ITV’s Maternal: Interview with Lisa McGrillis who plays Dr Helen Cavendish

Premiering on ITV1 on Monday, January 16 is the six part Maternal, a new medical drama about three female doctors returning to work for the NHS after maternity leave. It stars Parminder Nagra, Lara Pulver, and Lisa McGrillis and written by Jacqui Honess-Martin.

Lisa plays Dr Helen Cavendish and tells us all about the series.

What attracted you to the role of Helen?
Being a mother myself and dealing with the life-work juggle is something that I can relate to on a day-to-day basis, like anyone who’s trying to be a good mother but is also passionate about their work, which I am. For the first time I feel like I’m playing a character that’s close to me, so they were easy shoes to fill. It felt like an organic experience.

For those that know you from Mum or King Gary, playing Helen in Maternal might seem like a departure. Did it feel that way for you?
I attract and I’m attracted to work that straddles comedy and drama. I feel like I can tap into that quite easily, finding the humour in everyday life. And I feel like Maternal very much does that, because there are situations that are funny rather than it being gags. It’s quite good to be able to do both. This definitely feels like more of a drama. Jacqui’s writing is quite exceptional; you can’t go off-piste with Jacqui’s writing because the rhythm breaks. It feels like she has written these three very real women who are very relatable.

How would you describe Helen?
Helen is a very warm, compassionate woman, very much from a working-class background and from a broken home. And she’s super-intelligent, but not in an academic way. She works in acute medicine, so she’s got much more of a human instinct when it comes to being a doctor rather than being a textbook medic. She can diagnose problems fairly quickly from just reading the room. I think that the audience will probably like her; she’s the kind of doctor that you would want to meet if you were going into hospital and you were frightened, because she’s super reassuring.

When we meet Helen, her marriage is going through a turbulent patch and she’s just returning to work after having her third child. Tell us about that.
And her husband is having an affair with a woman that Helen has to work with! But Helen can put on a front and go, ‘Okay, I’m just going to swallow this for a bit. I’m going to go in and be the best doctor I can. I’m going to do my ward rounds with a woman that my husband’s been having an affair with.’ If that was me, I would absolutely fall apart! But Helen has an extraordinary strength.

Were there any gory or funny moments when you as Helen were treating a patient or doing a procedure?
I had a funny turn in one scene. The only bit of gore that I had was when a patient of Helen’s had a ruptured [bleeding] haematoma in their groin. They’d set up all the prosthetics while I was in my trailer and I was called to set. As I arrived the guy who was playing the patient was eating in bed before the scene. It sounds really weird, but I walked in, and there was something about him eating a cookie while all this blood was squirting out of his groin that made me want to be sick. The director said I went really white. I had to stick my finger into that gaping wound, but it was fine once the patient had stopped eating.

Your own baby daughter, Cleo, has a starring role as Helen’s baby. How was that?
I thought that would be a good idea. I kind of regretted it at some points because it’s quite hard to switch off one from the other. But she was absolutely in her element; she’s probably going to win the first-ever baby BAFTA. She was reaching out and saying ‘Mummy’ on camera, which made it all feel slightly more authentic. My five-year-old son, Joshy, came on set, too, when my husband [actor Stuart Martin] was working away for four months and our nanny had norovirus.

Maternal is a show about women returning to work and we were all in a similar boat, being parents outside of trying to work on quite a busy filming schedule, which made it feel quite real. But I felt incredibly supported. The producers were like, ‘Okay, how can we help to make this work?’ Which is what doesn’t happen for the women on this show.

Maternal premieres Monday 16 January 2023 at 9.00pm on ITV1.