Ashley Jenson: When I did Shetland I just really felt like I’d kind of come home

‘It’s like nowhere I’ve ever been before. It felt magical, the whole ambience of the place, both bleak and beautiful, silent and noisy, large and small’

Face to face in her exclusive interview with The Scotsman, Ashley Jensen is telling me about her bid to spot a real life killer when she was filming for the new series of BBC crime drama Shetland, which hits the screens this week. How in between takes the crew would scan the horizon for signs of the orcas, or killer whales, which are often spotted in the sea around the islands.

“But no, I didn’t see any orcas! Not for want of trying!,” she says. “Every day you look out hoping to see one, and some of the crew had an orca app - but I wasn’t lucky. It was the same with the puffins. I saw a puffin corpse with Alison [O’Donnell, who plays ‘Tosh’] and we only knew this skeleton was a puffin because of the beak, and I was like ‘seriously, is that all I’m going to see?’”

Jensen was hoping to catch sight of the island wildlife when she joined the cast for the eighth series of the hit murder mystery drama set on Scotland’s northern archipelago, after the departure of Douglas Henshall as lead, but while the odds are she and the team get to the bottom of whodunnit in the latest crime wave to wash across the islands, spotting orcas and live puffins remains on her to do list.

Ashley Jensen filming on Shetland. She visited the islands for the first time to work on the new series. Pic: BBC Pictures

Surely it wasn’t that hard to spot some puffins, they’re all over the place - even the hardened criminals in the new series carry books about them in their pockets.

“I know! But I would work and go home at night and prepare myself for the next day. You know it’s my first time in the job and I thought ‘I can’t be arseing about and going looking for puffins all night when I’m up at six.’ But a lot of the crew would go off and come in with photographs and films of puffins, with their funny little noises, thousands of puffins, and I’d be like ‘the puffins, the puffins, I need to go and see the puffins…’

“Then on the last night, I said to my driver ‘come on, we’ve got to go and look for these bloody puffins, we’re leaving tomorrow’, but it was too late at night and they’d basically all bloody gone to bed and were all in their little burrows.

“We did see two or three renegade ones going ‘rwaaak’, ‘rwaaak’, [she makes a sound that’s a cross between a squeak, a grunt and a chainsaw’] and that was it. It was ‘quick, get a photograph of them!’”

Ashley Jensen joins Shetland, the BBC crime drama, for its eighth season. Pic.BBC/Silverprint Pictures/Kirsty Anderson

While this is Jensen’s first visit to Shetland, it’s a welcome return to her homeland after last year’s BBC drama Mayflies, alongside Tony Curran and Martin Compston, for which she has been shortlisted for a BAFTA. Meanwhile, for the character she plays in the series, DI Ruth Calder, it’s a somewhat more reluctant homecoming as the Shetland native who left for London at 18 is only back because a case has dragged her there.

“She left as soon as she could,” says Jensen, “and we find out the reasons as the show progresses. She’s not faced a lot of what she ran away from and is pulled back against her will, not because she doesn’t like Shetland, but because it causes her to face her past and relationships with people who knew her.”

For Jensen joining Shetland was a no-brainer after a career that has spanned three decades and stage, screen and film. Brought up in Annan in Dumfries and Galloway, she studied drama at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh then landed a role in the 1993 BBC drama Down Among the Big Boys playing the daughter of Billy Connolly’s criminal Jo-Jo Donnelly before gaining fame in the US on Ugly Betty (2006-9) and starring alongside Ricky Gervais in Extras (2005–2007) for which she was nominated for an Emmy and then alongside Mark Bonnar, Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan in their Channel 4 comedy drama Catastrophe (2015-19). She played a DI in Robert Carlyle’s debut film The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015), and more recently super sleuth Agatha Raisin for Sky as well as teaming up with Gervais once more in After Life.

As well as Jensen, who joins series regulars including Alison O’Donnell as Tosh, Steven Robertson as DC Sandy Wilson and Lewis Howden (Sgt Billy McCabe), there is a whole host of new characters in the new series, including Phyllis Logan (Guilt, Downton Abbey), Jamie Sives (Guilt, Annika) and Dawn Steele (Holby City, Granite Harbour).

Ashley Jensen and Alison O'Donnell team up as Ruth Calder and 'Tosh' McIntosh to solve the latest mystery in BBC Scotland's Shetland. Pic: BBC Pictures/Kirsty Anderson

So how did Jensen approach joining such a long-established show with a huge fan base and much-loved main character in Jimmy Perez, played for so long by Henshall?

“It’s big boots to fill,” she says, “and if I’d gone down the route of thinking about that too much, it could have been quite crippling.

“I had to look on this as a new six-part series with nothing that had gone before and nothing after. I absolutely loved it. I loved the experience of being able to go and film on Shetland, a place that I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I would go. It’s like nowhere I’ve ever been before.”

“It felt magical, the whole ambience of the place, both bleak and beautiful, silent and noisy, large and small. With orcas, seals, puffins and Shetland ponies, it almost feels magical and mythical. Often it’s not until you go away, for me from Scotland, do you appreciate what you had. When I did Mayflies last year and Shetland this year I just really felt like I’d kind of come home.”

Behind the Scenes filming Shetland, with Ashley Jensen and Alison O'Donnell. Pic: BBC/Silverprint Pictures/Jamie Simpson

Did Jensen identify with Ruth Calder as the new addition and did her approach differ to that of the Metropolitan cop who knocks back the welcoming offer of a scone by stating her desire to just get on with the job?

“No. Ruth’s much more forthright and cares less about other people’s opinions, although when you get to a certain age you care slightly less about what other people think about you. But I think I’m a bit more accommodating than Ruth Calder. She was literally just there to do the job, but Ashley’s there not only to do the job but also to have quite a nice time. For me life’s too short to be having a miserable time or stressing about ego. I just want to get on with everyone and for everybody else to have a nice time as well.

“So I think Ruth’s more direct, throws her weight around more, whereas I would definitely have accepted the scone.”

When she was presented with the Shetland script Jensen didn’t have to think twice.

“It really was a page turner, and the colour, dialogue, nuance and well-rounded characters made it a gift. Ultimately everything comes down to the script, and the story was so engaging.

“And I felt that Ruth’s not black and white. She could sometimes be unlikeable and rude, formidable, but she’s very good at her job. To be poetic about it, she’s a little bit like an island herself, she’s built this barricade and nobody’s going to get in. She is quite isolated like the island of Shetland.

Ashley Jensen as DI Ruth Calder and Jamie Sives as Cal Innes in the new series of BBC crime drama Shetland. Pic: BBC Pictures

“She has to be there for her work and get on with it, but ghosts and demons from the past are going to unfold.”

While Jensen is Henshall’s replacement as lead, in conversation she emphasises the ensemble nature of the cast and how DI Calder is working in tandem with Tosh, played by Alison O’Donnell.