'It's great looking really rubbish!'

Anna Friel on loving being dressed down to play a troubled mum, finally returning to Liverpool and why she rejected a film role to make Broken.

- Caren Clark

It’s more than two decades since Anna Friel became a household name when she burst onto our screens as troubled Beth Jordache in Brookside.

Now, after carving out a career on the big screen and appearing in US series such as Pushing Daisies and in ITV crime thriller Marcella, the 40-year-old is delighted to be back in Liverpool filming BBC1’s powerful drama Broken, which continues this week.

‘I’ve not been in Liverpool for 23 years!’ says Anna as TV Times chats with her in a trailer on set. ‘I was only here for 16 months when I did Brookside and I didn’t get to know the city because I was filming the entire time, so coming back is an odd turn of events.

‘I recently turned 40 and things have come full circle to where I was at 16. Liverpool is great now, though. I’ve not felt intimidated in some of the supposedly hardest places. The people are kind and lovely and the place is pristine.’ ‘Pristine’ is perhaps not the word the usually glamorous Anna would use to describe her own attire when we meet. She is just about to film scenes as her character, struggling mum-of-three Christina Fitzsimmons, and is sporting a scruffy betting- shop uniform and several fake cuts and bruises from the fight she had with her boss in the first episode.