Frances O'Connor: New drama The End shows death isn't 100 per cent serious

For Frances O’Connor, filming new Sky Atlantic series The End was a time of contrasts.

On the one hand, pre-set sea swims, morning yoga, shooting on beaches and boats off Australia’s Gold Coast. On the other, embarrassing sex scenes, hard-hitting euthanasia debates, and a rather more unusual health hazard of the job: getting stung by a bluebottle jellyfish mid-filming.

“The shoot was incredibly intense, but the beach helped,” the Aussie-English actress tells me over coffee at the Covent Garden Hotel, a year on from filming and now back at home with her husband and teenage son in north London.

She misses the heat: O’Connor, 52, grew up in Perth and her parents still live there, so spending four months back in the sun was “amazing” and helped to counterbalance the weightiness of the topics she and her cast-mates were grappling with: the right to die, transgender issues and dementia, to name a few.

The six-part series follows three generations of the same family and O’Connor plays middle-aged protagonist Dr Kate Brennan, a mother-of-two and palliative care specialist living on the Gold Coast. Euthanasia isn’t just a key topic in her field of work but also her family: her own mother Edie (Dame Harriet Walter) has tried to take her own life multiple times.

Episode one opens with Brennan shipping her mother out from England to live in a nearby retirement village and viewers quickly learn that’s not the only heavy storyline: the father of Brennan’s children is in jail, a dying patient has committed suicide under her care, and her child is going through gender reassignment surgery.

“It’s a lot,” O’Connor says, bluntly. “Sexually, too, she’s so screwed up. She’s got a lot of different relationships going on and gets involved with people she really shouldn’t.”

The role is the first time she’s played a doctor and many of the scenes were “pretty full-on”, she says, hinting at some particularly heavy scenes towards the end of the series. She says she struggled filming a “really bad death” where she has to “come in and fix things” in episode four. “We all hated shooting that scene.”

It wasn’t all stress and sadness on set, though: there was a lot of laughter during sex scenes — “they’re always embarrassing” — and O’Connor recalls one moment she and her cast-mates attempted a competency test for Alzheimer’s. “Half of us on set couldn’t do the maths,” she laughs.

On-screen too, the show is surprisingly funny, “because death isn’t 100 per cent serious”, says O’Connor. “It’s something that happens to all humans and usually there are moments of comic relief or funny things that happen right alongside these moments — so I think it’s important to represent that. It’s such a turn-off to be really serious about a subject that’s already serious.”

Has it changed the way she looks at topics such as euthanasia? O’Connor admits she feels “conflicted”. Speaking to medical professionals as research showed her how personal each case is but overall she supports the right to die, and she thinks co-star Walter, 69, brought the subject to life. “She’s so effortless and fun and naughty.”

The pair had never met before filming. Her favourite scene was “this great sequence with Harriet, me and the two kids, we go for a hike and we end up on the beach and we all go screaming into the ocean. That was beautiful.”

Will she be watching it back with the family? “I’ve seen it once and that’s probably enough for me,” says O’Connor, admitting she hates watching herself. Her husband has watched it but her son Luka, 14, refuses because “he’s too embarrassed” and prefers coding. “He won’t watch anything I do”, she laughs.