Jo Eaton-Kent plays Cheery the dwarf in The Watch, BBC America’s Terry Pratchett-inspired fantasy series now playing on BBC iPlayer. Shortly before UK audiences got a chance to see it, they chatted with Paul Simpson about the challenges and the joys of the series.

You’ve been working on a play the last few weeks. Is it nearly ready?

Well we’re in week three. We’ve got five weeks of in house rehearsal and then we’ve got a tech week so we can put it all on stage. We’re not able to do it in the venue because of Covid so we’re actually all the way out in Shoreditch – Shoreditch Town Hall, a very big space.

It’s the musical Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein. I’m playing the carousel owner Mrs Mullin who doesn’t sing a thing!

That’s a shame.

I know!

I think one of the things that surprised me for The Watch was the music. That and the dance sequence at the end of episode four, with the alarm. That just had me rolling on the floor laughing.

Same here honestly. Episode 4 I remember I watched it and I had no idea [that was coming] because we didn’t rehearse it with the Wham! song. We literally had this backing track. (I think they included that same music in episode 5 which I’m happy about because it was nice music but it was the same tempo, same key, same everything.) So I thought OK, this is going to be an interesting little moment (laughs) and then Wham! all of a sudden. I just literally couldn’t believe that they had the audacity to include that!

I know the Pratchett purists have got issues with The Watch, but quite honestly to me it’s got the spirit, it’s got that anarchy.

It had that part of the work. I think that’s really what we take from the show, is that everything that the City Watch is supposed to represent is about the fight against injustice and the love for one another. It’s all about love.

How much were you aware of Terry Pratchett before this came up? Was he somebody you’d read?

Yes, actually. Funnily enough my Dad did a stage production of Truckers, I think he either wrote it or directed it, way back. I’ve known about Terry Pratchett for a long time and so when I told my parents when I actually got the gig they were like, ‘Oh yes, I know a bit of Pratchett.’

Had you read anything of the City Watch characters?

I knew a bit of it. Obviously once you get the role you want to do some research so I did a lot more reading once I’d found out I got it. So I knew of them, yes.

The interesting thing about this is what Simon gave you in the scripts was Pratchett moved forward to 2019/2020. So you presumably needed to be drawing more from that than background reading because there were clashes.

Well, we do live in a completely different world compared to the last century. It’s not even that many years but it’s an entirely different world. I think what we got is something that just sort of speaks to the same things that what the books probably did back then. I can’t speak for it because I wasn’t born probably…I’m not sure!

So what were you told about Cheery when you came onboard? As Lara Rossi said a few months back: Marama’s a werewolf – doesn’t look like it. Cheery’s a dwarf – Jo is not a dwarf!

Yes, a recurring theme, the anarchy of it all. I remember actually, I was out shopping when I got the call from my agent and she said, ‘Oh you’ve got this part come through. It’s filming in Cape Town, it’s for Terry Pratchett.’ I said, ‘Oh yes, I know Terry Pratchett’ ‘And you’re going up for a dwarf.’

I was standing up at the time and I looked down and ‘Are you sure?’ and she said ‘Well, that’s what they said.’ So I went in, they liked me and the rest is history.

So what did they give you for your auditions, sides from episode one?

It was my first scene. When we actually went through the auditions, every recall, every part of the process I was reading that first scene with the Klatchian coffee and then later on down the line, I got a scene from episode one and I did a scene from episode two and I think I read a very early draft of an episode six scene in one of the recalls. It wasn’t ready so it wasn’t useful, but we did try it out. So they had these ideas from the very get go.

What attracted you to the part? Apart from, it’s Pratchett and it’s Cape Town?

Cape Town is beautiful.

It’s the fact that they were so willing to tell a story in the way that we’ve told it. I think non binary representation anyway is just so infrequent in the screen world and to get the opportunity to even go near something like Cheery is truly an honour. I feel such immense pride in the role just being there. I feel like it speaks volumes as to where we have come from and to be at the helm of it, to actually be the face of this character that, I think, is going to be really important for a lot of kids around the world. It’s really truly something really special so I couldn’t pass up the chance to be part of that.

