Will Jo Tell All? ‘After the Flood’ Star Sophie Rundle Breaks Down That Finale Cliffhanger

The murderer you’ve been hunting is someone you know. Your husband’s a crooked cop. And then you go into labor while trapped in the wreckage of a car accident. Scrappy PC Jo Marshall (Sophie Rundle) survived all of that in the finale of this six-part mystery thriller, which began with the discovery of a dead man in an underground parking garage after a devastating flood. Jo was obsessed with finding the killer, but in doing so committed crimes of her own and discovered that her colleagues had done far worse.

We still have questions about After the Flood, so Rundle agreed to review the evidence.

Jo learned that her husband, loving but overprotective Pat (Matt Stokoe, Rundle’s real-life spouse), was there when his on-the-take police colleague, Phil Mackie (Nicholas Gleaves) murdered Daniel Eden (Arthur McBain). Not only that, Pat was taking payments from various people for years, too! Can the couple pick up the pieces?

Sophie Rundle: There is a new uncomfortable honesty between them. The whole series is just more, and more, and more lies being kept from each other. At least it’s all out in the open now, but it’s not very palatable. Certainly, Jo’s trying to work out, “Who is Pat then? Is he stronger or weaker than I thought he was, and do I want that? And who am I now?” She’s changed by the events of the series. And we all know having a baby makes things different. There’s a lot of love there, but there’s this fundamental betrayal of who you thought they were. A lot of that’s tied up with how she viewed her dad and finding that stuff out.

Right, Jo learned that her late father, a cop she idolized, was corrupt. And then her father-figure Mackie was rotten, too.

Mackie is sort of kingpin of all of this, but where does that go now? Someone knows how dark he is. It was such a good rug pull that he’s this father figure to Jo and then — oh, he is such a good villain, isn’t he? He’s just so smug and thinks he’s so vindicated. And then it’s so brutal when he just calmly pulls it all down. I’d love to see how deep that goes.

Courtesy of BritBox

What was it like shooting the scene where Jo went into labor in the wreckage of a car accident in which Lee (Jonas Armstrong), who Mackie planned to pin everything on, was killed?

We fought to have that scene. We were like, we’ve got to see her give birth. And I’m really pleased. It was the last thing we shot. Before we started, the team said I would be cold and wet and bashed around. I said, throw it at me. And they did. They tipped a car up on the side and I was crammed in there with Jonas. My legs were battered and bruised from climbing around in this upturned car. I kind of used it as free therapy to get out some of the demons from my own birth experience, the fear and the confusion and the sudden pain. She did not have a hospital bag and her whale song playlist!

Narratively, it’s the culmination of everything, the release of everything she’s been through in the past six episodes, this mystery and all the secrecy and the lies and it all coming to the fore. I love that it ends in the rain with blood coming down her face and getting really primal. It’s one of the few times in life that you just get ripped back to the bone in childbirth. It was very weird because alongside that, it was blisteringly hot and there was an ice cream van to say thanks to all the cast and crew for their hard work. People were going off to get ice lollies in between me screaming.

Jo learned in Episode 5 that her widowed mum, community activist Molly (Lorraine Ashbourne), had an affair with another key player in the crime, developer Jack Radcliffe (Philip Glenister) many years before, while married. How is Jo dealing with that?

Jo spends so much time railing against the fact that because she’s pregnant and about to become a mother, suddenly people only see her as “Jo, the mother.” They stopped seeing her as herself. She’s been doing that to her mom, but hasn’t seen that. Her mom is not just her mother. Her mom is also Molly, the woman with needs and desires and secrets. And I love that Jo has to realize, “Oh, my mom has this whole inner life and it’s really uncomfortable and that doesn’t fit the narrative that I want for my mom.” They have that mother and daughter dynamic but there’s also a sisterly element. Jo’s left reevaluating the relationship. But with her mom, it’s all love there. It’s not a betrayal in the way that Pat’s revelations have been.

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Is justice served?

It’s complicated, isn’t it? The bad guys have to be sent down. But who are the bad guys? Jo did a lot of things that were sneaky and wrong, and if she pulled down that house of cards, her own house of cards comes tumbling down with it. I really like that element of, sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to get to the right end result in detective work. There’s a huge amount of naivety in Jo. This series is about her great reckoning of what she would like the world to be, what the world actually is, and where is she going to align herself going forward.

At the end Jo was headed to the police station, with Pat and their newborn baby, approaching DCI Roy (Daniel Betts). Will she tell all, even if it could destroy her life?

It’s a great cliffhanger. I’ve had lots of furious responses from friends and family being like, “But what happens? What did they say? Did they pull the trigger?” Is she going to sell Pat down the river? Is she going to burn it all down to do the right thing? If she reveals all the corruption that she knows about, she’ll be damning herself. She’ll be damning the father of her child, their future together. I think you want to be left thinking, “She’s going to burn it all down,” and you want the person next to you going, “No, no, no, I don’t think she is. She’s going to say everything’s fine and she’s going to become complicit.” I hope people have different opinions. She could do either. I think even Jo doesn’t know — until she starts speaking.

After the Flood, Streaming, BritBox