EXCLUSIVE: When Kneecap actress Jessica Reynolds was chosen to play the iconic role of Emma Harte in the Channel 4 reboot of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s seminal rags-to-riches tale A Woman of Substance — about a young woman’s rise from servitude at the turn of the 20th century to become the world’s wealthiest woman in the 1970s — she vowed “to fight any period drama cliches at all times.”
Reynolds tells us that she was determined to fight anything that “felt like it wasn’t coming from her guts and the true circumstances that she was going through.”
She wasn’t interested in having “numbed tears coming down my face that just looked beautiful on a closeup shot. I’m not interested in that kind of acting. I don’t feel very moved by that,” she insists.
“And I wanted to really go there and try and bring what I have as a modern woman in 2026 through that kind of period lens. I just wanted it to feel as real as possible.”
The eight-part miniseries with Reynolds (House of Guinness, LifeHack) and Oscar-nominated star Brenda Blethyn (Vera, Secrets & Lies) playing the younger and older revenge-driven Emma, respectively, launches tonight on Channel 4, some 40 years after the same network premiered the original adaptation with Jenny Seagrove and Deborah Kerr playing the two distinct ages of Bradford’s protagonist.
BritBox has the North American rights, but a U.S. broadcast date has yet to be confirmed.
Emma’s story starts in 1911 Yorkshire, where she worked as a maid in a big country mansion, the seat of the dysfunctional mill-owning Fairley family whose great wealth has been acquired by cruelly exploiting the workers who toil for them.
It’s Emma’s dream to use her business smarts to work her way out of poverty and outclass the fearsome Fairleys, who have wronged her.
The themes of a woman overcoming adversity and the unwanted attention from men of privilege and power sadly resonate now just as much as when the novel was published in 1979 and when the drama was shown on Channel 4 in January 1985.
Reynolds suggests that on the surface “there has been so much progression” about how men treat women and girls, but she argues, “A lot of it is smokescreen and it’s smoke and mirrors … and overtly people are more feminist and more forgiving to women and more supportive of that. But I think covertly, there’s still so much entrenched misogyny in the world. … I would have said a couple of years ago that things are getting better. … I don’t know if I can say that right now.”
What are men scared of, I ask Reynolds?
Well, Reynolds is alarmed that “the system that is upheld benefits the men, the generically cis white straight male who’s at the top. And unfortunately, in order to give other people power, they have to give away their power. People generally, and people of that ilk, do not want to give away their power. It’s as simple as that,” she says.
Reynolds hadn’t been at all familiar with Bradford’s blockbuster nor with the record-breaking television version that played in a pre-internet age to close to 14 million tuning in to watch the original miniseries with Kerr and Seagrove.
The book was a popular best-seller with a potent story that resonated with the people of a country — the UK — that was going through divisive miners strikes and other social and industrial upheaval.
Reynolds’ says her mother had vague memories of the book and the TV drama, but it wasn’t a cultural touchstone for her parents.
“I suppose I’m Irish as well,” Reynolds reasons. “And I think it was such a big British thing. So it wasn’t really in my vocabulary at all, but now getting into it, I can’t believe how kind of fanatic the fan base is. It meant so much to so many people, probably mainly women of that time. And the cultural impact was just huge, it seems.“
Indeed, I was living between New York and London at the time, and I can recall being sent to cover the show’s pre-launch — this was in early summer of 1984 — with Kerr and Seagrove posing for photographs at some grand hotel in Knightsbridge, if memory serves. There was tremendous excitement that a Hollywood star was going to be seen in a drama on the nascent C4 launched just three years prior.
Something about Bradford’s story had struck a chord; it somehow chimed with the times.
Equality for women was still being hard fought. A few years earlier, women in the UK were granted the legal right to have bank accounts of their own without requiring a male guarantor. Women, then as now, wanted to be on an equal footing with men.
In the cold of early 1985, the country needed cheering up, and A Woman of Substance seemed to cut through to all sectors. Watching the original again, it feels dated — as it would four decades on. But I remember there was a crazy hunger for it then.
For starters, Channel 4 marketed the beejeezus out of it. From June 1984 into early 1985, there wasn’t a day without one of the national newspapers running some news, feature or photo spread related to A Woman of Substance.
