An Interview with Grantchester’s Kacey Ainsworth
For nine seasons of Grantchester, Kacey Ainsworth has portrayed Geordie’s spirited wife Cathy Keating. But as the show moved from the 1950s to the ’60s, Ainsworth saw an opportunity to tell compelling new stories of Grantchester‘s female characters. Discover how Season 9’s mother-daughter clashes, Miss Scott’s undercover sleuthing, and some intergenerational wisdom came to be as Kacey Ainsworth talks hopes, ambitions, menopause and more in her summer 2024 interview with MASTERPIECE! [Contains spoilers from Episodes 1-7 of Season 9]
At the heart of Season 9 are stories about women and their challenges, from mother-daughter clashes to menopause. Can you share how those storylines developed?
Well, I’ve found that quite a lot of the time in period dramas, there’s not a lot about how women of my age were helped or not helped— definitely not helped—during menopause. I thought it would be interesting to shine a light back onto that time and see how far we’ve come in how we deal with women in midlife. I’ve also found that often there’s not a lot of growth in storylines dealing with the dreams and aspirations of women of this age—it’s usually for the younger characters, and I always want it to be that whether you’re nine or 90, you have dreams and aspirations for your life.
I’m very lucky that over the years the production team at Grantchester has supported some storylines I’ve suggested to develop Cathy further, so when I wanted to write this, they asked “What do you have in mind?” I took the bull by the horns and decided to write an episode off my own back, making it a female-centric story about the four women in Grantchester because we span such a massive age range. I wrote a 90-minute episode and then sent it to the producers, who said, “We’d be really happy if you could come in and talk to us about developing what you want.” And it was absolute music. It made me quite emotional because you invest in these characters over the years, and I was really happy that we were giving them even more to do.
I had the privilege of working with [Grantchester writer and executive producer] Daisy Coulam on this episode, and it was working with a master. She’s absolutely fantastic and relentless and she’d be online to me at the very early dawn saying, “We’ve had some notes back from people, what about this?” It was a most amazing, collaborative, brilliant process.
It must have been so gratifying to see it all come to light in Episode 5!
Yes, especially for Skye [Degruttola, who plays Esme]. This was a whole big storyline for her—she wasn’t just running around with the other kids—and it was wonderful to watch her take it on board and to be so committed to it. She was really amazing.
It’s the same with Melissa [Johns, who plays Miss Scott]. I don’t get a chance to work a lot with Ms. Scott, and there was a feeling that she was the one putting the oil on the wheels in the office, which is what happened with a lot of women in those days—as we know, they didn’t get their just rewards, so we wanted to show that. We wanted to show how super sleuthy she was and could be. And we wanted to show that Geordie responds to that—he doesn’t really take it for granted, but also, he doesn’t really know what she does, and it’s only when she stops doing it that then he goes, “Oh, okay, I think I get this now.”
And we didn’t want him to be stereotypical either in his response [to what Cathy’s going through] because Cathy and Geordie have such a beautiful relationship and it’s become so equal over time. We wanted him to be baffled, not understanding what’s going on in his house with his daughter and his wife, but we didn’t want it to be that he was somehow very macho about it, because I don’t feel that’s part of Geordie’s character. He wouldn’t be so brilliant at what he does if he wasn’t able to empathize with people. So, yeah, it was a lovely way to merge everybody together.
Although Geordie did commit two cardinal sins, which he was sorry for, in telling his wife to calm down and telling his wife that she sounds like her mother!
Yes. Yes, of course. Because you can’t be perfect—there has to be some reality there!
What’s it been like seeing Skye Degruttola, who plays Esme, go from a child to a young woman in your years working together? And what has your role been with her—have you seen yourself as a mentor, or do you slip into “Mom” sometimes?
I try not to slip into “Mom,” and her own mom, Simone Lahbib, was on set most of the time anyway. Simone’s an actress and has also been in Grantchester [Season 7]. I have a daughter who’s a similar age, so the parallels are really strong. But I’ve known her since she was nine years old, and now I know her at 18, 19, which feels crazy to me because I’ve been through all the rites of passage with her. It’s been really a wonderful journey.
