Fresh from his success with global hit Heartstopper, producer Patrick Walters is now unleashing his next premium drama, Sweetpea.
It’s only taken since 2017 but the wait, he hopes, has been worth it given the creatives who have come together to realise the series on screen.
For starters, Ella Purnell, riding on the wave of her success with Fallout, takes the lead role as Rhiannon Lewis dismissively referred to as “Sweetpea” by her mysoginistic boss. But Rhiannon has had years of being ignored ond overlooked all through her school years and into work life.
In the six part series, based on C.J. Skuse’s cult novel, she’s had enough. With one unexpected incident, she snaps. Suddenly the wallflower is gone, and in its place is … a killer.
Yet the tone of the show revels in the character’s new-found adrenalin. Killing for Rhiannon is good / bad. Wait, what?
Such are the conflicting emotions for the audience, but with context, Walters explains.
“We think of it as like a ‘wish fulfillment’ thing. Like, everyone has those feelings of being socially overlooked, not being the most popular person, or whatever it is you have, usually when you’re a bit younger. Everyone can empathise with that. We might be stuck on a bus or a train or whatever, and someone’s man-spreading, or playing their music on their phone. It’s just so annoying. And you think in your mind ‘I’d just love to kill them’, or ‘I’d love to tell them to piss off’, or whatever it is,” he tells TV Tonight.
“What if that voice in your head is going to act on all of the things that you’re saying?”
“The genesis of the show and how we pitched it was, ‘What if that voice in your head is going to act on all of the things that you’re saying?’ So you’re actually going to these extremes, trying to give an audience a thrill-ride where the wish fulfillment that you’d never acted on is acted out. It’s a kind of electric, propulsive thing -that’s what we wanted to do with it.”
Walters, who was also executive producer on The Essex Serpent and a co-producer on Australian-UK drama The End, also finds parallels between the worlds of Sweetpea and Heartstopper, albeit as totally different genres.
“There’s something about worlds that feel like very recognisably our own, but they have this heightened quality to them that makes them just a little bit different to ordinary life. With Heartstopper, it’s kind of Technicolor, and all of those emotions that teenage love makes you feel. The show is like a normal school, it is like the UK, but it has this magic quality to it, that I find very uplifting and joyful,” he says.
‘The ‘shit Britishness’ is what we called it when we were making the show”
“With Sweetpea although they’re very different shows, I find that there is a similar quality in that she’s in this humdrum, miserable, grey, with municipal style buildings everywhere…. the ‘shit Britishness’ is what we called it when we were making the show.
“But it’s done in a way that’s very cinematic and has this graphic quality to it that makes you go, ‘Oh, wow, this is a world that I can enjoy being in.’ It has a sort comforting element to it, in some ways.”
But there are key differences from C.J. Skuse’s novels to the screen adaptation, which was important to root the character’s motivations.
“In the books, when you meet Rhiannon she has killed loads of people before, and she’s a fully-fledged kind of American Psycho Patrick Bateman-style,” Walters explains.
“A lot of the humour in the books comes from the way she’s describing in her journal, entries of all the people she’s killing. But she has a kind of psychopathic lens over what she’s describing, which is the comedy of what CJ does so brilliantly.
“We wanted to bring it right back and tell the origin story”
“But we wanted to bring it right back and tell the origin story of someone who was more of an ‘every person’, and how they got on a journey of violence and grisly killings. So we think of it as a prequel to the novels, if you see what I mean, because it’s the beginning of her journey.”
The series also features Nicôle Lecky (Mood, Sense8), Jon Pointing (Big Boys, Smothered), Calam Lynch (Bridgerton), Leah Harvey (Foundation), Jeremy Swift (Ted Lasso) and Dustin Demri-Burns (Slow Horses).
But are there are concerns around ‘glorifying’ a serial killer, Dexter-style perhaps?
“We were wanting to harness the underdog component of Rhiannon as a young woman. Traditionally, they would be the people that would be stalked by the serial killers, not the serial killers themselves,” he continues.
“The really exciting thing, especially for the first season, was to try and take some of those tropes that usually are reserved for male protagonists… and tell a story that feels, psychologically, like it’s going to leave the audience in a really conflicted place. So we wanted to give Rhiannon a lot of the coming-of-age style as she starts to take back power. People treat her in a different way. The invisibility that you see in the first episode starts to lessen, and in its place, becomes a more confident, more fully-rounded person.
“Obviously, murder is bad. I’m not saying anyone should kill anyone”
“Obviously, murder is bad. I’m not saying anyone should kill anyone. It definitely exists in a heightened (world) to be enjoyed only on TV. But I think the question you’re asking is interesting because seeing it through a female perspective and in a show that’s been made, written, directed and starring these amazing women, Ella Jones, Kirsty Swain and Ella Purnell -that, I think is part of its DNA.”
If Sweetpea succeeds in its first season, Walters will remain a busy man. C.J. Skuse has penned 5 novels for the character.
“Fingers crossed. If the show does well, we’d love to keep going and get her there to that ‘full tonto.’”
Sweetpea premieres Thursday 10 October on Binge (Friday 11 October at 8:30pm on Showcase)
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