‘Suddenly I was a celebrity. I didn’t want to be!’ Sue Johnston on fame, loneliness and her new robot pal
She’s been a soap icon, a Royle and even a zombie pensioner. Now the actor is starring in Ann Droid, Diane Morgan’s madcap comedy about an elderly woman and her cybernetic companion
Sue Johnston is the kind of actor who usually can’t stand seeing herself on screen, but for Ann Droid she made an exception. The new sitcom by Diane Morgan and Sarah Kendall stars the 82-year-old as a recent widow whose son hires a humanoid robot called Linda (played with delightful uncanniness by Morgan herself) to assist her after he moves out. The results are initially farcical: Linda is a dated – and therefore relatively cheap – model who lacks the intelligence of newer variants and attempts to cheer people up by blasting Cotton Eye Joe at them. Yet the pair soon become inseparable. Johnston describes the show as “rich with humour and love”. When she watched it back, she found it so absorbing that “I forgot it was me – I very rarely do that and I just enjoyed it.”
Ann Droid is worth raving about on its own terms – it’s rambunctiously funny and exceptionally poignant – but it is clear Johnston’s enthusiasm stems from somewhere else too. “I’m proud of Diane and I just want it to work for her,” she says with feeling. The pair met on the set of the Sky sitcom Rovers before Morgan made it big with Philomena Cunk and Motherland and kept in touch. “Which you don’t with everyone. We’re both silly about our dogs; we just made a connection.” She was thrilled to reunite. “There’s a lot about Diane that reminds me of Caroline Aherne. They’ve got that northern, straight-face, cut-through humour. And they’re geniuses.”
The down-to-earth humour, exquisite pathos and weary warmth Johnston brought to The Royle Family, Aherne’s masterpiece, is all present and correct in Ann Droid, too: I cried at least once per episode. “There was only ever Sue Johnston that I wanted for this role,” says Morgan (hard evidence: she even named the character Sue). “She’s so adept at comedy obviously but is also incredibly moving in the more emotional scenes. She’s very relatable too, which helps. Basically she’s a perfect human being.”
Playing Sue didn’t require a huge leap for Johnston. “There’s a lot of self-recognition in it. Except that I hadn’t lost a husband – I had one and lost him 100 years ago.” (She divorced director David Pammenter, with whom she has a son.) Sue comes to treasure Linda’s companionship, and Johnston very much “recognised the loneliness thing. Although I have a very full life, there is a loneliness that creeps in when you’re old and you’re on your own.” We first meet Sue in hospital after a fall; Johnston had one herself last year. “Since then my son wants me to move near him but I’m fiercely independent. If he could have got me a robot, he’d have got me a robot!”
Johnston really doesn’t come across as someone struggling to cope. Aspirationally groomed and glam in an emerald green Issey Miyake pleated coat (a devoted Liverpool fan, she’s also wearing a 97 pin to commemorate the victims of the Hillsborough disaster), the actor also seems to have been working relentlessly. Johnston entered public consciousness as a beleaguered matriarch – first as Sheila Grant in Brookside, then as Barbara in The Royle Family – before going on to star as forensic psychologist Grace Foley in the popular police procedural Waking the Dead for 11 years. Lately, however, she’s been appearing in a slew of prestige television series about the elderly, including Ben Wheatley’s comedy horror Brexit allegory Generation Z, in which she played a pensioner turned zombie, and Truelove, about a group of old friends who decide to help each other die.
Does she still have a lot of energy? “No,” she says bluntly, then laughs. “I’m all right when I’m at work and there’s a sort of adrenaline; get up at five and go, I can do that. But when I’m not working, I’m buggered. I do take it easy.” The roles she has been offered recently must have been hard to resist – a far cry from the kindly grandparent characters of yore. Why are there so many meaty, edgy parts around for actors in their 70s and 80s nowadays? “I think that’s down to the generation we were,” says Johnston, who sees a through line from 1960s rebellion to modern-day popular culture. “It was almost revolutionary how we broke out of the traditions our parents grew up in. We were the ones that got miniskirts and wild music and fought for a lot of things.”