Bringing it back now is definitely some kinda nostalgia trip, one that I might not have survived had it not been for Reynolds’s blazing portrait of a woman who refuses to to be held back in the class she was born into. The performance by this shy new star-in-the-making transcends nostalgia.
Reynolds had just been discussing those old misogynistic banking rules with friends. “Things like that, I take completely for granted,” she sighs, shaking her head.
“And I kind of think I took feminism completely for granted. I just saw myself as equal to everyone. I saw I had the masculine parts of me as well. I had both, and I never for one second thought that me or, gender-wise, that anyone was above me, until I kind of started to reflect when I was older,” she says.
Reynolds arms Emma Harte with a resilience that drives her rise from kitchen maid to an entrepreneur overseeing a global organization and a property portfolio that incudes a penthouse apartment in Manhattan and a country mansion where once upon a time she had striven below stairs.
Her grip on the character is all the more remarkable when she points out that she was cast just three weeks before “before I had a camera on my face.”
Her casting was, she notes, ”very last minute,” and Reynolds believes that she was the last of the cast to be signed.
The cast also incudes Emmett J Scanlan (Kin, Mobland), Lydia Leonard (The Mirror and The Light, Gentleman Jack), Leanne Best (This City Is Ours, Line of Duty), Ewan Horrocks (The Last Kingdom, Domina), Harry Cadby (In Flight, Everything Now), Will Mellor (Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Line of Duty) and Lenny Rush (Am I Being Unreasonable, Doctor Who).
In between meetings with directors John Hardwick, Richard Senior and Samantha Harrie, table reads, costume fittings and hair and makeup tests, it was vital she find Emma’s voice.
“Accent was a huge thing because I always start with voice for a character. And that was so integral to who she was in the landscape and her class,” Reynolds says. “So she started watching the old series but found “Jenny Seagrove so alluring” in the role that she worried “that I’m going to copy her if I keep watching, so I stopped myself” and picked up the novel, which captivated her.
She found Bradford’s eye for detail and world building impressive. For instance, she points out, there’s “a scene that we shot in about 30 seconds was like 15 pages of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s beautiful, dense description.”
However, time was not on her side. She left the tome and let the screenplay be her guide. The script, by The Buccaneers scribes Katherine Jakeways and Roanne Bardsley, allowed her to track all of her character’s emotions, plus there was a ton of dialogue to commit to memory. “And I’ve obviously hopefully been cast for a reason,” she ventures to say, “to bring what I’ve got here with me, use the instrument that is here and the scripts and the writing and the voice and just dive in. So I didn’t have the luxury of prep, as sometimes you do.”
In fact, she was surprised that she’d even landed the part. For starters, she didn’t want to tape for it, believing that “I’m not going to be cast in a role like this.”
Smiling, she adds that the thoughts crowding her head as she weighed up the role were: ”I’m not this girl. I’m not this person.”
Initially, she reveals, “I really didn’t have that belief that I was able to be that all-round, feminist icon leading a show, an English show. She’s such an English rose. I didn’t necessarily see that in myself.“
What she brings instead is English grit — UK grit, perhaps, because she’s from Northern Ireland. It’s what gives her performance weight; better that than to be an English rose that wilts. When her Emma Harte stands up for herself, you darn well believe it.
Reynolds feels that perhaps what her team and the show’s creatives saw in her was an ability to bring more of a modern and a rougher edge to Emma. “I’m guessing maybe that’s what they saw in me and went, ‘Oh, this person can bring something that isn’t the thing we see in every other period drama.’ And I really respected them for that because I maybe wouldn’t have taken that gamble on myself,” she surmises.
Thespians aren’t reliable observers of their own art. How can they be? How can Jessica Reynolds know that she’s managed to anchor her Emma Harte as a sort of everywoman. I was able to imagine Emma Harte as a person of substance in, say, Montana, having served (I’m jesting here) an earlier generation of Duttons, before swallowing their business, or doing the same in, say, Lagos or Belfast or Connecticut.
Taking on the part was “quite a lot of pressure,” Reynolds admits, because she saw Emma as “that kind of person that is able to connect with all different types of people and go through hardship and just keep plying on and kind of that stiff-upper-lip kind of thing.”
