Finding love in middle age after leaving a long-term marriage can be difficult to accept, especially when you think it will last forever.
But for Olivier Award-winning actress Nicola Walker, 54, who stars as formidable family lawyer Hannah Defoe in BBC One’s The Split: Barcelona, wants people to take another chance on love when fate brings that opportunity along.
“The Split: Barcelona conveys a hopeful message ultimately. I think there’s a lot of joy in it. I mean, there’s a lot of fear too. It is difficult to accept that a marriage that you thought would last forever turned out to have an endpoint. But if you can pick yourself up and be vulnerable and go again, even at an age where you thought everything would be sorted – and it’s not, your world’s falling apart a little bit – it’s still okay,” says Walker.
“And I think that’s why it’s such a joyful two episodes, because it’s Abi Morgan saying it’s okay when your world doesn’t hold up like you thought it would, the only thing you can do is get up, keep walking, and maybe go again.
“But I think Hannah has so much to say on this topic – obviously because of her job, she deals with divorce day in, and day out. So she has multiple levels of understanding. She understands that some marriages do not last forever and has seen that play out. Some relationships should stop, as painful as they are, and something will come next. But that may not be a relationship like you expect.
“For Hannah, it’s the relationship with her children. It’s changing as they’re growing up, and that’s positive and beautiful. There is the possibility of spending time with somebody else. There is her work, which feels better than it’s ever been.
“So I think Hannah’s advice would be, you’ve got to stay hopeful about yourself and the people who love you, who are around you, supporting you and your family. I think Hannah has come to understand how much she relies on this, the extended family around her, including her ex-husband, who is always going to be around.”
Two years from the third and final series of The Split, written by Welsh playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan, 56, the two-part spin-off called The Split: Barcelona is where Hannah Defoe and her family, including her ex-husband Nathan Stern – played by British actor Stephen Mangan, 56 – are back and have gathered for a beautiful wedding at a magnificent vineyard, nestled in Catalonia’s wine region.
The weekend will introduce audiences to a host of new characters, including Archie Moore, played by British actor Toby Stephens, 55, who previously starred in Percy Jackson And The Olympians.
“The split is not just about divorces, it’s about surrogacy, adoption, inheritance tax, and the levels of conflict that go on within a family as well as a marriage,” says Morgan.
“A lot of the identity of the show is placed in that world of the office and London and those family homes. And it’s about a very affluent world. There’s something about taking these people away to another country, to Spain, to Barcelona, where you’re colliding with a different culture, you’re in a different climate, a different atmosphere, and you don’t have all the tools that you have in your normal environment. I like the displacement of that family.
“And I think when you have a wedding, and certainly a destination wedding, there’s an immediate pressure on it to be brilliant. So putting those people – who we know and love, who we know screw up and make mistakes – in that environment, we know there’s going to be heartbreak, breakups and makeups. There will be moments of joy and moments of pain. If you put that in another country, it sort of becomes a kind of lightning rod.
“It was also really fun taking those people outside of their suits. Hannah is always in that suit, and those heels, and always walking down corridors. But now they’re walking through vineyards and Spanish towns and gorgeous houses. And so it was about just taking these characters somewhere else.”
Shooting the legal drama – which is essentially Morgan’s trojan horse to write about love – in Barcelona came with so many perks for the cast.
“It was lovely being in Spain, Barcelona. But I think I really enjoyed working on the scenes with Nicola [Walker]. I think she’s fabulous. What was nice was working with somebody who is so familiar with the part, particularly the final scene of the whole thing, which is really where this conversation about people in middle age is explored,” says Stephens.
“What’s sweet is the same neurosis of when you’re a teenager or a 20-year-old, worried about becoming intimate with somebody physically as well as mentally and spiritually, it being such a frightening thing to do never goes away. The fear of that never goes. And you know, when she articulates that as a 50-something-year-old woman, it’s very moving, and for him [Archie Moore] to say exactly the same thing, ‘I feel the same way’. I think that was nice.
“I suppose those are the scenes that I love best. I mean, obviously, it’s nice having all of the party scenes in a vineyard and all that. But I think, really, for me as an actor, it’s most rewarding when you’re doing things that are honest and truthful, and you’re working with somebody who’s really talented.”
For Mangan, there isn’t necessarily a message The Split: Barcelona is trying to convey to viewers, but there is a reason why they love legal dramas.
“It’s more about the complexity of being a husband and a wife and a father and a mother and a sister and all those things. Everyone in the show – even the couple who are getting married – are going through turmoil. Life is messy when it’s going well, so it’s important to grab those moments and turn to the people who love you the most,” says Mangan.
“The Split: Barcelona is about the mess of life, the mess of love, the mess of relationships, which I think is why the show is so popular because we can all identify with it, whether we’re in happy relationships, or we’re single or we’re in an unhappy situation, all that is reflected somewhere in this programme. And I think everyone can sit there, and think, ‘Oh, could we end up mucking this up?’ That’s the beauty of it.”
The Split: Barcelona comes to BBC One and BBC iPlayer on December 29.