Have you had feedback confirming that that’s been the case, that kids have seen themselves in Cheery?

I’ve had people reaching out. Honestly, it sounds so cliché but I’ve had kids messaging me… not even just kids, I’ve had mums and dads sending me messages over social media telling me ‘Thank you, I’ve been able to have this conversation with my family.’ ‘Thank you, it’s helped me to understand a bit more about it.’

It is like a quantum psychics take on the concept on gender, don’t get me wrong, but it is a really beautiful thing to see people being able to bond with their families in the way that we do. It’s art imitating life and life imitating art.

I think one of the things that also feels very powerful looking at it from outside is that it was just absolutely not talked about. It was just straightforward introductions: she’s a werewolf… they’re not binary… It was that total level approach.

It was so cool in that respect and it’s actually something I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed in a film or any kind of narrative show, narrative artwork. Seeing a process for a trans character or a non binary character or a trans non binary character, because they’re so few and far between, that actually shows someone who starts off with one set of pronouns and as they go through the show discover that actually something better fits, and for it just to be OK.

In the final episode you get to hear them using gender neutral pronouns in reference to Cheery and it’s literally like it’s not a thing. It was very deliberately put in in the way it was put in and I’m immensely grateful to Mister Simon Allen for doing that.

Did you and he chat about anything on this from your own experience that you could bring in to just add to Cheery’s ‘journey’?

Absolutely.

Obviously my experience is going to come into it, as well episode 6 writer Amrou Al-Kadhi who’s also non binary. That was quite a nice change, having an immediate ally.

I think a lot of the narrative, the story for Cheery is very much influenced by mine and Amrou’s personal experience. There’s no avoiding it really because we’re the closest thing to understanding what it means. There aren’t many voices that are able to be heard right now that are in the rooms. We are lucky enough to be in those rooms and be able to tell a vivid true story of what it can be like, despite the fact it’s fiction.

What Cheery goes through in our story, I do see a lot of parallels between myself and them.

Was Amrou out there with you or were they based back over here?

I don’t think Amrou got a chance to visit, no I don’t think they did. We did meet beforehand and they were saying, ‘I really hope to come out at some point’ but I don’t think they actually got the chance to. Which is a real shame because it would have been lovely to see them and bask in the sunshine.

In terms of the production, for you as an actor, what was the biggest challenge?

The biggest challenge? Actually, being away from home for so long. It’s the first time I’ve ever done that, especially on that scale.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Always wonderful. I thought to myself, I wish I knew better how I could plan my time while I was there. You’re sort of at the beck and call of the schedule because you’ve got to get a show done but there are some days where you’re not needed and you are sat in a flat in a foreign country.

I think initially there was a big of a scare in terms of public transport so we were keeping fairly local. I just wish I’d thought to myself, ‘Well, it would be good to have certain people coming over and visiting’. I wish I knew to do that, to plan better essentially.

And in terms of actually playing Cheery? What was the bit that was not necessarily the hardest but the most surprising in playing them as it went on?

Oh, that’s a good question. I think it was, maybe, really nailing down what we wanted to say, what message we wanted to get across about what it means to exist in a fluid gender or in a gender that doesn’t meet the expectation or agenda that is outside of any binary, any boundary you can think of.

Being one of the first teams of people to actually get the chance to say that out loud is a hell of a lot of responsibility and you don’t want to say the wrong thing. So we did have a lot of discussions about whether this or that is the right thing to say. We really had to nail it down. It’s not that it was difficult but I was so pleasantly surprised to have as many conversations as we did about that.

And also of course you’re telling a story, and the story to an extent has to be king in the respect that you don’t want it to become almost didactic ‘Right, we are stopping now for a lesson on this’. It has to feel organic, doesn’t it?

It has to and that was part of the challenge. That was part of those discussions we had.

