‘Gentleman Jack’: Suranne Jones & Sophie Rundle on Season 2’s Radical Queer Representation

Sophie Rundle and Suranne Jones in Gentleman Jack - Season 2
Q&A
Aimee Spinks/HBO

Gentleman Jack finally returns with Season 2 on Monday, April 25. The HBO period drama tells the story of Anne Lister and Ann Walker, the first women to openly marry in England. Set in 1834 and pulled directly from Anne Lister’s diaries, Gentleman Jack gives all the queer Regency-era romance Bridgerton lacks. And its second season is a remarkable depiction of the day-to-day lives of queer couples who dared to be out in the 19th century.

“Yorkshire, 1834. All eyes are on Anne Lister and Ann Walker as they set up home together at Shibden Hall as wife and wife, determined to combine their estates and become a power couple,” the logline teases. “Anne Lister’s entrepreneurial spirit frightens the locals as much as her unconventional love life and, with Halifax on the brink of revolution, her refusal to keep a low profile becomes provocative and dangerous.”

Season 2 continues to use the real life diaries of Lister — part of which were written in code — as its source material, with every part of Lister’s story based in historical fact and the five million words she wrote in her journals.

In this TV Insider exclusive, Gentleman Jack stars Suranne Jones and Sophie Rundle and creator/writer/executive producer Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax) talk about the upcoming season, dishing on the importance of LGBTQIA+ representation in media and the radical lives of the show’s heroines.

Gentleman Jack Season 2 consists of eight episodes. In the first half of the season, Anne (Jones) and Ann (Rundle) are newly married and living together at Anne’s ancestral home, Shibden Hall. Anne has started calling her wife by the pet name Adne, and they set on their mission to make Adne’s family members — and the rest of the Halifax community — accept their marriage.

The wives embark on a de facto coming out tour, forcing Adne’s small-minded family members to see them and their queerness and, by extension, the normalcy of it. The commitment to their dignity is a daily practice, Anne says to Adne in the early episodes. And the next steps on cementing that dignity is revising their wills to leave everything to each other — the only legal way same-sex couples could bind themselves together at the time.

It’s a sad fact that queer love stories rarely get happy endings. Carol and POSE stand out as examples of happier queer romances, but they have their tragedies. Gentleman Jack Season 2 is a shining new addition to coming out stories in media. It puts a microscope on the day-to-day impact of living your truth — the bravery that process requires, the exhaustion it causes. And it highlights the joys of being free as well as the fear and aftermath of familial and societal rejection.

The sheer abundance of plot lines showcasing the nuanced lives of queer people is a feat. Here, Jones, Rundle, and Wainwright open up about why that representation is so important.

Anne and Adne’s family tour — the stresses and joys of it — highlights what it’s like to come out and how it feels to be faced with familial rejection, which isn’t something we see often in TV and film. What struck me in these episodes was how current it feels despite being set in 1834. Why do you think it’s important to be making a nuanced story like this set in this time period?

Suranne Jones: The importance of the show, of it not being a secondary story — this is on primetime television — this is, as you say, nuanced. We’ve had the chase, we’ve had the love affair, we’ve had the difficulties of Ann Walker’s mental health, her struggles with her own demons, her religion, homophobia to herself, within society. Now we’re looking at these women — the bravery of them, how they managed to marry, albeit in secret. But now they’re navigating what it is to not have the bond of a child, what it is to not have a piece of paper. All these things that same-sex couples have dealt with for years to get them to civil partnerships, to get them to marriage, still not sometimes.

I think looking at the struggle in detail is what marks us out, as you say, as a different show. It’s so important for the community — the wider community beyond the LGBTQIA+ community — to see it and understand it. Because if you don’t see it, you’re not going to understand it. That’s the point of shows that have this ability. It’s so important. A) If you can’t see it, you can’t be it, and B) If you can’t see it, you can’t understand it. We need shows like this so that we have a deep understanding of each other as humans and what we’ve been through and what we still go through.

Gentleman Jack Season 2 Suranne Jones

Aimee Spinks/HBO

Sally Wainwright: I think the reaction we’ve had to 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 a couple with that life then, 200 years ago.

Suranne Jones: Our Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack, Ann Walker community is beautiful because Sally understands it so well, so beautifully.

In Season 1, Ann was so fearful of what her family thinks of her and wanted so badly to please. In Season 2, her self-acceptance and steadfast decision to be with Anne at Shibden is remarkable for her. 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’ve used that word radical for her, ’cause she usually doesn’t get words like that. But you’re so right! I think she’d be horrified if people knew what was actually going on [laughs], 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 it is an extraordinary thing that she did, and that’s who she was deep down inside of her. She was this brave person, she was just sort of the victim of the life she had led up to that point. I hope that she would be proud that we’ve dug her out of history and we’ve celebrated her now and we’ve brought her back to the forefront of attention.

Gentleman Jack Season 2 Sophie Rundle

Aimee Spinks/HBO

One thing we talk about a lot is this is the story of two women that married each other, and yet we still have a tendency — as Sally pointed out, there’s this amazing plaque at the place where they got married, but it still focuses on Anne Lister and still sidelines Ann Walker a bit as the wife. There were two women in this marriage, and she was one of the women brave enough to commit herself to a woman at a time when that was unheard of. So I think that little strain of steel and bravery inside of her, I hope she’d be pleased that we see it and we celebrate it.

Gentleman Jack is also a BBC One production. The first episode of Season 2 aired Sunday, April 10, in the U.K. Wainwright, Jones, Faith Penhale, Will Johnston, and Ben Irving serve as executive producers. Phil Collinson and Stella Merz serve as producers. And Edward Hall, Amanda Brotchie, and Fergus O’Brien serve as directors. The new season is produced by Lookout Point for HBO and BBC One.

Gentleman Jack, Season 2 Premiere, Monday, April 25, 10 p.m. ET/PT, HBO and HBO Max