Innocent star Katherine Kelly: ‘There were a lot of raised eyebrows when I went from Rada to Coronation Street’

“It matters to me that it rings true,” says Katherine Kelly, flicking her fingers through her hair. “I would hate for anybody to watch me on screen and think, ‘Oh I don’t think she’s been through that.”

The 41-year-old Yorkshire actor has certainly been through the wringer on-screen. In the ITV hit Mr Selfridge, she played a socialite who is abused at the hands of her bully husband (Aidan McArdle). As wild barmaid Becky McDonald in Coronation Street, she flailed from one breakdown to the next, suffering two miscarriages. Her role as Elizabeth in Sally Wainwright’s historical lesbian drama Gentleman Jack –  the second series of which she’s filming now – is a smaller one, but she nails what it’s like to be juggling three small kids while trapped in a marriage with the bullish Captain Sutherland (Derek Riddell).

In the ITV drama Innocent, which is returning for a second series with an entirely new cast, Kelly is suffering once again. She plays English teacher Sally Wright, a ball of raw emotion who was wrongly convicted of murdering her 16-year-old pupil. When we meet her, she’s just had her guilty verdict overturned after spending five years in prison, and is determined to rebuild her life. It’s not easy. She’s lost her job; accusations that she had a sexual relationship with the underage student won’t go away; her husband Sam has moved on with a new partner; and she miscarried their baby while on remand.

Kelly spends most of her time “trying not to cry” in the role. She doesn’t want to “numb” the audience by overdoing it. Her character might be weepy, but she’s also fierce. “I want my f***ing job back,” she tells the head teacher at her old school. “Or I will get seriously legal on your arse.”

Kelly, who is wearing a pink fluffy jacket and talking to me over zoom from her hometown of Barnsley, south Yorkshire, hasn’t experienced most of what her characters have been through, “touch wood”. But she’s meticulous about the research. To play Sally, she read lots of prison diaries, watched Louis Theroux documentaries, and discovered an invaluable Channel 4 series called Prison.   

“Sally doesn’t really talk about her time in prison – unless she’s pushed to,” says Kelly. “I felt like you needed to feel that she was carrying the weight of that trauma all the time. I really wanted to feel the tick and the tock of that day. I wanted to know about what the beds were like and the springs and the mattress and the noise.”

Despite being one of Britain’s most prolific TV actors, Kelly can be hard to place – thanks to the variety of characters she’s played. She’s searing as the university lecturer locked in a toxic feud with a student in ITV’s Cheat, and astonishingly real as a stony-faced Detective Inspector (DI) Jodie Shackleton in Wainwright’s masterpiece, Happy Valley. 

She played two more detectives – in Netflix’s pared back Criminal and in ITV’s Liar, as the tough and unemotional DI Karen Renton, “an irresistibly male role“ – but even those characters couldn’t be more different from each other.

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Kelly moved to London at the age of 18 to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), but returned to Barnsley just before lockdown last year, after she split from her husband Ryan Clark. The logic for moving back home was that her large Irish-Catholic family could look after her daughters, four-year-old Rose and six-year-old Orla, when she was away working.

“Then of course the pandemic hit – and bang went that idea,” she laughs, before briefly leaving the room to stop her sausage dog from barking at the postman. “It’s only now with the vaccination programme that I can actually put into action what I had moved up here to do,” she says when she returns. “But I try not to do jobs back to back. I love my job – it’s a vocation – but I equally love being a mum. It’s about trying to find a balance.”

The eldest of four siblings, Kelly got into acting by accident. Through lack of babysitters, she “tagged along” with her parents when they did amateur dramatics in Barnsley. “I think it was always there – I just was an actor,” she says.

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It was her dad John – who had been a nurse, a miner, a radio DJ and had founded The Lamproom Theatre in Barnsley – who found a leaflet for drama schools at the job centre and encouraged her to apply for Rada. “I went to Rada and I didn’t know what an agent was,” says Kelly. “I was just so green.”

She always felt like she was “on the back foot” there. “I’d only read a handful of plays – I’d never heard of David Mamet or Stanislavsky – so I just drank it up for three years.” She loved it. It was like “taking your kids to Disneyland”.

After drama school, Kelly was cast as a “leading lady” in the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at 23 years old. A few years later, she landed the role of Becky in Coronation Street. “There were a lot of raised eyebrows about me being in Coronation Street when I’d been to Rada and just left the RSC,” says Kelly. Becky ended up becoming one of the soap’s most beloved characters before escaping to Barbados with new lover Danny in her final episode in 2012. The role won her a National Television Award.   

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“I really liked that [it shocked people],” says Kelly of taking on a soap. “I love that element of surprise and I think that is what I am always trying to cultivate.” When Kelly handed in her notice on Coronation Street, it was because she didn’t want to tire of the character, “and I didn’t”, she says. “I felt like we never repeated anything, which is really amazing in a soap.”

She’s managed that her entire career. Next, she’s starring in a new sitcom podcast, Curl Up and DI, with Vic Reeves, Morgana Robinson, and Mark Benton. Whatever comes after that, I’m sure she won’t be repeating herself.

‘Innocent’ is on ITV for four nights from Monday at 9pm