Nick Stevens is remembering the first time he met Delia Balmer, the only known survivor of serial killer John Sweeney, whose story he wanted to dramatise. The meeting went very badly. “She was half an hour late,” recalls the screenwriter. “She wouldn’t look me in the eye. She was very agitated and angry.”
Even though Stevens was familiar with the sensitivities of true-crime stories from his previous dramas In Plain Sight and The Pembrokeshire Murders, this was extreme. But he soon realised that the behaviour of Balmer – played by Anna Maxwell Martin in new drama Until I Kill You – reflected the PTSD she suffers due to Sweeney. In 1994, after she ended their three-year relationship, he held her hostage tied to a bed for four days and later attacked her with an axe, as recounted in her memoir Living With a Serial Killer, on which the show is based.
Stevens also suspected that Balmer’s anger may have been one reason police took six years to apprehend Sweeney and, through her testimony, connect him to the murders of two former girlfriends. (He is now serving multiple life sentences for these crimes.)
“My starting point,” says Stevens, “is what happens when someone who is not an ‘easy’ victim finds themselves in that system? That’s the story we tell.”
Balmer’s combative character also became a dramatic issue, he admits: “There were questions about whether we might lose viewers because of the spikiness of Delia. But I hope the more thoughtful, compassionate viewer will stay.”
All are conscious that they are talking about someone absent from the conversation (Balmer was unavailable for this interview) but Maxwell Martin stresses: “I find Delia a fascinating and complex person. I’ve never had any interest in the audience sympathising with or liking my character. I think that’s shown in the work I’ve done.”
For example, DCS Patricia Carmichael, the unnerving internal police investigator in Line of Duty? “Yes. Obnoxious cow! And, on Motherland, I remember being told after the pilot that people weren’t going to like me if I did it like that. And I said: I don’t care. I find it irritating when someone’s trying to ingratiate themselves with an audience.”
Actors fear being typecast, so, for Shaun Evans, the part of Sweeney offers useful distance from 11 years as the young Inspector Morse in ITV’s Endeavour. On stage, in David Edgar’s Here in America, Evans has just finished playing the Hollywood director Elia Kazan, who ratted on Communist party members: “A friend of mine said: ‘You do know it will be hard to get an audience to sympathise with Kazan?’ I thought: I’ve just been playing a serial killer!”
Evans and Maxwell Martin were determined to evolve their characters throughout the show – rather than starting the four hours of airtime wearing badges declaring “victim” and “monster”.
“If you present as psychotic or evil at the beginning,” says Evans, “it’s not very interesting for the actor or the audience. But also, Delia’s not daft. If he’d been a terrible threat from the beginning, she would have spotted it.”
Maxwell Martin agrees: “It’s so important to me that this wasn’t a gratuitous, self-flagellating drama watching the slow decline of a victimised woman. Of course, there’s an attack scene but we’re talking about the criminal justice system and how women are treated. Especially if, like Delia, you don’t behave as other people think you should.”
Because Balmer is rare among such victims in surviving to see the drama about her, those involved felt a strong sense of responsibility. “I sent her the scripts with my heart in my mouth,” says Stevens. “And I got back a document called My Critique, which went on for several pages. We had a big to and fro about the position of a mug on a table in one scene. So that gives you an insight. But she was always reasonable in the end.”
Maxwell Martin chose not to meet Balmer until shooting was almost over: “I can’t really say why, I just never have before when I played real people. You are studying people, their mannerisms and so on. If you were sat in a room with them, you might end up staring at them in a fairly weird way. For this, I watched tapes of Nick Stevens interviewing her, which was really useful.”
Was she nervous when they met? “No. I’d been playing her for months. Possibly not accurately. But I hope I had some sense of her. So I knew that when we did meet, she wouldn’t be throwing her arms around me and telling me how wonderful I was. I knew Delia would find it challenging to see herself wrenched to life by a semi-bad actor. And she was very game and funny about that.”
“Purposefully and respectfully,” says Evans, “I never met Delia or anyone connected with the case. I started to read the book then put it down because I didn’t want to see the story exclusively from Delia’s point of view. There were moments on set when you’d think: ‘Bloody hell, this actually happened!’ But I found I had to put that aside.”
Maxwell Martin nods. “I’m a great believer that acting should not be psychoanalysis. It’s all action and doing. Actors sometimes say: ‘I don’t think I’d do or say that,’ and I think: ‘It says on the page you do. We all want to wrap at 7pm so just do it.’”
Actors and directors often say that comedies are rehearsed in an atmosphere of grim tension but tragedies produced in high humour. Tributes to the late Dame Maggie Smith noted her ability to move from complete concentration during takes to total relaxation between them. Did the extreme material here affect the mood on set?
“I am quite naughty,” admits Maxwell Martin. “It’s not to reduce the work or disrespect the project – especially on something like this. But, for me, I love being at work and we’re there for 14 hours a day and I want everyone to have a good day. And – creatively – I find it better to switch off between scenes. I didn’t when I was younger. I used to take it incredibly seriously.
“Mind you,” she jokes, “I won loads of awards back then and now I can’t get a sniff of them so maybe I need to revisit that!. But now I just want to have as much fun as possible at work.”
She attributes her looser attitude on set to working on Motherland, Mandy and Alan Partridge: “Improvised comedy is the most difficult thing you can do. You just have to keep going, thinking: ‘The crew aren’t finding any of this funny, there’s probably 1% that’s usable, and why didn’t they cast Katherine Parkinson?’ It’s mortifying because the boom operator is standing there dry as toast. So now I just try to be as relaxed as possible and open to the process like Maggie and Judi [Dench] and Eileen [Atkins].”
Did she deliberately put herself in that list because she wants to be Dame Anna?
“I will be! I’m already veering into national treasure status. The damehood can’t be far off!”
Evans, laughing, adds: “Well, I’d agree that – however serious the material – you want a lively, open atmosphere on set so you feel able to make mistakes and try things.”
When Until I Kill You is shown, ITV1 will post warnings and help links for those who have been affected by the content. Is there an impact from acting it?
“I used to say very flippantly: no problem for me – bottle of wine and feelings gone,” says Maxwell Martin. “But when you do those scenes, they are very real for you. Your body and mind create the same chemicals as someone who is in that plight – of terror or sadness. And you go home and it can build up.”
Evans adds: “I remember walking away [from a scene with an axe] and having a lot of feelings to deal with. But, perhaps most tellingly, when this job finished I went on to direct a miniseries [The Bay] because I didn’t want to be in front of the camera for a bit.”
As Until I Kill You features sex scenes – first consensual then toxic – an intimacy coordinator was on set. Actors of Maxwell Martin’s generation are still adjusting to this new member of crew: “I remember, in the old days, they’d say: ‘You two seem to have great chemistry so let’s just turn on the camera and see what happens!’ That’s a porno!”
In the past, might actors not know which parts of their body would be seen on screen? “Yep!” she says. “There is nudity in this, so we sat down and talked about where the camera will be. You can have lots of underwear and stickers on your body to make sure they can’t show that bit. But it’s better if you just trust one another, which we did on this.”
This duty of care, says Stevens, extends to the real-life protagonist: “It’s a regular thing now that my wife and I take Delia out to a Greek restaurant in London. She is a different person to the one I met two or three years ago. It seems to have been a positive for her. You might expect someone who has been through all that to be tearful with moments of gloomy introspection. But there’s none of that.
“Amazingly, Delia still sleeps in the bed Sweeney made for her and to which he tied her for four days. I can’t be sure how she processes all this. But I’m certain she’s in a better place than she was.”
Until I Kill You is on ITV1 in early November
