‘Under Salt Marsh’ Claire Oakley on Picking the Murderer, Possible Season 2

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains major spoilers for “Under Salt Marsh,” which had its season finale on Friday.

‘Under Salt Marsh’ is one of Sky Atlantic’s biggest non-HBO dramas in recent years. The original six-part series (Sky has yet to confirm where it will land in the U.S.) stars Kelly Reilly of “Yellowstone” as Jackie, a detective-turned-teacher with an unfinished case who comes back from the dead when, late one night after a secret rendezvous, she comes across the lifeless body of one of her students in a ditch. It is soon confirmed that he has been murdered, making him the second child in three years to die in the small Welsh community of Morfa Halen. As a storm threatens to destroy vital evidence – as well as the coastal village itself – Jackie teams up with her old police partner, Detective Eric Bull (Rafe Spall), to find the killer.

Ahead of the season finale on February 27, Claire Oakley, who created, wrote and directed the series, sat down with Variety to talk about her inspiration for “Under Salt Marsh,” whether Mac would always be the killer and whether audiences will see Jackie and Bull team up again for a second season.

Where did the idea for the show come from?

I really wanted to set something up [in North Wales]because I had really fallen in love with the area, and especially with the salt marshes. It’s such a rare and unique environment.

And I came up with the idea that if we had a detective series, we could really delve into the fine details of these swamps, and suddenly the ecology and the salinity in the water and all these little things would become really vital.

This is a bit conceptual, but the salt marshes protect us. They protect us from sea level rise caused by storms. So they are very important if we want to continue living here, because our island is getting smaller and smaller. And so [there as] this idea of ​​protection and “What if we don’t protect the things we need?” What if we don’t protect future generations from possible horrors? I started thinking about the plot in that way, like, how would this detective story, this murder mystery, reflect that idea?

An early scene that many viewers have discussed is the one in episode 1 where Jackie insists on telling Cefin’s parents about his death rather than letting the police do it. Why did you make that choice?

I liked the idea that Jackie often acts on instinct and that’s probably why she ultimately left the police force and may not have been the best type of person to join the force. In some ways she is a very good detective. In other ways […] she can’t stand it when things get personal. And I wanted to put her in a position early on where maybe she, as a human being, felt like it was right that she had to tell the parents as soon as possible that they would be the first people she would go to and that she wouldn’t be waiting for the police, which in this particular community could take quite a long time to get there. But while it’s happening, [she’s] realizing, like, “oh […] it’s quite an irresponsible thing to do.” I was interested in these moments where she is not responsible, but she is emotional, on a human level.

I also really liked the idea in that scene of her showing up covered in mud and shaken and pale and clearly in distress. And their reaction to her is: maybe that’s not abnormal [for Jackie]. Like, “We thought you were doing well, Jackie. Sit down and I’ll call your dad.” It was a way to understand that she had a complicated past.

Viewers have also commented on Jackie’s large age gap with Dylan (played by Harry Lawtey). Was that written into the script or was it a result of Lawtey’s casting?

It was written in it. I felt that [worked] for Jackie, the idea of ​​a younger boyfriend who might not demand everything from her that someone her own age might: for example, are we going to live together? What’s going to happen? Is this a real relationship?

She could get love, passion and sex from this person, while also not having to give much of herself and thus not having to take responsibility.

Was there some intention behind getting Jackie pregnant?

I liked the idea of ​​her being stuck in the past. She can’t move on until she finds out what happened to Nessa – kind of like the entire community, they’re already hollowed out by this terrible thing that happened – but she in particular can’t. On the surface, she has a new job, she has a new career, she’s doing it. But pregnancy allowed me to suggest that not all is well. If you are happy and you feel stable about your future, then there is no reason not to tell your boyfriend that you are pregnant, or anyone else for that matter.

I was actually pregnant when I wrote it too, so that almost certainly gave me some insight.

In episode 6, where the storm has hit the village and Jackie is chasing Dylan, there is a huge wave that hits his car. How did you create that scene?

