Romola Garai on grief, marriage and the affair at the heart of Adultery

A look at Romola Garai’s recent TV drama credits offers something of a pattern: Vigil, Betrayal, now Adultery. Has she become the go-to actress for a certain kind of one-word-says-it-all punchy narrative where her poker face hints at passions swirling beneath? She laughs. “Exactly. All short titles, delving into the dirty laundry baskets of human behaviour.”

Her role of Beth in Danny Brocklehurst’s drama certainly qualifies. Married with two teenagers, juggling her job as a fitness trainer while grieving the death of her best pal, Beth barely seems to stop for thought before plunging into a torrid affair with Tom (Dominic Cooper).

"Film, TV and literature have had a complex relationship with women, their individual pleasures set against their duties as wives and mothers," says Garai, who tells me that Leo Tolstoy’s tale of adulteress Anna Karenina is one of her favourite books. "The question of how much you owe yourself versus how much you owe other people is the big question of women’s lives."

With stars as telegenic as Garai and Cooper and the writing of Brocklehurst, Beth and Tom appear as figures caught up in a passion beyond all reason. Do they deserve our sympathy? Garai, 44, and the mother of two children with actor husband Sam Hoare, nods.

"There’s something that happens, I think, to people over the course of their lives, where their duties and responsibilities, whether it’s work or family, kind of creep up. And they haven’t noticed it until they reach a tipping point and it becomes intolerable." She laughs. "Maybe it’s because I’m in middle age and I’ve seen that happen a lot around me: people sort of popping."

Beth certainly pops. "She’s done too much for other people, so she rebels," agrees Garai. "She’s an unhappy woman made selfish through grief. Bad things happen, but I have an equal amount of compassion for both sides of their predicament." What would Garai advise if Beth were a real-life friend? "I’d say, 'Put down your laundry basket, have a really big cry and maybe take a month’s holiday on your own, to think about what you want for yourself'. Because I think that’s the root of the problem."

Separately, following the assertion by Dominic West, her co-star on The Hour, that he’d return to Abi Morgan’s much-missed period drama “in a shot", could we count on Garai’s involvement too? She nods. "It’s the show people still stop and talk to me about. Working with Dominic and Ben Whishaw, it was an incredible cast with an incredible writer. So, yes, I would."

I don’t like to remind her that would mean breaking her run in a show with a two-word title, but it seems Garai would make an exception.

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Danny Brocklehurst

What inspired you to write about adultery?

"My teenage son had started dating a girl, and my wife and I were due to meet her parents. Being a writer, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if either my wife or I fancied one of them?’ Then I realised it was a good way of exploring a modern relationship about marriage and parenting."

What other aspects were important?

"There are lots of layers, with themes of class differences, the impact of social media and the effects of grief. I wanted to write a grown-up drama with no villains but with consequences, and look at why these things happen."

Did writing the drama give you a better grasp of betrayal?

"Most affairs aren’t based on real life. They’re based on a sort of fantasy, something that feels like an escape. I see it around me with friends and people I know. It comes out of marriages becoming stale, or people feeling unseen or undervalued, and it manifests in them finding something elsewhere. But the damage of an affair is enormous, so you have to ask the question, is it worth it?"

Adultery premieres on ITV1 on Sunday 25th October at 9pm, continuing on Monday at 9pm. All episodes will be available to stream on ITVX.

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