“I’ve no doubt that the lockdown affected my response,” she says. “People really need to feel a sense of connection in times of crisis, and they need to feel that they can see and hear one another, even though they are so distanced. So I thought this show really fit the bill. But the dynamic is a very complicated one, and all of the relationships are, in their own ways, quite complicated.”
If the first episode is any indication, Amazing Grace has more shock twists than a daytime soap. Except in this case, they’re right up front. As Diane, the hospital mentor to Kate Jenkinson’s gifted but frazzled midwife, Grace, Thornton appears at first stern and despairing of her protege, but, in tune with the rapidly developing plot, another vital element of their relationship soon becomes clear.
“The premise requires the audience to accept a coincidence, if one can call it that. Free-to-air television is at pains to keep creating drama but we are living in a very different environment, where people can absorb new screen stories very quickly in that binge setting. So, commercial television needs to take a slightly different approach. That’s something that [writers] Jonathan Gavin, Ainslie Clouston and Sarah Smith have managed to do very skillfully – to open up an enormous number of unanswered questions.”
In addition to the messy lives of the main players (the cast includes Alex Dimitriades, Luke Ford and Catherine Van-Davies), is the literal messiness that goes hand in hand with the location. As “one of those people who finds it difficult to look away when there’s a baby around,” Thornton delighted in working alongside numerous newborns. Due to a shortage of prosthetic tummies, there were also many pregnant extras: “There was a lot of new – life pending and real – and that creates a very tender and respectful situation on set.”
The series touches on controversial issues around maternity care.
“The show explores the way in which every birth is completely different,” Thornton explains. “The way in which any given birth will pan out is unpredictable, even to the experts. I don’t know that the show makes judgments either way. One thing that it does definitely support is increasing power for mothers and potential mothers.”
Having appeared on both Prisoner in the 1980s and, more recently, alongside Kate Jenkinson, on Foxtel’s Wentworth, Thornton hopes for a future in which female-led drama can move beyond prisons and maternity wards.
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“Both [shows] are signs of a movement in the direction of telling women’s stories. The dearth of women’s stories leading up to (Prisoner) over the previous generation was pretty gob-smacking, but also a reflection of societal norms. The beauty of this new wave of women’s stories, which has been in train in the US and the UK for a long while, is there are so many stories yet to be told. We are moving into a new period of creative work that is seeking to more truly reflect the demographic breakdown of our society, and this goes for racial, ethnic and gender parity and true representation as well … The challenge with drama is to find an environment and a world that brings people together realistically in the one setting and that’s why there’s always a generous sprinkling of legal, police and medical drama. But as we start to seek new ways of looking at the world through innovative writing, that will change.”
