Q&A: Julie Graham Talks About 'The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco'

In "The Bletchley Circle," former WWII codebreakers joined together to solve murders and crimes the police could't figure out. "The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco" is set four years later and while Susan, Alice and Lucy have moved on to forge new careers, Jean is looking for a new challenge away from her librarian duties and Millie is bored tutoring rich children of the aristocracy. So when Millie sees an article in The San Francisco Chronicle that describes a murder almost identical to one that felled a former colleague during the war, she and Jean make a momentous decision.

Julie Graham plays Jean and in this interview she talks about the new series and the challenges faced by women looking to have a meaningful career in the 1950s.

Q: Describe The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco in three words.

Julie Graham: Bold, badass, broads.

Q: The Bletchley Circle is about women at the top of their game. Who do you admire? And who is your ultimate hashtag girl boss?

Julie Graham: Probably Jean. My ultimate girl boss…Michelle Visage. She doesn’t take any BS from anyone.

Q: What do you love about your character?

Julie Graham: I love that she’s resourceful. I like that she’s smart. She’s not showy, she just gets on with it. She’s Scottish, that’s always a bonus, she flies below the radar, but she’s got a quiet confidence. She’s brave.

Q: Thinking back to the first season, did you learn anything surprising about the women who inspired the show?

Julie Graham: I was surprised there was so little material about them because the women were so important in the codebreaking process. They were given the mundane, which were seen as female jobs, so the men got the glory and they were the worker bees. History is written by winners and it saw its men blowing their own trumpets about all their amazing work during the war. I was just amazed at how little information there was about them.

Q: And they wouldn’t have been allowed to write about it?

Julie Graham: They had to sign the official Secrets Act. I was astonished they were able to keep their council for that length of time. I was amazed to hear the stories about women who didn’t share the information with their husbands, their children, their parents.

Q: Can you talk about the scene in which you get turned down for the job interview, and what you as a person want for that character?

Julie Graham: There wasn’t a lot of options open for women like Jean, apart from being clerical or librarians, but one of the opportunities they could have, if they weren’t married, was to work in the Foreign Office.

Everything is against her - her age, her experience is not valued - and it was incredibly frustrating reading that scene, because you want to jump over the desk and grab the young whipper snapper by the neck and ping his braces. In that one scene, it encapsulated everything about the frustration that women had, after being so useful and then just thrown on the scrap heap. The only thing she can say is that she did clerical work, enhanced clerical. In that moment you want her to reveal that she worked at Bletchley Park and helped crack codes, but they weren’t allowed to do that, so the opportunities they missed out on were ten-fold.

Q: Has it been interesting learning about the history there in the States?

Julie Graham: There’s a wonderful book called Code Girls, all to do with the code breakers in America and the machinations of the army and the navy at that time, who were at odds with each other. There was this great male rivalry in the military at the time and they had huge arguments about who they should recruit. That didn’t really surprise me, but it was just to see it written in black and white, the

kind of actual codes that were written down by men in order to choose the women who would crack the codes. Even though they were from two different backgrounds across the Atlantic, they had so much in common.

Q: Were the Americans similarly bound to secrecy?

Julie Graham: It didn’t come as a surprise to me that the women were sworn to secrecy in the same way they were in the UK, but I think the Americans were just slightly more aggressive about it. The threat was that not only you would be put in jail, but your families would be affected by this as well.

Q: What was your favorite moment on the shoot?

Julie Graham: It’s just wonderful when we’re all together. When all four of us are together, that’s when it’s the most fun, not only hanging out with the actresses but hanging out with our characters. Those are my favorite moments.

Q: A couple of the other cast mentioned an 11-page shoot day. Towards the end, people started going a bit loopy and the giggles crept in. Can you recall who was leading it?

Julie Graham: I think Rachael. She’s the giggler. She starts me off and then we start the rest of them off. Rachael and I are terrible gigglers but Rachael’s far worse. I’m throwing her under the bus. Rachael darling, you’re a giggler.

Q: How important do you feel shows like Bletchley are in continuing the conversation of women’s equality?

Julie Graham: I think they’re incredibly important because they remind us that things, although have moved on to a certain extent, that recent history was pretty bad for women. In the UK, there’s a 50/50 campaign called ERA, which is equal representation for actresses because the disparity between the amount of actors on screen and the amount of actresses on screen is just appalling. 

This show goes some ways to address that because it’s a female-led show, but I think the more female-led shows there are the better, it shows that there’s an appetite for them. People will watch them, they get huge viewing figures, they’re popular. I think that the more we make shows like The Bletchley Circle, the more ii addresses that issue.

"The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco" is currently available on the streaming service Britbox.