emma into a situation that Emma has made very clear she doesn’t want any part of. When they were younger, they made a deal that they wouldn’t see their mum and that they wouldn’t talk about what happened when they were children.
Emma is very clear that part of her life is over and done, and she wants to pretend it never happened. She doesn’t even talk to her husband about it.
Phoebe is quite naïve in thinking that because she’s done lots of healing and has really explored her own personal trauma, Emma has to do the same thing. She’s quite clumsy around that. She’s got the best intentions, but she’s like a born-again trauma therapist telling Emma what to do, and that pulls them into conflict with each other.
How did you cope with filming some of the heavier scenes in this series?
It has been important to maintain a huge amount of integrity when shooting those big scenes. We want to deal with these issues sensitively out of respect for people who have been through these kinds of things.
At this stage of my career, I’m quite used to it; my CV definitely includes a fair chunk exploring the murkier end of the human psyche.
I’m usually very good at shaking off the emotion at the end of the day. I have a cup of tea and watch a bit of Real Housewives, and I’m OK! But there have been a few days when we’ve all had to decompress a bit together after filming a difficult scene.
The schedule has been a straight sprint to the end, and the material is quite dark, but we have all got on so well that we’ve actually had loads of fun making the show.
Do you have any personal experience of insomnia?
In general, I am the opposite of an insomniac — when I am stressed, you can’t get me out of bed. I love a snooze! I like to get under the quilt and have a stress nap.
But there have been a couple of times in my life when something’s been playing on my mind, and you’re awake at 4am with the dawn chorus before you have to struggle through the day.
‘Brilliantly and carefully written’
I think it’s been brilliantly and carefully written, watching Emma go through that and her Herculean effort to pull her life back into a very structured, ordered place. She’s usually the solid one who can deal with everything — look after her husband, do a high-powered job, take care of her children — but now she can’t make herself go to sleep, and she’s losing control of everything.
She’s struggling, and it is unsettling to see the way it unfolds.
Did you do any research before playing Phoebe?
I absolutely love doing research; it’s one of my favourite parts of the job. It’s fun to be able to inform your performance, and then, when you get in front of the camera, you can throw that up in the air and see what happens. You build that foundation, and then it can be really organic on set.
When Phoebe turns up at Emma’s house, she’s been on this odyssey of self-discovery that we don’t see. It feels like she comes back from the Amazon with a bag full of answers and keeps telling everyone what they should be doing to come to terms with their own pain.
Even though we don’t see a lot of that, I read lots of books about the things Phoebe might have been exploring, like plant medicine or consulting body healers. I wanted to be clear about what that self-discovery might have looked like for her.
How do you hope viewers will respond to Insomnia?
I hope they will get invested in the characters and want to know what happens next. I also think people will really resonate with the struggle to figure out difficult familial dynamics, mental health challenges, and coping when the life you thought you were living starts to fall away beneath your feet.
The themes are all intrinsically human; it’s stuff that we all go through, so I hope that in addition to being deeply entertained, the audience will be able to resonate with all the characters, too.
The series straddles a lot of different genres, and it explores that shadowy bit of the psyche that we don’t really understand, the part that throws things up in our dreams.
While there is a whodunit and a familial drama at play, there’s also a slightly spiritual, ethereal element shot through it, too — because you’re dealing with this altered state that Emma finds herself in.
It’s a psychological drama in the truest sense, and I hope viewers will enjoy it.
Insomnia is streaming now on TVNZ+
