Queen Of The Screen Jenna's Hard Labour

The Actress Tells How Being Brave Helped Her Career Grow.

- Elizabeth Day

The other day, Jenna Coleman gave birth for the seventh time. “I feel like my year has been maternity bras and pregnancy bumps,” she says over a cup of tea in a café near her home in north London. “It’s becoming a parody now.”

Before you start to worry about the medical anomaly that is Jenna’s uterus, rest assured it’s all been for the cameras. In real life, the 32-year-old is yet to have children. “I don’t know if the time is now for me,” she says.

On screen, however, she has been through a long phase of playing mothers.

She’s in the middle of filming the third series of Victoria, the hit TV drama scripted by Daisy Goodwin in which Jenna plays the titular queen, and “we’re up to the seventh child now, which is just ridiculous”. Victoria ultimately had nine so, she adds, “I’m not out of the woods yet.”

And then there’s the BBC psychological drama The Cry, in which Jenna plays Joanna, a young mother in present-day Glasgow, struggling to adapt to the demands of her newborn. Jenna had to pretend to give birth for that as well, screaming and gripping the side of the hospital bed with bared teeth and a sweat-drenched face. It was very convincing, I say. “Oh, was it?” she asks. “Good.”

In order to get into the zone before filming a labour scene, Jenna listens to music by Mumford & Sons. “There’s something about the banjo,” she explains. “I just try to get up a lot of adrenaline and for some reason the banjo and the drums, I think, help.”

Has Jenna ever met her fellow actor, Carey Mulligan, who is married to the band’s frontman, Marcus Mumford?

“No! Can you imagine if I did and said, ‘Your husband helps my labour scenes’?”