The Control Room star Joanna Vanderham TEAses the new addictive BBC Drama: ‘You won’t see the ending coming!’

Sam is a walking talking plot twist – what can we expect from her? 

Her mum abandoned her with her grandparents without telling her she was never going back. So she has gone through her whole life believing that the people that you get closest to will abandon you. What we see is a very closed-off person who’s quick to say, ‘this isn’t working, and I’ll run away!’ She doesn’t try at relationships, and we actually get to watch her learn that life can be better. Even if it’s more difficult, it can be better if you stick to those relationships, you let people in, and you have difficult conversations rather than just running away like the only role model she has ever had. We get to watch this woman’s shell come away, and hopefully, people will fall in love with her. I’ve been describing them as like Bonnie and Clyde, but it’s like Clyde doesn’t know that he’s in a drama! 

I know Ian did shifts in an ambulance control centre to prepare, but what was your preparation like for the role? 

Ian went and did a couple of days and even a night shift with ambulance workers in the control room, which was incredible. It was really insightful for him, and it meant that when they were doing the phone calls, he could be more genuine, and he knew what and why they were saying what they were saying. 

But for me, it was much more about creating a woman who has had so much trauma and that I could just access her trauma whenever I needed to, so it wasn’t an effort on set. I spent a few weeks beforehand – it was kind of horrible, to be honest, what I was like to myself – I would imagine what my house would look like, and I would walk home from school on the day that she had left, and I was this little nine-year-old girl looking for my mother. I would visualise it daily, so it was a real memory, and it was something that I had kinda lived. I had headphones, and I would just walk around east London listening to tracks that had a lyric or energy that I felt related to Sam that I could put on in the five minutes between (filming) setups so that I could just access that trauma so it was literally a memory that I could just tap into and I wasn’t gonna waste anyone’s time. With all the anger and abandonment issues that she has, it was just about creating them as real thoughts so that I could just have them on set.

If you are carrying that backpack of trauma around with you, how did you manage and look after yourself mentally? 

Um, badly, I think! There was one job that I was doing, and I can’t remember what actually happened and set me off, but my boyfriend was there, and I was just crying uncontrollably, and he remembers this so clearly. I turned to him, and I was like, ‘don’t worry, they’re not my emotions!’ Over the years, I’ve learned that every now and then, you should go back to therapy and pick apart: ‘is this real? Is this my emotion? Or, is this someone else’s thought I created?’ I’ve done talking therapy, I’ve done CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), and now I try to spend the same amount of time doing visualisations after the job is finished about happy things and being back to normal. I probably should make more time for that, but I kind of love it, is that really bad? But I am a big advocate for therapy.