It’s undeniably challenging talking to Sophie Petzal. Rare is the interviewee, for example, who speaks in complete, grammatical sentences, devoid of “um” and “er” or even the ubiquitous “you know”. Petzal, a TV screenwriter with an extraordinarily long and impressive pedigree, appears simply to open the floodgates and produce critically acclaimed, compelling TV which seduces views and garners big awards. And she’s still only 30.
We’re talking because Petzal is the woman behind two current big TV projects. One, Hollington Drive, is on our ITV screens right now, a deliciously fascinating thriller in which parents are driven to wonder quite what their children have been up to.
This four-episode series, starring Anna Maxwell Martin, is all of Petzal’s own devising, whereas an upcoming Netflix show, The Seven Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle, is her adaptation of the acclaimed Stuart Turton novel. Each kind of work requires a different sort of discipline, yet Petzal’s CV shows an uncanny ability to adjust to genres, from the early comedy shorts she wrote as a child, to writing for children’s television as part of her first traineeship.
Petzal and her identical twin, Claire, were born in Brighton but the family moved to a variety of places along the Sussex coast — Rye, Battle, Bexhill, Hastings — during their childhood and adolescence. Petzal attended Bournemouth University to study screenwriting, and became a BBC production trainee. She won the Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award at the International Emmys, and — still only in her early 20s — was on her way. In 2014, she was selected as a One to Watch at Edinburgh International Television Festival.
Being a twin has a particular resonance for Petzal’s family. “The last set of twins born [before us] died in Auschwitz, so it was quite a big deal when twins arrived again”.
Though members of her father’s family are very observant, he himself had married an Irish Catholic and Petzal says that their links with Judaism extended primarily to “the odd Passover seder. But I identified very strongly with that part of me. I became really interested in my family history when I was quite young. I looked at family trees and I went to Berlin, New York, and Washington, to look at different libraries and archives to find records of family members”.
She became “really obsessed” with finding out when her relatives had left Germany and arrived at Ellis Island in New York. “Just looking at old family photographs, and realising how much I looked like some of these people… for geographical reasons, we grew up closer to my mum’s Irish Catholic side of the family, but I [looked at my father’s side] and thought there’s the rest of me”.
Petzal believes this has found expression in her work. “In everything I write, I’m always fascinated by families in general and family dynamics”. Hollington Drive, in fact, is the unpeeling of a relationship between two sisters — and the discovery that all was not as assumed on the surface.
Petzal’s research into her Jewish family led, via Facebook, to finding a whole group of previously little known cousins, enabling her to “hang out with them and go to various celebrations and family events in north London, which was really nice.”
She thinks her grandmother and great-grandfather came to Britain between 1933 and the outbreak of the Second World War. Petzal’s grandfather, she says, tried unsuccessfully to persuade his parents to leave Germany, and when they refused, left for America with a cousin.
“He lived in America for a time and then came to London where I think he met my grandmother. And then we have the most horrifying telegrams and letters sent between the Red Cross and the family, where the family [outside Germany] were looking for people and trying to send them money”. Petzal found one set of letters from a family friend to her grandparents, confirming that all the German Jewish relations were dead, but that they could take comfort in the fact that they were going to have a child — Petzal’s father.
The fate of parts of her father’s family has had a knock-on effect on Petzal herself, she believes. “The way that my father and his siblings were brought up, by traumatised people, would have completely shaped their lives and will have shaped the way their own children were raised. [And I think about] how close that all is, and how not long ago that all was. We talk, as a culture, a lot about trauma now. I know a lot of younger people in the Jewish diaspora who talk about it now, much more than my dad’s generation did…my generation are enough removed to be able to look back and wonder, have we dealt with this?”
Petzal is fascinated by the themes of guilt and blame, which often feature in her work. “There’s an incredible story about the man who worked at the airline check-in desk [on 9/11] and who actually checked the terrorists in. He was completely traumatised by the whole thing — but he never fitted into any group, because he was not a victim. There’s a degree to which I can think, well, I myself was not in a camp…”
Moreover, Petzal says her grandparents were so committed to making a new life for themselves, that while she knows in her head that they were Holocaust survivors, her father’s stories of his upbringing focus only on being a north London Jewish schoolboy, with “pushy” parents.
Her breakthrough show came in Blood, her 2018 original TV drama, starring Adrian Dunbar. Set in Ireland, it won Best Long-Form Drama at the Writers’ Guild Of Great Britain Awards, and was renewed for a second series, screened in April 2020. The show, Petzal says, “was about something I knew about — complicated family dynamics and adult children re-hashing the past and having difficult relationships with, and different memories of, their father. It was in a non-religious, but heavily influenced by religion, setting, where one just doesn’t really question one’s dad.”
She laughs: “Family and trauma and repressed familial pain is at the heart of everything I write. I don’t know whether that is specific to the modern Jewish experience, or the modern Catholic Irish experience, but that was certainly embedded in the stories I grew up with. And that is interesting, because actually I have a lovely relationship with my parents and a fantastic relationship with my sister”.
Explaining the difference between writing something entirely of her own devising — such as Hollington Drive — or an existing work, like the Evelyn Hardcastle novel — Petzal reaches for a house metaphor. “When you’re originating something , you’re coming up with it from the ground up, so you know what’s in the foundations, you’ve laid the first bricks. By the time you put the roof on, you’re pretty confident that the walls will support it — because you saw them, and you built them. You’re designing everything from the start to lead to the answer that you know you want”.
With an adaptation, however, there is repeated, in-depth reading of the work in question, interpretation, and “having to get across, in a visual medium, the messages and themes of the book. And also to expand it, because if you just took a book and chopped it up into seven episodes, you’d probably only have about 25 minutes of television”. That particularly applies, Petzal says, when there are internal monologues in the book — “you can’t just have a man in a chair, thinking”.
Scarcely missing a beat, she is back to the house metaphor: “An adaptation is like trying to build one house on top of another. You’re working with something where if you had been telling that story, you might have told it differently.” But once there is an existing story, “you have to throw yourself in it with gusto”.
Evelyn Hardcastle is still being written and is not due to go into production until either later this year or early next year. Meanwhile, Petzal’s work can be savoured in Hollington Drive and other as yet unveiled projects. Like I said, she is still only 30.
