The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey has been cast in the second season of BBC prison drama Time alongside Jodie Whittaker, Tamara Lawrance and Siobhan Finneran.
Jimmy McGovern’s show, which featured Stephen Graham and Sean Bean as leads in its heart-wrenching first season, will move on to a women’s prison where Ramsey will play Kelsey, thrown together to face an unfamiliar world with Orla (Whittaker) and Abi (Lawrance).
Even with the ever-present threat of violence within its walls, they discover that an unexpected sense of community, and a shared understanding, still might be possible.
“I’m very happy to be a part of this project, working with an incredible team and following on from a stellar first season” said Ramsey. “And it’s such an honor to be Kelsey, I’m really excited to experience the world through her for a few months.” Deadline revealed Ramsey’s next film project last week – period drama Monstrous Beauty opposite the likes of Dominic West and Ruth Negga.
Whittaker is fresh off the back of a stint as the first female Doctor in Doctor Who while Lawrance is leading Channel 4/HBO’s Get Millie Black. Happy Valley’s Finneran will also reprise her role as prison chaplain Marie-Louise in Time.
The double-BAFTA-winning first season, which won for Best Mini Series and Best Actor (Bean), followed a prison in which a man who killed someone while drink driving befriends a prison officer. It won critical acclaim for McGovern’s portrayal of prison life in the UK and averaged more than 10M viewers per episode consolidated.
McGovern said the Season 2 cast is the “best cast I have ever seen assembled for any drama of mine.”
Filming will begin on season two in Liverpool shortly. Time is a BBC Studios production for BBC One and BBC iPlayer. The series is written by McGovern and Helen Black, directed by Andrea Harkin (The Confessions of Frannie Langton, The Trial Of Christine Keeler), and produced by Carmel Maloney (Domina, Dublin Murders). Executive producers are Priscilla Parish, Michael Parke and Andrew Morrissey for BBC Studios, Lucy Richer for the BBC, and McGovern.