Simon had this brilliant idea, in the first episode, of having it be we establish the gender through about three lines, we’re talking single words some of them. It’s like, ‘There’s nothing she doesn’t know about potions and powders’ ‘She?’ ‘She’ and then me chiming in ‘Me’. I’m involved in the conversation, we’ve gotten to the crux of any issue and it’s solved! All within five seconds, done, sorted, no more discussion, we can carry on.

Simon was very gracious and came forward and said ‘Does this work?’ because he felt like it worked, it was organic. I looked at it and it made sense to me. And I still think it makes sense. I think there are plenty of times I’ll look at it and I think ‘Yes, that was a really good decision.’

What is your most fun memory of working on it?

Well, being out in the desert was really fun. Getting to cross these dunes of Atlantis – literally the area was called Atlantis. It really is the most beautiful white sand dunes. But there’s industrial areas, it’s bizarre. I’ve actually got it as the background of my computer, it’s honestly the most beautiful place. You’ve got the Table Mountain off in the back there, it’s just gorgeous.

And in the same episode we were going around the forests and through the Unseen University’s storage disposal and I remember being with Lara and Richard. We all had a really fun day, but we had to keep ourselves up, our spirits up, because it was quite traumatic stuff. People are having seizures and lots of dark memories are coming to the surface and we had to keep each other light. We had real fun in the tent singing songs and just having a great time. We came away from that day of shooting and I thought, ‘I think we’re all quite good friends, aren’t we?’ That was a lovely feeling.

Did that feeling come back quickly when you got back together for the completion of shooting? ‘I haven’t seen you for months, right here we go’, straight back into it for those six days?

It was tentative, thin ice all around. as in you don’t quite know where you’re stepping and there were officers on duty saying ‘No you must remain further away from each other, I know you love each other but do your job’. It was really tricky initially for that week.

We didn’t get a wrap party so it was really nice to be able to spend some time together with the notion that this would be our last hoorah, for the time being. We got to work it out and make the most of it and enjoy it in that way. It was like, no this is the final chapter in this saga, in that final week.

I presume the big concert at the end must have been a hell of a gig.

I think we had two or three days dedicated in the last week, the week we couldn’t do in South Africa, to film that scene. It would have been a really cool time to go full whack and release and it was a very different experience.

But actually with that gap, I think it gave the creative team, time to just actually work out the best way to officially tell the story. It was a long shoot that scene, because there were so many angles. There was a lot of rehearsal. There’s that one big long shot that goes back and forth between all of us – that took some time blocking so it was a surprisingly long time. But it was really wholesome to get to the end like that. That was a big hurrah I suppose.

Has there been anything that you’ve seen where people have talked about the show that surprised you?

Surprised me? How vastly different everyone’s opinions are!

Welcome to the internet!

Yes, it’s the internet, it’s the world, isn’t it, at your fingertips. It’s just the variety of opinions as well.

I’m just so happy to hear that people love it because I do. I love what we’ve made, I think what we’ve made is worthy of being proud of and the fact that people are responding to it so positively and saying, ‘This is more than I could have imagined, this is everything I could have dreamed of,’ it really means a lot.

And if you had to pick one moment from the shoot that sums it up for you?

Ooh, it might be early on, that time I nearly knocked Richard’s teeth out with the whisky bottle because I was trying to shove it into his mouth! He had to tell me to calm down, so I do remember almost with a bit of a cringe. I think that summarises the craziness of it all: I nearly knocked my co-star and friend’s teeth out within about thirty minutes!

If the show goes again, are there things that you particularly like to do with Cherry now that we’ve gone through that journey…

Yes, I would love to see the chance for Cheery to have a stable loving relationship with a significant other because that one with Spike is questionable. That’s something I would like to see. How their skills develop in terms of how their forensic skills develop, how she gets to play around with her gender.

I would like to see a world of Ankh Morpork that is even zanier, even more whimsical than what we’ve already seen because it is crazy. The whole thing is absolutely wild but I think it can go further and I believe with what we’ve got, there’s no stopping us. I think we have every opportunity to just go crazy.