Joanne Froggatt has taken on some dark roles. But her latest - as a doctor during the pandemic - had her in tears from the very beginning

Joanne Froggatt plays an NHS doctor during the pandemic in ITV's Breathtaking READ MORE:  Will tear-jerking new ITV Covid drama have the 'Mr Bates effect'?

Joanne Froggatt’s career has been punctuated by a number of high-profile roles that have shocked viewers and stoked some heated debate.

As lady’s maid Anna Bates in Downton Abbey she was brutally raped by a valet, and she followed that by playing sadistic Victorian killer Mary Ann Cotton, who was thought to have poisoned 11 of her 13 children, in Dark Angel.

She then shone as teacher Laura Nielson when the date-rape thriller Liar gripped the nation in 2017, before taking on the role of a domestically abused wife out for revenge in Angela Black.

But it was Joanne herself who was left shaken and tearful after reading the script for her latest TV series Breathtaking, in which she plays an NHS doctor in the pandemic.

‘Soon after I began reading the first episode I started to cry,’ she says. ‘That’s never happened to me before in 27 years reading scripts. Nothing I’ve been asked to be a part of has affected me, or shocked me, in the way this story did.’

Dr Abbey Henderson, an acute medicine consultant played by Joanne Froggatt, with painful marks from her PPE

Co-written by Line Of Duty creator Jed Mercurio and based on the memoir of NHS doctor Rachel Clarke, the three-part drama begins in March 2020 as the world comes to terms with the spread of a virus that to date has claimed 230,000 lives in the UK.

As the series progresses it takes in Covid deniers and the second wave of the virus in the winter of 2020, as well as the impact on the NHS staff who spent months on the front line.

Joanne’s character, Dr Abbey Henderson, an acute medicine consultant and mother-of-two, works at a city hospital in England and is quicker than most to realise that the NHS – and the UK in general – is ill-prepared for what’s about to hit.

She sits in a lecture theatre with colleagues as a consultant details how the hospital will deal with Covid, aghast that nobody’s wearing a protective mask.

Her frustration at the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), testing kits and, in time, beds and ambulances only mounts as the crisis deepens. It escalates early in the first episode when the government sees its hopes of restricting the virus to those who’ve recently travelled from countries affected by Covid shattered.

‘A patient at the hospital hasn’t been abroad but becomes gravely ill,’ explains Joanne. ‘Then the doctor treating him also catches Covid and becomes seriously ill too. Soon the number of people being admitted to the hospital with the virus starts to grow and the scale of what’s about to happen becomes horribly apparent.’

The series was filmed over three floors of a disused university building in Belfast last year, with the rooms and corridors furnished to look like a busy hospital.

Before filming began Joanne and the rest of the cast attended a medical bootcamp aimed at teaching them everything from the correct way to put on their PPE to how to resuscitate patients.

‘The putting on and taking off of the protective equipment was so important to get right because it could be the difference between you saving or losing your life,’ explains Joanne. ‘A lot of the rehearsal week also involved drilling from doctors Tom and Andrew, our medical advisors, on how to resuscitate patients.

‘Tom and Andrew both worked on the front line during Covid and it was the details they passed on that I found really useful.

Before filming began the entire cast attended a medical bootcamp aimed at teaching them everything from the correct way to put on their PPE to how to resuscitate patients

‘In the first episode Abbey has to pronounce someone dead in an ambulance, and Andrew said I might want to touch their arm as I was revealing the time of death as a mark of respect. Those tiny moments of humanity really helped.’

One huge challenge for Joanne was wearing a tight protective mask while filming, especially as director Craig Viveiros would let scenes run for minutes at a time so the actors became immersed in the story.

‘At least we could step back, have a snack or go to the toilet when the scene was completed,’ she says. ‘In the real world there was none of that. During four-hour shifts treating patients with Covid you couldn’t scratch your nose, go for a comfort break or anything like that.’

The series began life as a diary in which Dr Clarke recorded her feelings about looking after patients in the early days of the pandemic.

‘I was stressed, and because I couldn’t sleep I’d sit in my kitchen at night tapping away at my computer, writing about what was happening at work,’ she says. ‘It was therapeutic and it meant I didn’t keep my husband awake.’

When the diaries were published under the title Breathtaking in 2021, former NHS doctor Mercurio recognised them as a means of bringing an authentic frontline account of the pandemic to TV screens.

‘It felt like a story we had to tell, with the mismatch between government messaging and the public reality as the centrepiece of the drama,’ he says.

The team behind it are hoping that the series will have the same impact on the public as the Mr Bates Vs The Post Office drama did, and Dr Clarke hopes it will remind people just how serious the pandemic was at a time when its severity has come under the spotlight during the ongoing Covid-19 Inquiry.

Breathtaking began life as a diary in which NHS doctor Rachel Clarke recorded her feelings about looking after patients in the early days of the pandemic

‘There’s a view held by some that Covid wasn’t as serious as it actually was,’ she says. ‘This series shows how serious and deadly it was, how important it was that we introduced the restrictions we did.’

She also wants the show to serve as a tribute to those who worked and died during the pandemic. ‘Doctors I know are haunted by the experience four years on,’ she says.

‘If I ask any colleague what their Covid experience was like, almost without exception they’ll cry, and this includes grizzled A&E doctors and people who’ve worked in intensive care units for years.

‘I hope that when NHS staff watch the series they feel seen. I hope they’ll think, “That’s me, that’s what I went through. That is my testimony and now the public knows what it was like.”’

• Breathtaking, Monday-Wednesday, 9pm, ITV1.