KATHERINE Kelly’s new role could not be further from the cobbles of Coronation Street - she plays the British wife of a terrorist who is planning an attack which could change Europe forever.
Katherine, from Old Town, stars as Jane Lowry in the new series of Strike Back, which starts on Tuesday.
Jane is the British wife of Omair Idrisi, the man behind some of the worst terrorist attacks on the west in the fictional story. He is freed during a jailbreak masterminded by Jane.
It is up to Colonel Adeena Donovan (Nina Sosanya) and her team to track down Idrisi and Jane, who are planning an act of terrorism.
They take down and kill Idrisi, but Jane escapes. She’s even more determined to carry out the plan now that her husband has gone. This will be her tribute and her revenge.
So why has she been spotted talking to a far-right extremist group in Hungary? Why is a British jihadist working in league with a terrorist group at the opposite end of the spectrum?
In order to track down Jane and find out what she’s planning, the team crosses the Middle East and Europe.
Then they discover Omair Idrisi might not be dead after all.
Katherine took the role after having her second daughter, Rose.
She said: “Jane is the villain of the series with a very complicated backstory which slowly unfolds with each episode. When you meet Jane in episode one, she is married to Omair Idrisi who is a wanted terrorist. But has she been radicalised? You’ll have to stay tuned.
“She’s totally unredeemable. And that is the reason I wanted to do it, I’ve always wanted to play a villain. I don’t know whether it’s the warm Yorkshire thing, but even if I start out as a baddie in a show I’ve usually redeemed myself after a few series. So I was really excited to play this character with little, if any, redeemable features.”
Katherine said she had enjoyed the physical side of the show, and said the character needed to look like a warrior who could really handle herself in combat. She was happy to let stunt experts step in but said the weapons training was necessary.
“I got to fire many different types of weapons. I’d never even held a gun before. So it was a great experience,” she said.
Katherine said she found it harder going back to work after having Rose, but was ready to work again and took her children to Budapest while she was filming.
She said: “I was on maternity leave and I just said “Rose is five months now, when we hit that six month mark I’ll be ready to go back to work”, and of course you have to give your agent a bit of notice but she came back to me the next day. She sent me a flurry of projects and this was one of them.
“At first I thought, ‘I can’t possibly do this with two small children.’ Orla had just turned three and I had a new baby, and it was filming in Jordan and Budapest and I just couldn’t even imagine making that work.
“But the producers and execs just said ‘please don’t even worry about that, just come in and meet with us and we’ll make this work’.”
