THE BURNING GIRLS
CJ TUDOR’S TALE OF MURDER AND MARTYRDOM COMES TO TV IN THE BURNING GIRLS
IF SATNAV HAD A STORYTELLING equivalent it might just struggle to pin down Chapel Croft. This seemingly idyllic village with a harrowingly dark past is the setting for The Burning Girls, a series committed to taking your bearings away.
“Everything’s a puzzle,” says executive producer Tony Wood. “Nothing is quite what it seems. To paraphrase Pirates Of The Caribbean, ‘You don’t believe in ghost stories. Well, you’re in one!’ You think you’re in a thriller and then you realise you’re in something supernatural. And then you question whether it’s really supernatural. There are things that you don’t see coming. There are 90 degree turns in it that keep you strapped in throughout.”
The six-part Paramount+ drama adapts the 2021 novel by CJ Tudor. “As a read it doesn’t let you go,” Wood tells SFX. “It was a bold take on a thriller, and that allowed us to make something that sat outside of the more normal crime genre. I think she’s a brilliant writer.
“She’ll fly off the shelves in WH Smith at the airports and simultaneously she’ll be very, very well reviewed in the broadsheets. Looked at from a broadcast point of view, that’s excellent for us!”
Samantha Morton is the Reverend Jack Brooks, relocating from Nottingham to Sussex with teenage daughter Flo (Lockwood & Co’s Ruby Stokes). Looking to put their own traumatic past behind them, the pair discover Chapel Croft’s alarming history – not only the horrific execution of two local girls, burned at the stake during Queen Mary’s purge of the Protestants in 1556, but the disappearance of another two girls in the early 1990s.
“The story’s driven by Jack’s curiosity throughout. She’s absolutely convinced that if there are restless spirits then it’s her job to quieten them. And then the village reveals its true character and she becomes aware of the mystery of the disappearance of the girls, and her curiosity then drives that. So she is part detective, part spiritual guide, part anxious mother.
“Sam is such a brilliant performer. She created this performance that was not really what we had seen on the page, in which she’s alive to everything around her. Every activity she’s seeing, she’s weighing up. That kind of combined the vicar and the detective in a way that galvanised the whole show.”
As Wood reveals, Morton’s performance delivers a subtly different protagonist to the one in the novel. “She took some of the lightness out of Jack. In the book Jack seemingly skates through life and has a smile on her face all of the time. Sam wasn’t going to do that. She played her with a curiosity and an intensity, and in filming we quickly worked out that the key w
