‘Hope she’s pleased’ Lesley Manville based her new role on BBC's Emily Maitlis

express.co.uk:

BBC journalist Emily Maitlis. Lesley plays Susan Ryeland, an editor at a publishing company, and hopes that the Newsnight star would be "pleased".She made the admission in a new interview with Radio Times, explaining why she decided to channel Emily into her portrayal of Susan."Emily Maitlis kept coming to my mind," she smiled."It would be easy to imagine that highly intelligent women with important jobs just don’t worry about clothes, but I just thought, 'No, come on, I'm going to rock this one!'"She added: "I remember seeing Emily walking across the foyer of BBC TV Centre and, while obviously the mind is brilliant, she was looking fabulous in really high heels."So I’ve channelled her."I hope she’s pleased!"Lesley stars alongside Daniel Mays in the programme, that focuses on Susan's investigation into the death of her company's leading author, crime writer Alan Conway, who is played by Conleth Hill."He’s a difficult client and they have a prickly relationship," Lesley explained."Then Alan dies before he can finish Magpie Murders, the last in his Atticus Pünd series, so Susan has to go to his house in Suffolk and solve the mystery around his death – was it murder, suicide or an accident?"She finds parallels in his unfinished manuscript, so you get the 1955 mystery of Magpie Murders, investigated by Atticus [Tim McMullen], and then Susan looking into Alan’s death in the present, and several of the cast play characters in each story, with the two narratives interwoven."But while her character is compelled to get the bottom of it all, Lesley's detective skills are far from similar."I’m terrible at it," she laughed."I get confused!"I don’t watch a lot of crime drama, and I had to work hard on Magpie Murders to remember what.