‘The Crow Girl’: Eve Myles Says ‘Jeanette Doesn’t Catch Her Breath’ in Season 2 After Wild Finale

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Crow Girl Season 1 finale “I’ll See You There.”]

Well, there’s a twist that Jeanette (Eve Myles) certainly didn’t see coming. In The Crow Girl Season 1 finale (streaming on Acorn TV as of October 13), she and Sophia (Katherine Kelly) grow closer just as the audience is let in on a major reveal.

It turns out that the killer that Jeanette has been after, Victoria (Clara Rugaard), is actually none other than Sophia. Her father sexually abused her — Victoria’s sister Madeleine ( Chloé Sweetlove) is actually her daughter — and her mother did nothing to stop it. In the finale, Victoria killed her father after he killed their daughter. Then, after quite the day that included her partner Lou (Dougray Scott) being taken in by anti-corruption for his inappropriate relationship with a victim and links to underground fighting club in which boys were forced to participate, Jeanette headed to Sophia’s for some wine. And a season of the two women growing closer culminated in a kiss and then Sophia leaving Jeanette in bed … to go to where she was holding her mother in a hidden room behind her bookcase.

Below, Eve Myles unpacks the finale, Jeanette and Sophia’s relationship, and more, and teases what’s ahead in the second season.

That wild Sophia’s Victoria twist, which I loved, it’s so juicy — what was your reaction to that?

Eve Myles: Wow, my gosh. The book [by Erik Axl Sund] that it’s based on, I read quite a bit of it, but then I let it go because I felt that Jeanette in our story was really different, and I didn’t want to be swayed by that. I just kind of wanted to play in my script. I had no idea. I had no idea. And when Katherine and I both got that, we were just on the phone going, “Wow, that is cheeky. That is cheeky, cheeky.” And I just thought it was brilliant. And I watch everything with my husband and it’s just lovely to see his reaction. He was floored by it. I just think it had been done so well. I think the directors done it so well, and Kate was just so perfect, pitched it so beautifully. Then the edit in that last episode was just like, it just stopped you from breathing. It was just so beautiful. So more of that please. [Laughs]

Courtesy of Acorn TV

Does Jeanette have any suspicions whatsoever about Sophia at this point at the end of the Season 1 finale?

No, not at all. The only thing that she picks up on that’s suspicious is that when she looked at those tapes, that’s Victoria’s tapes. There’s nothing in them. And before that can sink in or she can process that because Jeanette sees something, bang, bang, bang, and it’s literally like dominoes. Her thought process is she gets that one clue or she gets that one conversation with somebody, or she sees something that will connect and pin and unlock a case, and it goes down like dominoes. And she’s there and she’s got the answer. She’s brilliant at what she does. She’s unconventional, but she’s brilliant at what she does, and infuriating. But she didn’t give her that time. So, it was a beat, and she was there with a wine and then seduced her. So it was like, she’s not going to be thinking about that.

It’s the beginning of it though. She’s on the path, it seems. Speaking of the seducing, they’ve been drawn to each other since the beginning, and that culminates in this finale. How does Jeanette feel about Sophia romantically at this point? How much is that something she’s still sorting through? Does she have any clear feelings yet about that? Because she’s gone through so much in this one day, too.

Yeah, it’s been, I mean, the entire day, it’s [one thing] after another, it’s like she’s been in a boxing ring and life has kicked the s**t out of her that day. And there she is, still standing, still managing to smile and chat, but she’s frazzled and vulnerable and fragile and open, and she needs comfort and she seeks that comfort from the only other person in her life now, who is Sophia. But there has been an attraction there from the beginning because of the warmth and just something that naturally happened between the pair of them. So, absolutely there’s feelings there because she didn’t rebuke her. It was almost like, it’s going to happen, but when, and that was the right — it was about when that was going to happen.

So, I think that going forward, it would be great to explore the messiness of that, the confusion that I would imagine many people go through when something like that in midlife happens, and it happens all the time. So, it’d be a really great and interesting and beautiful thing to play that and find and try and find honesty in it and truth in it to make it work and make it really believable because we’ve got to bring these women even closer and closer and closer together. Because when Jeanette finds out who she is, the closer those women are, the more devastating that will be.

Speaking of devastating, that Jeanette Lou conversation in her office is so intense. Talk about filming that with Dougray. How does Jeanette feel about her partner after it?

Bereft. It’s like a death. She feels grief and is saddened and unable to breathe after it. She’s lost him in front of her eyes, for all our admittance to come up. But firstly, dealing with a — I think Milly [Thomas] had written a 13-page scene and we’d received it a couple of weeks, and I’m on all day every day. So, when scripts come in, it’s really quite difficult to try and embed them. And I’m so strict on that. I need to know them inside out and back to front, because the last thing I want to be thinking of when I’m on set is my lines. I want to be able to play. They just have to be there, and I trust that they’ll be there because I’ve done the prep. I’m really, really disciplined like that. There’s nothing worse than having your scene bouncing around you in a scene and you’re searching. And I know some people really like that, but that’s just not for me. That’s just not for me, and it’s not for Dougray either. So Dougray and I had this script and this scene, and we were like, you don’t get scenes like that in television. It was a play. There was three acts in that. And you just don’t get that in telly. That format is like, no, no, no, no, no. But Milly is an amazing writer, and she’s got a lot of experience in theater and having that scene was a gift, an absolute gift to have, but terrifying at the same time because you’ve got to be so dynamic to keep people’s attention for that long in one scene.

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So, it wasn’t quite right. So, it’s been tweaked and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked then. So, we finally got it on the Friday and we were shooting it on the Wednesday, and Dougray and I just didn’t stop. We just went over it. No performance. No performance whatsoever. We just went line for line for line, line for line, so that then we could make — and then it was right, let’s try a version now where we make it messy. Let’s try a version now where we don’t drop one word and we just talk to each other and we just run it. Just run it like speed run it, like you’d speed run a play in a rehearsal room.

There was so many setups with one camera, and at the end of it, we were so exhausted. We came away and we both kind of just went, “I just hope it works. I hope it’s OK.” And it’s the first thing anybody talks about. Every time somebody comes to have a chat with me about this, whether it’s press or somebody in the street, whatever, they always go, “That scene, that scene was really special.” And I always say, “Thank you,” because everything was against it. How long it was, how long we’d had it for. The nature of the emotion in the scene was really hard. But look, I’m opposite Dougray Scott. It doesn’t get any better than that. The guy is a genius.

So, I know there’s going to be a second season. I cannot wait to see that. Is there anything you can tease?

All I can tease is that it’s the beginning of this story, and Jeanette doesn’t catch her breath. That’s all I’m saying.

The Crow Girl, Season 1, Streaming Now, Acorn TV