And it’s also been great to think about what it was like in the 1950s for girls, for what they wanted to do with their lives, what they were allowed do or envisage for themselves, whether it was just, yes, get married to have children—all of which are wonderful—but it’s been really nice to explore how she’s the first one of her generation, a ’60s child as it were, who goes, “I don’t know whether I have to do that right now.” We started in 1953 and it’s a massive change that’s come into society now that we’ve moved into the ’60s, especially for women.
These women’s stories help make Grantchester relatable, and one such moment stood out for me—I’m getting choked up just remembering it—when Cathy, in conversation with Mrs. C., talks about teaching her daughter to read, and holding her when she’s swimming and then letting her go.
I know, I was the same. And it was the same for me and Tessa [Peake-Jones, Mrs. C.] when we were shooting that. She has daughter, too. It came out of the episode that I wrote, and obviously, yeah, you do think about your own child. So it was incredibly emotional, and it catches you like it’s just caught us now. We’ve shared that moment from different time zones, but it catches you because it’s such a beautiful memory and it is very hard to let go. And I can’t imagine what it was like in the ’50s and ’60s when so much change was happening and we didn’t have mobile phones, we didn’t have all ways to check on the safety of our children. We had to just trust them or trust in our upbringing or just hope. And that’s hard. That’s a really hard thing to do.
Another powerful moment born of these storylines occurs in Episode 7 Mrs. C. tells Cathy, basically, “This is what’s going on with you and you’re not alone.”
It’s interesting—and we did do some research on this—that before the ’60s, menopause was just seen as a kind of rite of passage of what women goes through and wasn’t medicalized. I suppose it was medicalized somewhat around the 1930s, but it was only later on, in the ’60s that they started saying, “Well, you need this pill because your anxiety is too high,” or, “You need a total hysterectomy,” or those kinds of things, which would send women into tailspins because obviously, if you are removing your ovaries and your womb at once, zero hormones. So it’s not a gradual decline. And it was seen so much as a loss of something rather than a gain.
And so we worked out that Mrs. C. would’ve been of the generation that didn’t see menopause as a bad thing, something terrible that you had to go through: It was a rite of passage to the other side, and the other side was actually freedom. Of course, in some other cultures, even now, it’s not seen as a negative or a loss. In Japanese culture, it’s called the second spring, which is a beautiful way to describe how there is a freedom to it—you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant, you don’t have to worry about a lot of things. And so it should be seen in that light.
For Mrs. C.’s generation, it was that we walked through it and we walked through it together. And she was of the opinion that you gained, rather that lost, so it was really important to have her opinion come in from a different generation.
We’ve had nine seasons of Grantchester and seen Cathy and Geordie in what a long marriage really looks like—it’s work issues, it’s aging parents issues, it’s teenagers, all of this. How has that been for you to bring that to life, and what would you hope for them as you think about their future in a long marriage?
It has developed really beautifully, this relationship, their marriage, and we’ve tried to keep it so that it’s still relevant with a long marriage today, so that we don’t paint it as hearts and flowers, but we do put out the difficulties that are there. There was a really beautiful scene, and I can’t remember which season it was, but it always sticks in my mind, when Geordie talks about how it wasn’t love at first sight with Cathy. It was something that grew, and it was something that he realized in a moment of her saying goodbye to him at a train station—that when she left, that was when he realized that he wanted her to turn around and come back. And I think that they take that through their relationship and continue to grow.
Because I work with Robson really well, and also because he’s very generous as an actor, he’s allowed for this situation to develop so that we have a very strong family life as well as he has all the work stuff that he does. You want to say, it’s his series, it’s him and the vicar, it’s about two fellows. So it’s wonderful—especially we’re talking pre #MeToo—when you get an actor who says, “No, we have to develop this, it can’t be that she’s always squirming. It has to be that there is something else and there are other things.” So I’m hoping that we continue to develop.
What are your hopes for Cathy as she goes into Season 10?
Well, obviously, I want Cathy to end up, basically, as being Anna Wintour. She starts with this department store job and the fashion and everything takes her fancy, and she ends up becoming, well, let’s say a mixture between Victoria Beckham and Anna Wintour. I want her to end up editing a magazine or something like that. It would be wonderful, but it’s really because I secretly want to have a fashion show of some description, and I want to do that!
