Samantha Morton talks religion, motherhood and horror ahead of ‘intense’ new thriller The Burning Girls

“It’s been intense every day,” she says of filming the series, where in every scene, her character Jack is “carrying the weight of a lot of secrets – and that’s really heavy”.

It is not surprising that the Golden Globe and Bafta-winning actress has found this to be an intense gig.

The Burning Girls is the perfect autumn drama, filled with thrills and horror, following Morton’s Reverend Jack Brooks as she and her daughter, Flo, move from urban Nottingham to the sleepy village of Chapel Croft, a community that bears dark secrets and a stark warning not to investigate its past.

The story goes that 30 years ago, two teenage girls vanished from the village, and as Jack begins to delve into their disappearance she is warned about the ghosts of The Burning Girls who haunt the chapel, the spirits of eight-year-old twin sisters who were burned at the stake in 1556, during Queen Mary’s purge of Protestants, and are now commemorated by twig dolls left in various places around the village.

More recently, the Reverend Fletcher died suddenly in unexpected circumstances, and thus Jack has been brought in as his replacement.

The plot thickens as it becomes clear Jack may be running away from secrets of her own, with a malevolent force seeming determined to track her down.

It is a thrill ride full of dark and eerie themes like exorcism, murder, martyrdom, faith and religion, which was a great fit for self-confessed horror-fanatic Morton, who chatted about the series prior to the Sag-Aftra strike action.

“I mean, you read the book and you go, that’s from The Shining, that’s from The Omen,” says the 46-year-old star of C.J. Tudor’s novel, on which the series is based.

“I’m a cinephile anyway, and I grew up watching films like The Omen and The Exorcist and The Turn Of The Screw.

“Innocence is one of my favourite films ever.

“I love ghost stories, even Whistle and I’ll Come to You, John Hurt did a remake of that.

“And The Shout is one of my favourite films.

“So, this is a genre I love.”

“What I’ve loved about working with (director) Kieran Hawkes is that you’ve got all that, but he focuses on the character and the reality and the realism of those characters,” she adds.

Jack is an interesting character for Morton to delve into – she’s a vicar who’s been working in inner city Nottingham and has seen it all in her 20-year career, but finds herself inexplicably drawn to the mysteries of the village she finds herself in.

Tragedy has followed Jack wherever she goes. Her husband, Jonathan, was brutally murdered at his church in Bradford when their daughter Flo was just a baby.

“Jack and Flo fled to Nottingham, where they lived contentedly until a tragedy in Jack’s church forced them out of the city and led them to Chapel Croft.

“She’s a very modern vicar, not unlike the Vicar of Dibley, or Kate Bottley from Gogglebox,” says Morton, who’s also known for roles in Harlots, The Walking Dead, The Serpent Queen and The Whale.

“She’s just very real and very normal. She’s not one of the old fuddy duddy blokes that have been there forever, she’s new blood.

“The fact that she’s been an inner-city vicar is quite important, I think. Jack has worked in some tough communities: Bradford, Nottingham – somewhat impoverished northern towns.”

Morton says she was drawn to Jack in part because of her own fascination with theology, having been raised Catholic.

“I’m Irish-Polish, raised Catholic, so I’m quite religious as a person,” she says.

“I’ve never played a vicar before and there was something really interesting about that, and this idea of past trauma, childhood trauma, affecting your modern-day life.”

“I spoke to people I knew within the Catholic community, and then we did lots of research regarding a Church of England vicar, which is obviously slightly different,” she adds of her preparation for the role.

“But just in terms of the element of theology, as a child I went to a Christian Baptist Church for born-again Christians for a period in my life, I also went to Mormon church for a bit, and my granny was a Jehovah’s Witness, so I’ve been surrounded by different elements of religion my whole life.

“So, my preparation for that was just making sure everything written was all correct – and the writers were really hot and brilliant and double checked everything that they were writing – because you don’t want a vicar out there watching and saying, ‘Oh no, we wouldn’t do it like that’. There would be tons of letters!”

Of course, Jack is also a parent – she has “a very deep bond” with her daughter Flo, Morton says – and this maternal nature was something she could relate to.

“I’ve got a 22-year-old daughter, a 14-year-old child, and an eight-year-old son,” she says.

“So, as a mother, the relationship between Jack and Flo was really interesting. I’ve played mums, but Jack and Flo have a close bond, and I thought it was just a gorgeous, gorgeous relationship and one that I wanted to explore.

“Jack is a widow, which I think is a really key point to my character. I was a single mum up until my daughter was about five, and I remember that the bond between mother and child – or father and child, if you’re a single father – is really, really intense, so I was fascinated by that.

“That gradually changes as Flo’s changing and pushing back from her mum and pulling away. It’s that typical mother-daughter thing where you’re clashing a little bit and pulling away then coming back and pulling away again.

“There are all those themes running through this piece about wanting to protect your child from the outside world when you can’t, because they want to be out getting the bus on their own till midnight, going out with their friends, being on social media: you don’t know what they’re looking at on TikTok.

“You can only protect them so much in the modern world. It’s really scary.”

The Burning Girls will premiere on Thursday October 19, exclusively o Paamount+.