The star of The Lazarus Project loves escape rooms – but can she escape a time loop?
She’s appeared in more grounded dramas such as Bodyguard and Vigil, and in the near future we can expect to see her making her breakthrough as a television writer – The Goddaughter, a drama about Sikh suffragette Sophia Duleep Singh, is in the works. But it’s Anjli Mohindra’s sci-fi roles that SFX readers hold most dear. For some, she’ll always be Sarah Jane Smith’s “schoolgirl investigator” neighbour Rani.
This month she returns to our screens as Archie, the kick-ass, banter-spitting ex-MI5 agent in The Lazarus Project. We caught up with her on set to talk time travel, Elisabeth Sladen, and geeking out.
Series two involves proper time travel. Does that mean we’ll see Archie meet her younger self?
I will encounter myself in different time periods, but in a very strange way. When you go from series one to series two of any show, you get to inhabit it in a different way. People know that Archie is very good at her job, and very dedicated to it. Now we get to see what happens when she’s pushed to a certain place emotionally, or facing heartbreak. The time travel allows us to explore her seeing herself in a different time, from a completely different perspective, and seeing her process her loss in a deeper way.
So we see more vulnerability? Because Archie usually seems pretty bullet-proof, psychologically speaking.
100%, and that’s been fun to play: seeing who’s behind that mask. George did the thing she wished she could do: bring back a loved one. She’s had to live with the notion that she couldn’t have made Wes call for a Code Black and go back and rescue [dead boyfriend] Ross. Yet George does do that and gets Sarah back. There’s an unravelling behind the scenes – it wasn’t explored in the script, but her saying, “I could have saved him. Maybe I didn’t love him enough.”
Sarah is brought into the fold as a Lazarus agent this year. Does that provide a different perspective?
Yeah, her presence makes us all question things. And Archie’s having to really face whether she believes the Lazarus Project is for the greater good. This organisation where she was like, “I believe in this – I wanted a job that puts humanity at the heart of everything” – now seems corrupt. So maybe she should have used it to get Ross back.
This series you’ve got resets to the checkpoint, but also true time travel on top of that. It must be confusing.
Just as you thought you understood the rules of the game, someone’s got the cheat level out. A lot of us cast are quite cerebral – we all enjoy thinking outside of the box. It isn’t a script where you can read it and be like, “Right, I know what I’m doing.” Yo