Whereas, the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts graduate sees herself as being “a lot more sensitive and emotional” and someone who wears “my heart on my sleeve” and the kind of person who “needs to have a tantrum before I get over it.”
Emma Harte, Reynolds accepts, “doesn’t have the privilege and doesn’t have the time to do that. And so you’re right, she is such an everywoman and someone I admire so much.” But playing someone “so admirable and lovable,” and to turn up to set every day “and try and be that, well, it wasn’t easy.”
And seizing on Emma’s willpower and stoicism in the face of indescribable oppression and torment from those who believe they’re Emma’s betters, couldn’t have been easy to portray either.
“We see that kind of energy from working-class women so much because there is an alert survival technique and, especially, look at the trauma she goes through. From right in Episode 1, it kicks off, the world is crumbling around her, not to give spoilers obviously, but she learns very quickly, how to adapt, how to survive and she thinks so far ahead. She’s formidable and she’s so resilient. And maybe there’s an aspect of that that is fantastical. … In terms of the show, there is a slight fantastical element, and I love that about her, but I think we need to remember also that it’s also allowed for us to be weak and soft at times as well,” she says.
Behind closed doors, Emma does reveal a more vulnerable side. “But I think, just as a woman playing her, there are a lot of differences between that, between us, and it’s also OK to not be so strong all the time,” she suggests.
But it’s such a tumultuous time for Emma that she daren’t let her guard down lest her tormentors catch any sign of weakness. Keeping her wits about her — being “clever and tactical,” is what’s made her this powerful business mogul.
However, Reynolds wonders whether Emma’s better off becoming so phenomenally successful? Is she wise for “gliding over her trauma and kind of holding that position of success? A lot of us aim for that, but is that truly what fulfills us at the end of the day? You have that platform, you have the accolades and the acclaim, but if you’ve lost parts of yourself or you haven’t healed properly, then maybe you see what she’s like in the 1970s,” when the character’s lost some of her soul. “And that scares me a little bit,” she says wide-eyed.
Reynolds has had juicy roles, like in Outlander, where she played Maeva Christie, and she was Wee Deidre in Derry Girls, and she’s had roles in a few films, but nothing she’s done before could’ve indicated that this 5-foot-1-inch dynamo could carry the weight of an eight-part show on her shoulders. She’s the substance here.
Sports came first in her family, and she trained as a gymnast, “so there was definitely a bit of performance, with gymnastics.” And she confesses to having been “a bit of a show off” as a kid, and when her mother took the camera out, she would be ready — and eager — for her closeup.
Her parents enrolled her singing lessons “and stuff,” but when she hit puberty, she explains, she found performing “humiliating” and she just wanted to be “a cool girl.”
At 13, she saw Catherine Hardwicke’s controversial, unredacted study of teenagers, the movie Thirteen.
That film “genuinely changed my life and changed the way that I viewed myself and kind of made me feel less alone,” she says now.
It was a cathartic moment. She typed into the school’s computer: “How do I become an actress?” She auditioned for four drama schools, and on her first try, she was accepted into LIPA , the performing arts school co-founded by Paul McCartney in 1996, where she spent three years studying acting for stage and screen. Two years ago she made her professional theater debut playing Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast.
“I never really had a Plan B,” she jokes.
But she speaks of having two sides: “One that was so shy and so full of embarrassment for it, but then also such a need to express. And so I was always trying to balance that and run after that. And I still deal with that a bit,“ she notes.
Reynolds now is based in one of the coolest spots of East London, but she’s been back in her homeland filming Close to Home, which is a four-part Channel 4 series based on Michael Magee’s 2023 debut novel.
The story, set in Belfast, follows a guy called Sean who hails from a very working-class background in West Belfast. He goes off to university in Liverpool, gets a degree, comes back “and basically finds himself right where he started,” Reynolds says.
“And he’s kind of navigating family life, partying, love” and generational trauma, she explains, adding that she plays Mairéad, Sean’s special friend.
Anthony Boyle (Say Nothing, House of Guinness) stars as Sean.
Reynolds describes the drama “as so delicate and beautiful and a complete blessing to do.”
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English (US) ·