“You need to champion your peers and trust that the right job will come along for you.”
Gill Sherry
Fans of the BBC crime series, Granite Harbour, will be familiar with DS Lara ‘Bart’ Bartlett and her quirky wee scarves. But no-one knows her better than the actor who brings her to life.
“I did find myself in a shop recently looking at those scarves,” Hannah Donaldson admits. “I had it in my hand to buy it and I was like, NO! That’s definitely just for Bart.”
Laughter is always a great way to begin a conversation so we’re off to good start.
“It’s been fantastic,” says Hannah of landing the role of Bart. “When I got the script through, I couldn’t put it down. It’s not very often you get characters that you just connect with. Those opportunities are few and far between. It makes you really excited when you read that dialogue and you just want to be part of that project. You can feel it jump off the page at you!”
The first series of Granite Harbour, which is set in Aberdeen, was broadcast in December 2022, with series two airing on BBC One in May this year.
“When you’re first creating those characters, the writing team, producer and director have her on the page and your job is to bring her to life. With series two, you have slightly more ownership over it. To go back and do it again was fantastic. I got more of a say as to who she is and how she develops.”
Bart works alongside DC Davis Lindo (played by Romario Simpson), a former soldier who has moved to the UK from Jamaica to pursue a career with the police.
“What I think was really nice this time around,” Hannah tells me, “was that they’ve allowed space to see not only the dynamic between the investigative team at work, but also who they are as individuals. Their personalities really come to the fore… their strengths and weaknesses, their social lives and personal relationships. There’s a nice balance.”
Being able to glimpse those strengths and weaknesses, and perhaps even relate to some of them, allows viewers to really identify with the characters. This, of course, is essential when it comes to the success of the series.
“Bart and Lindo are so different,” Hannah continues. “In series one they kind of rubbed one another up the wrong way, they have very different approaches to their work. In series two there is a friendship there… but Bart’s desperate for promotion and Lindo still has somewhat unorthodox tactics to his investigating. That’s a dangerous line for Bart to be treading… but there’s an inherent trust there now where she probably appreciates that he gets the results, but it’s really difficult for her to always agree with the way in which he goes about his work.”
And therein lies the drama…
Having watched and enjoyed series one and two I’m hoping Hannah can confirm that a third series will follow.
“There seems to be no end to the viewing public’s appetite for crime drama,” she says. “If we can carve a little place for ourselves in that genre, that would be great. It would be lovely to get a third series but you never can tell.”
Fingers crossed. Worst-case scenario, Hannah has a lead role on her CV, the first in her screen acting career.
“I’ve played a lot of lead characters on stage. For the first ten years of my career that was predominantly what I was doing.”
Her favourite stage roles so far are those of Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song and Jenny Smith in Time o’ Strife. Her TV roles have included parts in Rebus, Payback, Annika and Shetland. In fact, her first acting job was in the Ken Stott series of Rebus in 2007.
“But my first ever job was sweeping up hair in a hairdresser’s where I made the grand sum of £18 for a Saturday shift. You never forget your first wage do you? That £18 lasted me a whole week. I can’t leave the house now without spending £18!”
Does that mean the young Hannah Donaldson had wanted to be a hairdresser?
“I was fairly bright at school but not altogether interested in academia. I had quite a short attention span and I was easily distracted. I definitely preferred a more hands-on approach. It’s probably very stereotypical but all of those creative studies were far more appealing to me. My parents both worked in creative jobs so it’s probably in my DNA… and then I just did lots of amateur dramatics at Scottish Youth Theatre.”
It was there that she met Mary McCluskey (former Chief Executive of SYT) who introduced her to the idea of acting as a career. As a result, she moved from her hometown of Newport-on-Tay in Fife, to attend drama school in Glasgow.
“I’m going to be 40 next month,” she reflects. “It took me a long time to land my first leading role on screen. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t years in my career where I wasn’t looking to other actors the same age who’d achieved those kind of roles years before. But the joy of freelancing is that everybody’s path is entirely different and it weaves in weird and wonderful ways.”
I happen to believe that certain opportunities are meant to arrive at exactly the right time in our lives. Hannah, it seems, agrees.
“Some people may look at the trajectory of my career and think it’s taken a long time for me to get where I am, but that would be doing a disservice to all the wonderful work that I’ve done before that led me to get that lead role. I wouldn’t have landed the role of Bart in my twenties, I wasn’t ready for it, or right for it.”
Still somewhat reflective, she adds: “There have been periods when I haven’t been working – when the world ground to a halt with that small issue of Covid, and having a baby – I felt like I lost my career. It was only on pause, but at the time it felt like I had lost some of my identity. I didn’t know what I was going to do if I wasn’t an actor. So I always remind myself when I get a job, that the novelty of getting that job and working in a job that I love, in an industry that’s incredibly competitive, is never lost on me. I absolutely love the job I do, and any job is a bonus.”
With that in mind, she has this advice for wannabe actors: “It’s about having unwavering faith in yourself and your ability. You need to weather the hard times and will probably need other things in life that bring you joy and fulfilment or that enable you to pay the bills. It’s really important to have other things so that you’re ready for the work when it does come along, and you don’t get resentful or bitter of other actors. You need to champion your peers and trust that the right job will come along for you.”
For Hannah, those other things include running a small-scale events company, writing and producing an annual Christmas show, and helping her husband on his mobile taco food truck.
“I’m never bored, I’m always busy!” she declares.
So, with the third series of Granite Harbour not yet confirmed, what’s next for Hannah – stage or screen?
“I’d just love to be able to do both, and be doing work that’s challenging, fulfilling and creatively rewarding.”
You can view both series of Granite Harbour on BBC iPlayer.
