'Broadchurch' Postmortem: Inside the Season 2 Premiere

Spoiler alert! If you haven’t watched Broadchurch's Season 2 premiere, stop reading now. Executive producer Jane Featherstone spoke to Yahoo TV about the decision for Joe Miller (Matthew Gravelle) to plead not guilty to the murder of 11-year-old Danny Latimer, that wonderful bathroom scene between police officer Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman) and DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant), Colman's exquisite tears, and the casting of James D'Arcy as Lee Ashworth, Hardy's main suspect in the unsolved Sandbrook case.

I’ve spoken to Matthew Gravelle, who explained why Joe would plead not guilty from a character standpoint, but tell me how that idea came to creator Chris Chibnall as the plot for Season 2.
The thing that Chris wanted to write about in the first series, and that we so loved about it was, it wasn’t just a murder whodunit thriller, it was also about the effects on a community of a crime of that magnitude. In a lot of dramas, where you usually spend a lot of time with the police officers involved in the investigation and how it affects them, you rarely get to spend that much time with the family of the victim. Chris and I did Law & Order together many years ago in the U.K., and we set up the U.K. version of that where you have one scene with the victim and then you move on. That’s that format, and it’s a wonderful show. But he said, “What would it be like to actually spend time with the family and really live through the months of pain as they investigate the crime?” So that’s what Series 1 was.

And then Series 2, Chris said, “What would it then be like to live through a trial if you’re the family? And what would it be like for the audience, who knows this family and cares about them deeply, to watch those characters have to go through the pain of the trial and the British justice system?” I imagine there are some similarities to the U.S. one in that people just get dragged through the mud — guilty or innocent. And so he wanted to see what the impact of a trial would be on the community, and in order to do a trial, you needed to have a not guilty plea.

Related: 'Broadchurch' Actor Matthew Gravelle on the Secrecy Surrounding Season 2 and Joe's Not Guilty Plea

I think also, as much as anything, drama is always about chucking as much conflict, pain, surprise, and emotion at the lead characters, and the best way to do that was to have a not guilty plea. So it allowed Chris to examine the justice system and allowed us to watch our characters go through hell.

How many takes does Olivia Colman do for an emotional scene like Ellie’s appointment with her therapist after the plea?
You could use the first take of her every single time. She does a few usually, just because it’s nice to have alternatives and you do that as part of the process. But, you know, she’s pretty pitch-perfect every time, as they all are. Her and David, those scenes of them together — the scene in the loo in the first episode is one of my absolute favorite scenes. The first time they do it, they’re just perfect. They’re sort of annoyingly perfect. There’s such a natural instinctive camaraderie between the two of them.

And her crying: She does have an incredible ability to do that authentically and truthfully, and it’s because she, Olivia as a human being, has such a big heart.

I did want to talk about the loo scene after Joe’s plea because it does so perfectly reestablish the relationship between Ellie and Hardy. The way he awkwardly asks her if she wants a hug, and she gruffly declines. Is that the kind of scene that goes through a lot of drafts to get it just right?
No. That scene didn’t change from the first draft to the last. A lot do change, but not those character scenes. Particularly in the second series where you’ve got your characters in your head and you’re able to write to their strengths. And as you say, it was important to reestablish for the audience at the beginning that this wasn’t suddenly going to be, “Oh, didn’t we go to hell in the first series, now we’re all cozy mates.” Oh no, there’s still conflict between these two, and she still thinks he’s infuriating and he still think she’s overemotional. So that scene literally was as was delivered on the first day.

Was it scripted for Ellie to walk into the cleaning sign Hardy had placed at the entrance to the ladies’ room on her way out? It’s another tribute to Olivia that you’re not quite sure.
It was.

One of the most gut-wrenching scenes in the episode is Danny’s body being exhumed by Joe’s defense team and hearing Danny’s mother Beth (Jodie Whittaker) yell in Ellie’s face that she hopes she rots in hell for all they’ve lost. Beth’s pain is understandable, but because the audience knows Ellie isn’t to blame, you do find yourself wanting to yell back at Beth. How did you and Chris approach that relationship in Series 2?
That’s probably going to be quite a surprising thing for the audience this season, that those two who were such a support for each other and such friends through Series 1 are suddenly put at huge odds. And the actresses found that quite challenging because Jodie and Olivia are great friends and they love playing scenes together. This time they were playing scenes together, but they were angry and they were fighting, and I think, for me, I love that rawness. Beth, I think, understands rationally that Ellie probably didn’t know. But nobody knows at this point, really, what Ellie knew and what she didn’t. You can’t trust what you think you knew before — things have changed.

Moving on to the Sandbrook case, obviously we heard some details about it in Series 1, but was that fully formed in Chris’s mind even then?
I think in order to have written what Chris did in Series 1, he needed to know a fair bit about it. So we were very clear about what happened to the girls. What probably emerged in the writing process of the second series was some more of the relationship elements [between characters]. Chris knew what they were but really found the voices between them as he wrote it. So I’d say he probably knew 60 to 70 percent [of how that story will unfold]. And you need to leave that gap of not knowing everything anyway, so that you can find it and respond to your actors. What Eve [Myles] brought to Claire Ashworth, Lee’s wife, who was Hardy’s key witness was extraordinary — a complex female character. And Claire and Lee together, you just never knew what to think of them.

Tell me about casting James D’Arcy as Lee. You needed someone who could play seductive and creepy. How did you know you’d found him?
Oh God, casting Lee was so hard, actually. We met lots of people, and then James came in, and he played somebody real and yet somebody with a bit of swagger that was hiding something. He had to be quite sexy, and there had to be something slightly dangerous about him, but at the same time, he had to also sort of exist in the real world and not become a pantomime villain. I think that’s what James did brilliantly. The vulnerability he shows at very spare, select moments across the series is incredible. So it was a very hard puzzle to solve, I have to say, but James suddenly came in, and we were like, “Oh, this is it! It makes sense now!”

Broadchurch airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on BBC America.