Having grown up nearby, Johnston spent some of those years at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, working for a time for Beatles manager Brian Epstein (she was the assistant to his assistant’s assistant) and becoming close friends with Paul McCartney. We speak a couple of weeks after the latter released his 20th solo album to much acclaim – yet more evidence that the cohort who broke out of societal strictures aren’t being sidelined in the way their predecessors were. “I saw Joan Collins being interviewed last night, she’s in her 90s and she’s playing the lead in her film,” marvels Johnston. “People don’t dismiss the old as much.”
In TV terms, Johnston is up there with the greats, but I think it might be scientifically impossible for her to be less of a luvvie. Rather than holding forth on her craft, she describes approaching projects with “panic and nerves. You don’t know whether you’re going to have the capacity to do it.” You might attribute this lack of ego to her career trajectory; she was 38 when she shot to fame in Brookside in 1982. It was “a shock – suddenly I was a celebrity. I didn’t want to be!” By then she had been working as an actor for decades, including 11 years in theatre and education. The experience of taking drama to schoolchildren may also be why she’s such an emotionally convincing actor. “Kids can see right through you – and will say! That’s what makes good drama, isn’t it?”
In less capable hands, Ann Droid’s dramatic arc could have been a tough sell. Set a handful of years into the future, it sees many frightening predictions around AI come true: robots are decimating the job market, and Sue’s son Michael (Morgan’s Motherland co-star Paul Ready) is eventually made redundant by a machine. Yet he’s so lazy, selfish and useless it’s hard to feel sorry for him. This is a world where robots are loyal and egoless, while the humans (Sue aside) are crushing disappointments.
Did filming Ann Droid make Johnston view our tech-dominated future more positively? She recently saw a video of robots running a marathon (“They moved exactly like Diane did!”) and found herself looking at them “with more affection than I would have done in the past”. Still, she’s far from an AI advocate. “I feel 50/50 about it. There is a danger it could fall into the wrong hands because there’s a lot of wrong hands around at the moment.”
When she started out, “you’d just kiss somebody or smack somebody, nobody cared”. For one scene in Brookside, her on-screen husband Ricky Tomlinson (who also played her other half in The Royle Family) had to hit her across the face; when their characters fought they’d “just grab each other”, she recalls with a shrug. “I think it’s better that people are cared for,” she quickly clarifies. “I’m not saying go back to smacking each other!”
That said, those days are full of precious memories. In between takes of The Royle Family, the cast “never got off the sofas”. Instead of going to trailers and dressing rooms they stayed “nattering and laughing – the crew as well”. Johnston describes herself as the “straight man” and felt it was a “privilege” to watch her cast mates clown around. “Ricky’s a great raconteur, so is Craig [Cash] and Caroline.” On set they had a “naughty corner”, where they had to stand if they laughed during a take or forgot their lines. Eventually, the carpenters built an actual cell-like structure “then the sparks [electricians] put a blue light over it”.
She still feels the loss of Aherne, who died of cancer in 2016, greatly. They were very close: in her 2011 memoir, Johnston wrote that “Caroline calls me her second mum”. After Aherne died, “Ricky had these paintings done of her from an artist friend of his for us all. Mine’s at the bottom of the stairs, so when I come down every morning, I go ‘Morning!’” As many times as Johnston has moved me to tears on screen, I wasn’t expecting to actually start crying during our interview. Yet she relates this routine with such understated sadness that I’m left temporarily speechless. “It’s horrendous,” she nods.
In the book, Johnson also writes about her fear that the phone will never ring again after finishing a project. She recently wrapped series three of James Graham’s superlative state-of-the-nation drama Sherwood (she plays an “old-school working-class woman – a battleaxe”) and says she has nothing else in the diary. Does she genuinely worry about work drying up? “Every actor does. You finish the job and you say: ‘Great, I can’t wait to be on the sofa with the dog.’ Then two weeks later you think: ‘Oh, that might be my last job.’” As strange as it sounds, I believe her. Well, of course I do: it’s impossible not to be convinced by Sue Johnston. Which is precisely why she won’t be on that sofa for long.
Ann Droid starts on 17 July at 9.30pm on BBC One.