‘Most women have an uncomfortable work story – my BBC thriller brings that to life’

The new BBC thriller Wild Cherry takes us into the rarified air of ‘the island’, a hermetically sealed enclave of privilege with its own private school that parents can threaten with withdrawn funding if the education isn’t up to scratch.

Houses – or, rather, mansions – are buried behind hulking hundred-year-old trees or down neatly gated off lanes. It’s an elite world Carmen Ejogo had no idea was so close to her native London, where income disparities are rammed up against each other from one street to the next.

It was not in such plain sight in Surrey, where Wild Cherry was filmed. ‘Suddenly you’re in this insane level of wealth,’ Ejogo, 52, tells Metro ahead of the show’s release today. ‘It feels a bit like them and us.’

That ambient affluence comes across on the small screen, with its fictional town of Richford Lake, where Ejogo’s character Lorna is one of several ultra-privileged mothers whose unruly daughters attend said private all-girls school.

Alongside the regular flavour of teenage angst and rebellion, the yummy mummies are also facing off a dangerous new era of social media, in which their daughters believe they’re in control, but are being unwittingly exploited.

Since you might be wondering, the evocative show title nods to both a climactic cherry grove scene and the raft of teenagers popping some figurative and literal cherries. The show is, after all, written by Bafta-winning Nicôle Lecky, who is not one for pulling titular punches – she burst onto the creative scene with her one-woman play Superhoe.

Ejogo has no shortage of good things to say about Lecky and her ‘curious, idiosyncratic worldview’. At 35, Lecky has a staggering number of strings to her bow, doing double duty here behind and in front of the camera as an American life coach none of the mothers much like.

‘There’s so much about this show that is women at their best, women at their worst; it’s the full gamut of the female experience for many different generations,’ says Ejogo.

Part of that gamut is Lorna’s mysterious past, in which she was forced into a relationship with her much older boss, played by Hugh Quarshie, as a last resort to progress in her career.

‘We’ve all come through the Me Too era, so one hopes that there’s less of that now,’ she says, ‘and that we have different avenues to navigate it, but I love that we get to explore that.

‘Most women that I meet have some story that is uncomfortable, awkward, weird when it comes to work dynamics and choices they made that might have been a little compromising. Just to survive. Just to keep going.

‘I think so many of us have that story at some point.’

Lorna’s partner in crime (yes, there’s crime in Richford Lake, more on that in a moment) is Eve Best’s Juliet, who might be the closest on-screen realisation of the ‘hot mess express’ in a little while. She’s fabulously unhinged and very much the yin to the yang of Ejogo’s buttoned-up Lorna, who’s queasy when the question of sex comes up with her daughters.

Ejogo said she could relate to the ‘overarching struggle’ of parenting, as a mother of two children she shares with ex-husband Jeffrey Wright.

‘You want to give free rein to your daughters to be whoever they want to be in the world, but there are so many ways in which you find yourself suppressing that, because you know society isn’t necessarily going to support you,’ she says.

‘I was able to lean into what those arguments look and feel like.’

That said, the prospect of tweaking the script to reflect her own parenting ups and downs was a no-no. ‘Nicôle is quite a strong gatekeeper of her own material,’ Ejogo laughs.

It’s material she praises Lecky for having managed to find a ‘thoroughly entertaining’ way in. Wild Cherry might be an eat-the-rich takedown with flavours of mother-daughter complexities, but – perhaps to make audiences more interested in those things – above all else, it is a pulpy thriller.

In a flashforward that’s woven into the episodes, we see the blood-soaked women trying to scrub away the evidence of having done something Ejogo promises ‘audiences aren’t prepared for’.

‘I’m not a snob about genre or mashing up things,’ she says. ‘I don’t think it has to dilute the work. I think we still handled it in a really sophisticated way.

‘It’s a really great thrill, a really good ride. I don’t know what I would compare it with. It’s so original in some ways.

‘I don’t know how people are going to take it.’ The good news is, you can go and decide for yourself.

All six episodes of Wild Cherry are available to stream on BBC iPlayer.

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