25-02-2025
'Dope Girls' star Julianne Nicholson celebrates the 'punk rock' moment that sets off postwar drama
While most post-war movies and TV shows depict the women left at home as lost souls waiting for the men in their lives to return, the new show Dope Girls (on CTV Drama Channel, the CTV app and Crave in Canada) tells a different story about how women gained independence in wartime. Starring Julianne Nicholson, Eliza Scanlen, Umi Myers and Eilidh Fisher, the six-part series from Bad Wolf (Doctor Who) and Sony Pictures Television takes us to 1918 London, with the boom of Soho nightlife and the bohemian artist lifestyle.
In the first episode we meet Kate Galloway (Nicholson), a recently widowed mother of a teenage daughter, Evie (Fisher), who was working at a butcher shop in an small village. That's until the men returned from war, going back to their jobs and bumping women back into their homes. But Kate finds out that her husband left her with a lot of debt, which leads her to London to reconnect with her estranged older daughter, Billie (Myers), in need of a place to stay with Evie.
Billie works as a dancer in a nightclub, and while there's a lot of tension between her and her mother, including having a younger sister she never knew about, Kate persuades Billie to work with her to open her own nightclub, the 33.
Meanwhile Violet Davies (Scanlen) becomes one of the first ever female officers in the City of London Constabulary police force, and gets assigned to investigate London's criminal underworld. That includes getting a job at the 33, but she ends up getting closer to the women at the club.
Violet is also grieving the loss of her sister, who died from drugs, and she carries the guilt of not doing more to prevent her sister's death.
Nicholson highlighted that a "huge draw" to be part of Dope Girl was that this series, created and written by Polly Stenham, allows the women's side of a post-World War One story to be told, where we see women taking up traditionally male spaces on screen.
"The men are coming back and oftentimes we think of that as being purely love and reunion, but women have found themselves out of their homes, in the workforce, independent, and now they're all, for the most part, going back into the kitchen, into the home caretaking mode. And that sucks!," Nicholson told Yahoo Canada.
"So it's fun to be able to sort of play in that world and show this other version of what might have been happening at the time."
But one of the particularly fascinating story elements is this relationship between Billie and Kate, and how their relationship can move forward after being estranged for years.
"Umi, who plays Billie, is such a talent and so strong and vulnerable at the same time," Nicholson said. "We don't explore necessarily the whole of their story on camera, but I had a very clear idea of leaving her, Kate always thought she would ... be able to come back for her, and her life circumstances changed, and she wasn't able to. And now it's all these years later, but it's been her big regret"
"It's the final straw that pushes her back to her, but it's very complicated. I know Umi has shared that in Billie's mind, one of the reasons I left her was because she was not white, which is very hard to hear, and feel abandoned as she was. So it was a very rich history that they share, and I found it very moving to play those scenes with Umi and explore the potential of finding their way back to each other."
A particularly impactful scene that really sets the tone for show broadly is one moment where we see Kate, Evie and Bille among the people in London partying on Armistice day. That includes one moment where Kate is in the fountain in Trafalgar Square, dressed in a blood-soaked outfit with angel wings.
"It felt really special to be able to recreate, just using your imagination, thinking back to that time, that place, what it must have felt like on the day," Nicholson said. "It just felt very alive and very moving and very punk rock in a way that ... you feel throughout the rest of the series. It felt like a great and sort of exciting and abrupt way to jump into that part of our storytelling. I loved it."
"I mean, come on, with wings, drenched in blood, it all came together for me. It was very exciting."
But maybe even more beautiful than that image of Nicholson's character is the moment when Kate, Evie and Bille walk away from that scene together, with each of them looking like they've just been able to be released from any inhibitions.
"It just feels so raw," Nicholson said. "I feel like so much of this show, just feels like people who don't have the energy to put on an act anymore."
"It's about survival, and so it just gets rough immediately, and sort of carries throughout. Even for the good girl in the uniform."
That "good girl in uniform," or as actor Scanlen described her, "good girl gone bad," is Violet. Scanlen highlighted that it was particularly interesting to explore her world as one of the first women in this traditionally made space of policing.
"Violet's such a fun character to play, being part of the police force and during the war, because ... it wasn't until when the war ended that they were brought on as a kind of experiment," Scanlen said. "It was just a very interesting world for me to explore, interesting to think about women in that space, and how they used their femininity as a way to enter spaces that men couldn't necessarily do so expertly in plain clothes."
But at the core of everything Violet does is this connection to her sister, and the grief of losing her.
"For Violet, her sister was her whole world, and so I think a lot of what she does in the show is informed by her loss," Scanlen said. "And as much as she tries to convince herself that it's her duty to serve her country, ... but I think under the guise of that is regret and self-blame for what happened to her sister. It is the driving force for her."
"It's a story of survival too. She's a lone wolf. She comes from Northern England to start a new life and have a future, and I think her moral compass is compromised many times in this show, but the North Star for her is her sister."
With interesting characters and a strong group of women leading this story of nightclubs, drugs and gangs, Dope Girls is a riveting series worth watching.
