Riptide's Jo Joyner: 'The audience will know who they shouldn't trust!'

"Alison is more creative, and sort of artistic and hippy-like than the people I've played in the past. It made me realise I've played a lot of women who've got careers, or who are professional and are juggling life and their career, and actually Alison is now in the second phase of her life. She has a job, she's married for the second time, and she's reached a real peace within herself. Her daughter is grown-up — well, teenage, so still hard work but the frantic early years are kind of over, so when we meet Alison, she's a calm, happy, chill person. Like all good thrillers, she's in a really good place before it all goes wrong!"

"Hahaha, good question! It's so funny, I'm going to sound like one of those big manifesters, but every New Year we talk about what we want to do as a family in the future. Last year, I had been really specific, which is unlike me, and I'd said I wanted to be in Harlan Coben's next thriller, and then lo and behold I was. This year's New Year's resolution was that I wanted to travel with work a bit more, because I'd filmed so close to home a lot and my kids were in secondary school, and I felt like everyone could handle me being missing a bit more, and all I've done this year is film abroad!"

"I was on her side from the get-go, definitely. It's a really fine line, isn't it, because you have to kind of drop seeds of doubt constantly in thrillers so that nobody is too easily forgiven, or not suspected, but it was very clear from the writers and the director when we first chattered that she was absolutely just with her happy place — she found a much more mature, calm man who knew his own mind, rather than her first husband. 

"The kind of guy she was with when she was 17 was not the sort of guy she was supposed to grow old with, you know? He couldn't quite mature himself in time, it was just bad timing with the two of them. So no, I didn't doubt her motives at all, it was all set out for me to know."

"It was really lovely, because Asher [Yasbincek] who plays my daughter Hannah, she's quite new — she's just done the Netflix Heartbreak High, and when we were filming that hadn't come out yet, so she wasn't really aware of what was about to. hit, and what a lovely year she was having, because she's just so young! 

"It was nice to do that shift of relationship that you get with older children, whereby the mothering, at some point, should tragedy hit, the roles reverse slightly and there's a point where, despite all the bickering, she starts to sort of look after her mum. Ultimately they're closer than ever, and they will come through for each other, which is a lovely journey of mother-daughter relationships. Asher was really lovely to work with — she's a great actress and she's got a really bright future."

"One thing I think is unusual is that you don't spend all four episodes wondering who did what, and who to look out for. You spend a good amount of time wondering, being suspicious of everybody, but at a certain point the audience hold a lot of the cards, and I think that has its own thrill towards the end of the show because they know who is in jeopardy and who isn't. At a certain point, the audience will know who they shouldn't trust, and then that becomes even more suspense-filled, I suppose, because they're watching plenty of people possibly become victims or not!"

"What was really lucky for me was that it was over the summer holidays, so it meant my family could all come out and join me in the middle. My husband has family in Perth and Melbourne, we hadn't seen some of them for eight years, so it presented not only the chance to work in this incredible scenery with these fabulous people, but I got to take the family and have a big reunion as well.

"It was stunning where we filmed, and I completely fell in love with Melbourne. I've been to Perth before, but I've not been anywhere else in Australia, and Melbourne — just the people, the food, the culture, the art, the buildings, honestly, I've got a real special place for it in my heart now."