Sally Wainwright, Suranne Jones, and Sophie Rundle On How ‘Gentleman Jack’ Continues To Evolve In Season 2

If any historical figure’s life is rife with TV potential, it’s Anne Lister. The 19th-century lesbian landowner and prolific diarist was by far one of the most complicated and fascinating women of her time (and ours!), so it’s no wonder screenwriter Sally Wainwright became so captivated by her that she brought us Gentleman Jack, the HBO drama based on Lister’s life exactly as she described it in her extensive diaries. Starring a brilliantly natural Suranne Jones as Lister and Sophie Rundle as Ann Walker, Lister’s love interest and eventual wife, the series tells what is ultimately a thoroughly modern story about love, ambition, and pride that’s laced with humor and heart.

Now into its second season, Gentleman Jack is ready to delve into the tough stuff. Now that Anne and Ann have married and moved in together, we see the bigotry and hatred they faced as two lesbian women in the 1830s, when women were expected to want and do nothing more than to marry a man and bear his children. Instead, Anne knows she’s meant to conquer the world and she wants Ann by her side as she does it. That we the audience get to come along for the fun is an absolute pleasure. 

Decider was lucky enough to sit down to talk with Sally Wainwright, Suranne Jones, and Sophie Rundle as Season 2 kicked off to find out more about the importance of portraying LGBTQ life in the 1800s, the evolution of Anne and Ann, and what’s still to come for the new dynamic duo. 

DECIDER: Sophie, the first few episodes of Season 2 really let us dive deep into Ann Walker’s mental health issues, or at least other people’s perception of those issues. I’d love to know your perspective of what she was going through. How much of that struggle was legitimate and how much was a way for people to belittle or control her? 

SOPHIE RUNDLE: You know, it’s hard because we have the language and cultural understanding now of mental health. They didn’t have that then, so it’s hard to retrospectively apply that to what she was going through then. I did try to figure out what kind of thing she was going through, what I can understand in contemporary language, and put that into her. Like you say, how much of that is something she’s dealing with, and how much was her family trying to gaslight her? 

It’s a very toxic merging of both of those factors, I think. I think that she’s someone that wouldn’t be as ill as she was then if she lived now. I think she just needed help and that’s certainly what happens in Season 1 and throughout her life. Anne Lister offers her a lifeline. She just needs someone to listen to her. She’s in there and she just needs help getting out. I just tried to disentangle what was happening to her, what she was reacting to, why she just needed someone to share the load. That’s the heartbreaking thing. Anne Lister helped her with that. If she’d lived now, she would have been a much freer person.

Anne and Ann’s family tour stresses and joys, what it’s like to come out, what it feels like to experience familiar rejection — all of those are things we don’t see much on TV and film. What struck me is how current it feels despite it being set in the 1840s. Why do you think it’s important to tell a nuanced story like this set in this time period? 

SALLY WAINWRIGHT: I think the reaction of the show answers that in a way. I’ve had so many letters from women all over the world saying how important the show has been for them in terms of showing what a couple lived that life then, 200 years ago.

SURANNE JONES: I think the importance of the show is that it’s not a secondary story on primetime TV. We’ve had the chase, we’ve had the love affair, we’ve had the difficulties of Ann Walker’s mental health, the struggles of her own demons of religion and homophobia. Now we’re looking at how these women managed to marry, albeit in secret. They’re managing what it’s like to not have the bond of a child, a piece of paper, all these things that same-sex couples dealt with for years to get them civil partnerships. 

It’s so important for the community beyond LGBTQIA to see it and understand it because if you don’t see it, you’re not going to understand it. That’s why [Gentleman Jack] is so important. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it — and if you can’t see it, you can’t understand it. These shows help us have a deep understanding of each other as humans in terms of what we go through and are still going through. 

Back in Season 1, there was a much talked about the scene where Anne is beaten on the street. The airing of that episode coincided with a real-life attack of a lesbian couple on a London bus, which made it all the more poignant for viewers to watch. Obviously, there was no way you could have known that was going to happen when you were filming. However, going into Season 2, was there a desire to pull more modern-day issues that gay women face into the storyline? 

SALLY WAINWRIGHT: No, absolutely not. Everything [in the show] was taken from the journal. It’s interesting, though, that in Season 2, there are further attacks on Anne Lister and Ann Walker now as a married couple. They’re not physical attacks, but they were subtle and sustained and nasty attacks in the press. In Episode 5, for instance, there’s a mock marriage announcement that gets printed in the local newspaper and then gets reprinted in several more newspapers in the area to send up the fact that they’re now together. My objective with the show is to dramatize the diaries, but it’s interesting to make that connection. 

