Ruth Wilson has opened up about the bizarre experience of pretending to give birth to her own father in her new BBC series, Mrs Wilson. In the show, which first aired on Tuesday, Ruth plays her real-life grandmother, Alison Wilson, who was shocked to discover that her husband was secretly married to three other women during his career in the army. Speaking about playing the role on the Graham Norton Show, which will air on Friday night, she said: "It's completely insane. It's madness to turn up and play the mother to my dad and my uncle."
© Photo: BBCRuth plays her grandmother in the show
She continued: "I have to give birth to my own father at one point, which is totally bizarre. I do feel sorry for my dad. As an actor, I have put my parents through so much on screen and now he's got to watch his daughter give birth to him. It's so weird!" The Luther star revealed that her grandmother passed away when she was 22, but that she discovered her memoirs after her death.
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Chatting on Lorraine, the actress explained: "She died when I was 22 so I knew her relatively well and she lived round the corner but, of course, she was a woman full of secrets and I remember her really as the woman who we find at the end of episode three, not the woman before that. So I had to go through all of her poetry and her memoirs, and it was an amazing privilege to discover and to play and to get under the skin of someone that had been in your life for so long that you didn't actually know that well."
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Ruth also revealed that it was challenging to protect her family during the show, saying: "It was one of the hardest things I've done, definitely, because you have the pressure of delivering the story but protecting your family. Making sure that all the members of the family that are seen on TV are served in the correct way, or how they'd like to be seen. We made sure all of the scripts were seen by all of the family members and that they had a say."
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