We built the entire center of the village. The chip shop, the butcher and that whole T-junction, where that wave originates, all take place at Dragon Studios in Cardiff. It was all built outside on the back lot of the studios, and we had to create a special concrete platform that had to support the weight of the entire set and also the water.

We had a first water level. When Jackie and Dylan are there, it’s a bit knee high. The cars can still drive through. So that was the first water level and we worked in that water. It was January. There were about 1,000 conversations about, “What if the water freezes?”

But we couldn’t heat the water because then it starts to steam. Then there were endless conversations about, “How long can someone – a cast or crew member – stand in this almost icy water at a time? Could we shoot a six-page dialogue scene?”

And then that wave. We actually had this huge kind of slide, with huge buckets of water on taps at the top, and we tipped them down so they shot across. The car was on a winch. So when the water came, we winched the car backwards, because the water would never be powerful enough to actually move the car.

A lot of what you see was done in camera, but then the water was made a little bigger – so we could believe it was pushing the car – in VFX.

And what about the scene where Mac has locked Bull in the room, which is flooding with water, all the way to James [Osian Emlyn] meet him and set him free?

Those were actually two different sets. Inside the chamber, as it filled with water, we had a hydraulic set: a three-sided chamber on a hydraulic platform that went up and down in a tank that resembled a large swimming pool. So as he fills with water, we slowly lower the set into the water while Bull does his take.

There was no door in that set. So the door opening was in another set that we built, where it was the outside of the room, that kind of hallway and the stairs. And when [James] opened the door, in real life we ​​had a stunt person.

Would Mac always be the killer?

Not really, no. I was commissioned by Little Door to write the pilot, and that was before we took it to Sky.
I didn’t plan the whole series. I think I had a quick outline […] and that these were the things I wanted to explore with the killer and that it had to be connected to the ecological reasons why he did it or she did it. But I hadn’t identified anyone. And then Sky came on board and they wanted to write a second episode before they decided whether to greenlight it or not.

We set up a little writers room. Me and Jonathan Harbottle came on board at that point to write Episodes 3 and 5, and we only outlined the first half, so the next two episodes, so Episodes 2 and 3 together, and then I went away and wrote Episode 2, and we still didn’t know who the killer was. We still hadn’t covered the second half of the series. And so I wrote episode 2, had [my] Honey, we got the green light, John wrote episode 3, and then we realized we had to come up with the second half of the series. And so we did another writers’ room, and then Nikita Lalwani came on board, who wrote episode 4. We did it at my sister’s house, she lives down the street from me, so I could take the baby to nurse every three hours while we were doing the room. And I think we did 8 days and planned out the second half of the series.

It wasn’t ideal in a way. In some ways it meant that it happened very organically, the story. In other ways it made things tricky, because we had already written three episodes without really knowing the ending.

You then have to go back to the beginning and work out and enter things again. As we knew with Mac, once we made a choice about him, it was about protecting your reveal, but when he was finally revealed, I didn’t want people to be like, “What the fuck?” I want people to say, “Of course, holy shit, it’s him. How can I not see that?” So it has to be right and not too crazy.

If you have a story about the murder of two children, there is a possibility that it is sexually motivated. But Nessa and Cefin are both killed – directly or indirectly – because of the toxic waste. Have you ever considered giving Mac another motivation?

No, I definitely didn’t want to investigate a sexually motivated crime, or even a crime of passion or a psychopath or things like that. I was interested in exploring the idea that someone who is ‘normal’, if any of us were in that specific situation, might have done the same thing. That it was just someone who was under enormous pressure and therefore had a distorted view of life. And it was a bit of self-protection; he ends up killing those children to protect his reputation and his standing in the community and what he thinks he is doing for the better. He builds this sea wall, he protects this community, but at what cost? “But at what cost do we do these things?” was the idea I was trying to get into. So I wanted the crime and the killer to represent these themes from the beginning.

Is it likely that Jackie and Bull will reunite for a second season?

We explore what a second season could look like. We are looking at different options for how we can take it further, if it comes into use.

This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.