Irish actress Maria Doyle Kennedy returns as kitchen whizz Tannie Maria, whose day job as the advice columnist for the local newspaper in the fictional Karoo town of Eden places her in the middle of a web of intrigue and murder in the second season of the show based on the bestselling series of mystery novels by Sally Andrew.
Filmed on location in Prince Albert, the show also features a stellar South African cast that includes Tony Kgoroge, Kylie Fischer, Jennifer Steyn, Grant Swanby and Terence Bridgett.
What was it about this show that first attracted you to the role?
I had just finished on another show and I was reading a lot of scripts and many of them were brutal. A lot of them were about serial killers and the ways that they dispose of women and it really started to upset me. Then I got these scripts and I thought they were just beautiful. I thought she was just a very interesting, real kind of person — seems kind of helpful but actually is very guarded; a middle-aged woman who has hardly any real relationship experience. She’s innocent in many ways, but also a terrible communicator who uses food as a language and way to process her emotions and connect with other people. I thought that was really interesting and [I liked] the whole, mad set-up of the town, a regular little town but full of oddballs.
What was it like shooting in South Africa and working with a predominantly South African cast?
It's been incredible. I had never been in South Africa before I went to film and my knowledge was sort of big historical, political pieces, broad-stroke knowledge. I had no idea about the complexity. Cape Town is such an extraordinary mesh of cultures and ethnicities and food, it’s really exciting and I feel like I’m only just beginning to scratch the surface.
What has most excited you about this second season and what are you most excited for audiences to see?
In season one we got to set up these characters and the town and establish the relationships of the main characters. In season two, we follow them and see how their relationships are going but also all of the other people really deepen and shine in this season. You begin to see the place as this town with all its oddballs. It really feels like an actual town in this season rather than a story about one or two people and that’s what I like most about this season. I would love to go to that town and hang out with this crowd of “mentalers”. So I hope that people when they watch it will care about the whole thing and that it will seem like a real place that they would want to visit.
• Recipes for Love and Murder Season 2 airs on M-Net DStv Channel 101 on Thursdays at 8pm.
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