Alison O’Donnell and Ashley Jensen make their 10th appearance in the crime drama Shetland. However, her trip to the set from her Bath home was a little difficult.
Shetland celebrates its 10th series with a very fishy mystery, but getting to the set of the show was a chore in itself. DI Ruth Calder and DI Alison “Tosh” McIntosh are back.
The new season of the hit BBC One crime drama, based on the books written by Ann Cleeves, opens with the detecting duo sharing a rare moment of downtime in their car before Calder and Tosh are called to stop a boat suspected of carrying drugs.
The scene proved a test of endurance for Ashley Jensen, who plays Calder, as she had to rifle through a cart of dead fish after a tip-off. “It was real fish but the smell wasn’t as bad as you might anticipate,” Ashley says. “It was fresh fish but it was eight in the morning. I was flinging them about and I was getting bits of fish in my face. But I love all that.”
When an elderly woman named Eadie is discovered strangled to death, a case that shakes the team to the core, things start to get a darker turn. However, Ashley makes fun of the fact that this series is about more than murder.
Apart from my first season, she claims, “It’s my favorite season in terms of the script.” It incorporates the murder case from all of our personal lives.
Even DC Sandy Wilson, (Steven Robertson), and Sergeant Billy McCabe (Lewis Howden) feel the fallout. “We’re all looking at each other and thinking ‘who are you?’” Ashley says.
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Tosh, on the other hand, taps into her inner disciplinarian. “I aptly named her Dark Tosh. We see a side of her we’ve never seen before. She starts to lose her faith in policing. Everything starts to fall apart,” says Alison O’Donnell, who plays Tosh.
There’s also a hint of romance on the horizon for Ruth. “She’s in a place where she’s doing dating apps, because she feels she has to,” Ashley says. But the investigation could lead her heart somewhere unexpected – Eadie’s handsome son, Ed, played by Stuart Townsend.
According to Ashley, “He has this complicated relationship with his mother, and Calder has complicated relationships with her father.” Allison warns that the investigation will be very sensitive. She claims that “this story will affect our team and it will bring out things from the past.”
The cast’s greatest adversary is Shetland weather, who still dominates the screen. Finding a location there was sometimes more difficult for Ashley, who lives in Bath.
She claims that when we travel there, me and about 15 other members of the crew always take an airplane. However, we had to travel to Orkney and arrive there.
Shetland was impossible to reach. We all spent about two hours sitting on the pavement. Then we must return to Aberdeen and spend the night at a hotel.
Alison had to adapt to a new dynamic when Ashley joined the eighth series in 2023 despite playing Tosh since the show’s beginning. Because I had been doing this for a long time and had an established rhythm, Alison recalls trying to find my feet during the first few weeks.
However, it became apparent to me that Ashley is the most sincere collaborator after a short while. Ashley continues, “Sometimes, you meet people and you go, “I can’t remember not knowing you,” which is a good thing.
Ashley’s own career has taken her from Scotland to Hollywood – she starred as Christina McKinney in Ugly Betty – but she says Shetland is where she belongs.
The Annan native says, “It felt like coming home when I first arrived in Shetland.” I don’t need to go back to America to prove anything. I think I did everything right and really enjoyed it. I’m not that person; I’m naturally Scottish.
Both actresses concur that the atmosphere on set is enjoyable, even eccentric, and occasionally filled with costume parties despite the long hours and the unpredictable weather.
They have “gone through a lot,” Ashley claims. They “have a theme,” they say. This year, puffins were the theme for our last year, while last year we had a maritime theme. The makeup artists “went to town” without a doubt.
