Nina Sosanya (Leigh)
What is Screw about?
It’s set in C Wing of Long Marsh Prison, a Category B male prison. That wing is run by supervising officer Leigh Henry, who I play. There’s a motley crew of prison officers under her beady eye, and into that comes a new young officer called Rose, played by Jamie-Lee O’Donnell. Because of the nature of prison life and the types of people drawn towards working there, everybody has a very different take on how prison should be run, how prisoners should be dealt with, what rules are to be adhered to or broken. It’s a pressure cooker of personalities.
Where does Leigh stand on prison: what should it be accomplishing?
She absolutely lives for her job, which ordinarily makes my heart sink when you hear that in a character breakdown. But when you look at what this job actually is, it’s completely fascinating. She utterly believes that she can and should be trying to make a difference within a system that she sees as broken. She runs her wing like the captain of a ship, according to her own beliefs and rules, and doesn’t particularly trust anybody else to do the job as well as well as she can. She finds it easier to relate to the prisoners than the staff members, and this causes incidents. She’s quite unpredictable and enigmatic, but she’s compassionate and trying to do the best she can within a broken system. One of the things that she says is about how these people have already been judged – the loss of liberty is the punishment – so the officers’ job is to look after them while they’re here, to make that time as beneficial as they can.
Why did you want to do Screw?
It opened my eyes to an area I was completely ignorant about. Prison is not something I think about, which goes to the heart of the whole problem. If you don’t have any connection with it, it’s out of sight, out of mind, and that doesn’t seem like a great way for society to treat anyone. I also really didn’t understand that female officers worked in male prisons, so that was intriguing to me.
How has doing Screw changed your perceptions of prison?
That line about loss of liberty being the punishment is what I hadn’t really understood. Is it correct to shut people away with no real means to effect change within their lives? Is it right to send them back out and expect them to rehabilitate themselves in a world that is now hostile to them because of the stigma of having been in prison? None of this seems to work. I hope people who watch this show might start to think about that and look at what is needed in terms of trying to respect this as a job which is as important as education, policing, health… It should be right up there, but people just don’t talk about it.
Do you need a particular mindset as a female officer in a male prison?
I think so. I spoke at length with a female prison officer who worked in the prison system for many years and the main thing is that they seem to have an extraordinary amount of courage and compassion. Every single day can be a volatile situation, so it takes a particular type of person to be able to stay. I think the biggest quality is compassion, because they’re looking after people in the most vulnerable state: if you don’t feel compassion then you’re not going to last very long.
Why did she decide to become a prison officer in particular?
That’s very much very much bound up in who she is and it’s really tricky to answer without giving anything away…
What do we know about Leigh’s life outside her work?
We don’t really, which is one of the joys of the programme. 90% of it takes place within this one wing of this prison, so it really is about who everybody is once they’re behind those gates. The outside world sort of doesn’t exist while you’re in there. All these people are thrown together in the same building, day in day out, even though they’re completely different, with vastly different attitudes and life experiences.
Could you talk a little about the set?
It’s a life-size replica of a prison wing, the sort that might have been built in the mid-19th century where it’s about the railings and the steel steps. It was built over three levels within this huge hangar in Glasgow, and goes around two corners. Once you step through the gates, you’re actually in this sort of living, breathing, breathing prison with 100 or so cells, most of which can open and lock. There are offices and pool tables, classrooms and medical stores… You’d be forgiven for thinking that the series is going to look claustrophobic or samey, but it’s exactly the opposite because these three levels allow the camera to sweep from one place to another. Rob would write these huge scenes and we’d be going, why is this not five or six scenes? But you can go from level one to level three, into a cell and out to the office, all in one. It makes it really dynamic.
What’s Leigh’s relationship like with Rose?
She’s really unimpressed. When Rose arrives, Leigh is juggling about five different situations with admin, governors breathing down her neck, and prisoners under lockdown because her team is so short-staffed. They keep sending these young recruits who have just got sacked from some other job and think this this will be a breeze. Leigh sees Rose as one of those: someone who is young and doesn’t seem to have taken much interest in the training. She’s made a lot of assumptions about Rose and doesn’t trust her.
How does she get on with the rest of her team?
She’s closest to Jackie, but keeps her at arm’s length in terms of their private life because she feels like that’s the best way for her to get the job done. She really doesn’t ask Jackie anything about her life either, even though Jackie would love her to. She banters and gets along very easily with the male prisoners which is probably one reason why she’s in a male prison.
Might you have the tools to do that job yourself?
No, not at all. Everything we do as actors is so controlled, but the whole nature of the work as a real prison officer is the opposite. You have to be ready for anything and everything.
