Breathtaking star Joanne Froggart on heartbreaking new Covid drama - 'I cried reading the script'

ok.co.uk:

We go back to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in ITV1’s latest drama. Downton Abbey actress Joanne Froggatt stars as Dr Abbey Henderson, a front-line hospital consultant who fights to save her patients as the mystery virus becomes an ever-growing threat.

Breathtaking is based on a book by journalist-turned-medic Rachel Clarke and has been adapted for the screen by doctor-turned-screenwriter Jed Mercurio.

Joanne says the script was an emotionally heavy read from the start. “I started shedding a tear or two and that’s never happened to me before in 27 years of reading scripts,” she recalls. “Nothing has affected me in the way that this did, so I knew from the off that what Jed and Rachel and [writer] Prasanna Puwanarajah had created on the page was just so emotive.” Jed, best known for creating Line Of Duty, was determined to bring a truthful account of medical workers’ experience during the pandemic to the screen. “I read the memoir in one sitting and just thought, ‘This is an authentic account from the front line,’ and it felt like it was the story we had to tell,” he says.

The three-part drama follows Abbey and other NHS workers throughout the crisis, from coping with shortages of personal protective equipment to caring for their colleagues who contract the virus on the front line. “This is a time that every single person has lived through, so I felt a great responsibility because of that,” says Joanne, 43.