SURANNE JONES: I remember seeing those pictures and feeling like we’ve come so far with many things. We are all supposed to believe that we’re evolving as a wider community, but it shows if we don’t keep up the conversation, we still step back. I think that’s why this show is entertainment, it’s beautiful, it’s romantic, but it’s culturally important as well. 

SOPHIE: We get asked a lot, “why tell the story and how relevant is it?” and the parallels are staggering that something like that can happen. We’re telling this story from the 1830s and it’s still happening in 2022. 

Season 1 largely presented us with Anne Lister as this extremely dazzling woman who gets everything she wanted and Ann Walker as this delicate flower that needs help coming out of her shell. I was curious if you guys could all speak to the differences in Season 2 and how you shaped the trajectory of Ann Walker becoming a bit bolder with Anne Lister. We get to see [Lister] being manipulated a bit in the first few episodes!

SOPHIE RUNDLE: You’re so right, Ann Walker is brought out of her shell. We end Season 1 at the beginning of their marriage, so if Anne Lister is making her come out of her shell and making her blossom and become a better version of herself, Sally kept telling me [Ann Walker] is going to use that against Anne Lister and she did! She was a bit of a madam at times and that’s exacerbated by the confidence Ann Lister gives her. That was such a fun dynamic to play with at times. She encouraged her to get out of her box, but then she wishes she would get back in that box. 

SURANNE JONES: It was fun to explore that. We had some great arguments! We were able to push each other’s buttons in a way we didn’t see in Season 1, and that’s the reality of marriage. You don’t get on with each other all the time and you find out about each other when you live together. I think that will be the universal takeaway from that. Whoever you’re married to, it’s difficult, and these women have societal pressures on top of that. 

DECIDER: Suranne, I’d love to talk about the marriage between the Annes. We know from the diaries and what we saw on the show that Anne Lister cared deeply for Anne Walker. However, it is pointed out early on in Season 2 that she’s not passionately in love with the younger woman. We know Anne Lister was industrious, so is it so hard to imagine that this might have been a business arrangement in her eyes in many ways? It was for most people in the 19th Century… 

SURANNE JONES: Oh yeah! We didn’t shy away from the fact that Anne Lister isn’t a predator, but for sure she wanted to climb up the social ladder. She needed money and she needed ways of being part of society. She isn’t a man. She needs to get her tenants to vote in a certain way so that she can control elements of how she fits in with being a female entrepreneur at that time. 

I think that marrying a woman with money was like rocket fuel for her. She’s like Anne Lister on speed. She’s got a wife, she’s got money, she’s got plans. She wants to build a bigger, better future for them. She’s providing, she’s being the male role. She wants to do all of that, and Sally doesn’t shy away from that. 

DECIDER: As for being in love… 

SURANNE JONES: I don’t think Anne Lister knows she’s in love. She says she’s fond of [Ann Walker]. She’s used to big, dramatic, explosive relationships with Mariana. I think that marriage isn’t always about that. It’s about coming home to somebody and I don’t mean Shibden Hall. It’s about the difficulties and fear and safety of that relationship. We will all fall in love with Anne Walker right along with Anne Lister in Season 2 on-screen. We do get there. 

Sophie, in Season 1, Ann Walker was so fearful of what her family thought of her and she was so eager to please. Her self-acceptance and her steadfast decision to be with Anne and make that full commitment is pretty remarkable. How do you think Ann would respond to the statement that she’s incredibly brave and pretty radical? 

SOPHIE RUNDLE: Oh, I love that you use the word “radical” for her because she doesn’t get words like that used for her and you’re so right. I think she’d be horrified that people know what was actually going on, but I’d like to think that maybe on some level she’d be proud that people saw her, acknowledged her, and supported her. I think that’s who she was deep down inside of her, this brave person, just a victim of the life she led up to that point. 

I hope she would be proud that we’ve dug her out of history and we’ve celebrated her now. This was a story of two women who married each other and yet we still have a tendency to focus on Anne Lister. There’s this amazing plaque of where they got married, but it still focuses on Anne Lister and still sidelines Ann Walker as “the wife.” There were two women in this marriage and she was brave enough to commit herself to a woman at a time when it was unheard of. So yeah, the little strain of steel and bravery inside of her is there; I hope she would be pleased that we see it and celebrate it. 

Season 2 of Gentleman Jack premieres at 10PM tonight, April 25, on HBO and HBO Max.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor from New York who cares too way much about fictional characters and spends her time writing about them.