Hermione Norris interview: there's nothing spooky about having therapy

Such is Hermione Norris’s enviable range as an actress that she can be difficult to pigeonhole. Yet, there is one thread that runs through some of her best performances: if you want an actress to play the emotional mayhem that can lurk behind the middle-class façade, Norris is your woman. “Oh, yes,” she says, “I do love those roles.”

Norris is no stranger to mental turmoil and admits that she has suffered periods of depression. “It’s not something that you are really in control of because it’s physical, and it’s genetic, and it’s about your life experiences,” she explains.

Some of her most memorable roles involve characters who live on the edge. Think, for example, of her as Karen Marsden in Cold Feet – yummy mummy on the outside, unravelling within. Or, in Falling Apart, her searing performance as the young professional woman suffering from spousal abuse behind closed doors. “After that role, people kept mentioning how much more shocking and revolting it was because the drama was about a middle-class marriage,” she says. “But bad things happen in every echelon of society, and if you cut the middle class, they bleed too. Drama should reflect that.”

Who better, then, to play the role of Cassie Manson, a family therapist, and one of an ensemble of middle-class characters who find themselves metaphorically impaled and haemorrhaging in ITV’s three-part remake of the seminal Seventies drama, Bouquet of Barbed Wire?

When Andrea Newman’s original drama first hit the screen, it was water-cooler television. Thirty years down the line, and starring Norris along with Trevor Eve, Imogen Poots, Tom Riley and Jemima Rooper, its themes of sex, love, death, infidelity and incest have lost none of their power to move and shock.

“By the end, everyone has slept with somebody else and yet it doesn’t seem salacious or gratuitous, just rather heartbreaking,” says Norris. “It’s a drama about people and humanity and how those who are hurt go on to hurt others. You watch a family imploding and disintegrating and everything just breaking apart.”

She arrives at the interview dressed in a black leather jacket, shirt and tailored trousers, looking striking rather than pretty. “I’m not especially bothered about my looks,” she says. “I’ve never had the privilege of playing a beautiful girl and I’m happy to play ugly.”

She jokes that the audience will probably be relieved that, despite some explicit scenes in Bouquet of Barbed Wire, she won’t be taking her clothes off. “God, no,” she laughs. “I wouldn’t want to put the British public through that.”

At 43, and now a wife and mother (she has two children – Wilf, six, and Hero, two – with the writer and producer Simon Wheeler), Norris is also, perhaps, more circumspect than she might have been as a younger actress. “Simon knows the business as well as I do, so he’s completely tolerant of my job and all the weird things I might be required to do. Yes, it can be bizarre sometimes to go home and bathe the children after maybe being blown up in a scene, or being in bed with another actor. But to me it would be a terrific self-indulgence to obsess about it or to let it invade my children’s time.”

Having children, she says, has given her perspective. “When they arrived, I was totally blown away by the depth of feeling I had for them. From the second they arrived, they became the most important thing in my life, and actually that’s a very good thing to have as an actress because, bottom line, if it all goes ---- up, I’ll be able to say, 'Well you can keep it. I have my family and that’s what matters most.’”

Not that Norris’s career shows signs of ending any time soon. Ten months ago, she quit her long-running role in the slickly produced spy drama Spooks as Ros Myers, the cool, all-action counter-terrorism section chief at MI5, not knowing what part she might be offered next. “It wasn’t easy because Ros may well be the most favourite character I’ve ever played, and being so physical on that show was just great fun. But you have to take a leap of faith, and I knew I had to stop her before she stopped me.”

She was swiftly offered Bouquet of Barbed Wire, and has since been in South Africa working on a futuristic new drama, Outcasts, from the makers of Life on Mars. The family went with her. “At this stage, my children are small and still need me very much, but the truth is that children need nurturing at any age. I thought about that a lot during Bouquet of Barbed Wire.”

While playing the mother of a 17-year-old daughter who has an affair with an older man, Norris found herself projecting into the future. “I did ask myself, 'What would I do in this situation?’ Here is your beautiful daughter, in the full bloom of youth, open and vulnerable in a way that only a 17-year-old could be. Could

I stand back and watch a predatory character luring her in and destroying her? How hard would that be? Yet, on the other hand, isn’t a certain amount of pain all part of the process of growing up? In that position I hope I’d feel, 'OK, I’ve had my go, I’ve made my mistakes, and now I need to allow my children to make theirs, too.’

“I’m not especially looking forward to the teenage years: drink, drugs, unsuitable partners. All of it will absolutely terrify me. But I’m determined to stand there and shut up and say, 'Have a fantastic time, darling!’ Although inside, I’ll be saying, 'Oh my God!’”

In times of crisis, Norris admits she might fall back on the Christian values instilled in her own childhood. She was one of four children raised by a strong-willed single mother after her parents divorced when she was just four years old. “We all went to Sunday school and to a Church of England junior school and some of it stuck. My brother, for example, became a minister. I’m a believer myself, although I’m not particularly religious. But I do think that Christian values are good to grow up with and they do inform the way I feel about the world.”

Despite her faith, she remains prone to bouts of depression, which have haunted her since the sudden death of her father, Michael Norris, a businessman, when she was 21. “Fortunately, these days the periods when I suffer from it get further apart, and when it strikes it’s for less and less time. Maybe it’s simply due to the fact that I’ve arrived at a point in my life where I do feel contented on quite a deep level. I feel blessed to have the career that I have. I’ve chosen my husband and I have two wonderful children.

“I also feel strongly that I don’t want to infect my children with my depression, if I ever have it. So the incentive to deal with it is very strong and I’ve become quite good at managing it.”

In Bouquet of Barbed Wire, she plays a family therapist. “Though Cassie, bless her, lacks so much self-awareness that she winds up sleeping with her daughter’s husband. Another therapist would have a field day.”

In real life, she’s a fan of the talking cure, too. “Oh God, yes. I’ll go wherever I need to go and my advice would be, if you’re behaving in ways you’d rather not and making bad decisions based on the things that have happened to you, get help and live your life to its full potential.”

Perhaps it’s her fearless self-examination that makes her such a potent actress. “What I do know is that I’m not frightened of feelings. I’m not frightened of people’s grief or their emotions or their complexities. I celebrate all that and I think it’s important for drama to do the same.

“In this country we’re emotionally retarded and think there’s something weird about therapy,” she continues. “But for me it’s very much part of being a good wife, a good mother, a good member of society and the best person that I can possibly be.”

• 'Bouquet of Barbed Wire’ is on ITV1 on September 6, 13 and 20, at 9pm