“Abi likes to put us through the ringer, doesn’t she?” says Fiona Button, star of the BBC’s beloved legal drama The Split. “Abi” is the show’s creator, Abi Morgan, and “us” are the Defoe sisters – Rose (Button), Nina (Annabel Scholey) and Hannah (Nicola Walker).
She’s right. Over three series watched by more than five million viewers per episode, the sisters have certainly been put through the wringer. While Hannah endured a painfully long-drawn-out divorce from her barrister husband Nathan (Stephen Mangan), torn between her family and her lover, Christie (Barry Atsma), Nina had a baby with a feckless comedian and decided to raise it on her own, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and was defrauded of her life savings by the duplicitous Tyler (Damien Molony).
Rose, the “baby of the family” and the only Defoe not to work in the divorce law firm headed up by their mother Ruth (Deborah Findlay), has meanwhile suffered a miscarriage, lost her husband James in a road traffic accident and had doubts over the identity of her biological father.
Though its focus is on women, The Split’s rich dive into the complexities of human relationships has made it beloved by all genders – or at least it has in our household. Is that Button’s experience too?
“Actually, people coming up to me in the street and saying they really connect with it, it’s pretty equal gender-wise,” she says. “I think maybe [watching the show] is instigated by the women in the household but then not argued with by the men. We can all relate, can’t we?”
In fact, Button takes umbrage with critics who have called The Split “soapy”. “To be snooty like that has always bothered me,” she says. “And I think it is a bit sexist actually. If you don’t have a homicide or an alien landing, then it’s about relationships and it’s about feelings and therefore it’s somehow less than. Most people are lucky enough not to have been near a homicide in their life, but everyone’s experienced love and everyone’s been part of a family so it speaks to the common experience.”
We meet in the lobby of a discreetly deluxe London hotel to discuss two specials of The Split that will be showing on BBC One tonight and tomorrow. The third and final series aired in 2022 – with Rose having found closure following James’s death by visiting the man who received her dead husband’s donor heart.
The specials see our favourite characters, plus a few guest stars (including Toby Stephens), decamp to Catalonia for a wedding. Whose wedding and what happens in Spain must remain in Spain for fear of spoilers. “It’s very much a sort of romcom present to cheer us all up at Christmas,” says Button. I’m a little surprised that she calls it a romcom, because the first episode that I watched ended in a characteristic stew of messy relationships at breaking point. “Of course, it all gets fixed,” she replies.
In person, Button is friendly and funny. When I ask her about working with Nicola Walker, that consummate expresser of deep emotions, she quips: “Yes, but she’s dead inside.” In fact, Button says she learnt much from her co-star. “A lot of actors get a script and they’ll have issues, but Nicola is literally there to serve the script. I don’t want to make it sound like she makes bad scripts good. What I mean is that she has such integrity… she’s all there.”
Button herself was born in 1983 in Lausanne, Switzerland, to a Swiss mother, Jacqueline, and an English father, Charles. “My mum picked him up hitch-hiking when he was in Switzerland,” she says. “They were very young when they had my sister and I and then it became apparent pretty quick that they weren’t right for each other.”
Her parents divorced when she was four, Button and her older sister going to live with her mother in Berkshire, while her father started a new family. “One of the things about divorce is that it does bring the siblings together. Certainly, my older sister and I have a pretty unbreakable bond. Because my dad’s side of the family was separate, it felt like we were a team.”
The experience informed her take on Rose’s relationship with her long-estranged father Oscar (played by Antony Head) in series one. “I could certainly tap into some stuff there for sure,” she says.
Fresh out of drama school, Button was cast opposite Dame Judi Dench in the Donmar’s 2009 production of Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade. Button, suffering from first-night nerves, gleaned an important life lesson from Dench. “It’s only theatre,” she told the young ingenue. “That’s stayed with me,” says Button.
Since this inauspicious beginning, Button’s stage career blossomed, including a title role in Royal Shakespeare’s acclaimed reimagining of JM Barrie, Wendy & Peter Pan, and most recently playing Cecily Cardew in a 2018 West End production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
“Sometimes TV can feel quite a trudge,” she says. “But there’s a magic to theatre. You can’t beat the moment when you see everyone getting into their costumes and it’s the opening night and all of that.”
Theatre may be her first love, but she now prefers making television because the hours are more conducive to parenting her seven-year-old daughter, Fordy. Button married Fordy’s dad, the screenwriter Henry Fleet, in 2014, although the haphazard story of how they came together sounds worthy of a subplot in The Split.
“We were introduced by my best friend,” she says. “We arranged to go on a first date and I didn’t turn up because I had actually met someone in the interim. The poor guy was standing outside the theatre waiting but it was in the days of Nokias and I had sent him a text and it hadn’t got to him.”
As fate would have it, the couple bumped into each other again at the Royal Court two years later. “Perhaps if we’d got together earlier it would have been a washout. Who knows?”
Button’s other recent TV roles include finally getting to play a lawyer (in the acclaimed third series of BBC One’s Industry), and the Channel 4 euthanasia drama Truelove. “That didn’t make much of a splash because Mr Bates vs The Post Office was on in the same week,” she says. “But I thought [assisted dying] was such an interesting topic. And so very topical now.”
She also has several upcoming TV roles, including a remake of The Forsyte Saga and BBC One’s Dope Girls. About the illicit Soho nightclub scene that grew up after the First World War, Dope Girls may be being touted as filling that gap left by Peaky Blinders, but it’s yet another drama, like The Split, that puts its female characters front and centre.
“And it’s much more common to see women of different ages in these shows now,” says Button. “Meanwhile there’s so many great younger women writers creating these roles – Lucy Prebble, Sharon Horgan and Phoebe Waller-Bridge for example. That’s less obvious behind the camera, although we had Giulia Gandini directing The Split specials. I think I saw an interview with Nicole Kidman where she said she was only going to work with female directors, so we are addressing the balance.”
Abi Morgan, who has also directed episodes of The Split, has ruled out further series, while a spin-off series featuring a British Asian family of lawyers in Manchester, The Split Up, has been delayed for “editorial reasons”. In the meantime, however, fans are in for a treat with the two Christmas specials. As Button puts it: “It’s cold outside and the world’s a scary place, so let’s just watch some more of these characters on holiday.”
‘The Split’ is on BBC One at 9pm tonight and tomorrow
