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Life and art intersected for Melissa Johns on the set of Grantchester Season 11. 

In the final season of the cozy PBS mystery series, police secretary Miss Scott learns she’s pregnant. Newly married to Constable Larry Peters – a relationship the couple is keeping secret from all but their closest friends – the looming addition of a baby throws a welcome but unexpected curveball into the independently-minded Miss Scott’s life.

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In season 11 “we find Ms. Scott as headstrong as ever, meaning that when she does find out this pretty big news, she doesn’t know what to do with it,” Johns told Showbiz Cheat Sheet in an interview. “She is a working woman and she loves having her own money and her own job and she doesn’t want to just slide into the abyss of motherhood and feel like she doesn’t exist anymore.”

For Johns, Miss Scott’s dilemma was familiar. The actor was pregnant with her first child while filming Grantchester’s final season. 

“I could not have related to [Miss Scott’s situation] anymore if I tried whilst filming it,” she said.

Miss Scott is preparing to welcome her baby in the early 1960s, a time when the world was not set up to accommodate working mothers. The situation has improved, but there are still huge obstacles for mothers in the workforce, Johns said. While she felt she had “always understood” Miss Scott on a deeper level, “this year was really something different.”

“Miss Scott’s biggest worry is, ‘What am I going to do? How is this going to pan out for me and my life?’ And actually at the time and still now, I’m an actress who’s now a mom and our industry still isn’t overly set up for that,” she said. “We got to hang out a bit with the same scaries and the same worries, I think.”

‘Grantchester’ actor found support on set 

Fortunately, Johns found a supportive environment on the Grantchester set. When she learned that Miss Scott would be expecting a baby in season 11, she’d yet to share her own happy news. 

“They did say to me, ‘Look, Miss Scott is going to be pregnant in this,’” she shared. “And at the time I thought, ‘Oh gosh, I need to tell them.’ And then we got to be able to have that conversation and everyone was just amazing, delightful. They took such good care of me. They proved that it is absolutely more than possible to employ pregnant actresses.” 

While both Johns and her character were pregnant, her pregnancy didn’t match up with Miss Scott’s. 

“I had to have a double, a bump double. My bump was not in the same timeline,” she said. “Viewers will absolutely notice some plants and some files … Robson [Green] used to joke all the time as my bump started to really pop, he would be like, ‘Oh my God, what are you going to walk in with next?’”

Green’s Detective Geordie Keating also provides some fatherly advice to Miss Scott as she struggles with her concerns about becoming a parent and how to tell Larry that they’re going to have a baby. Those scenes were rooted in the actor’s real-life friendship. 

“Nothing that Miss Scott said to Geordie in terms of her anxiety is something I wouldn’t have said to Robson as Melissa,” she said. “He’d tell me about the night that he became a dad and we had those conversations in between takes all the time.”

“And when you’re getting to have those conversations — because we are so close and tight-knit as a cast — it just makes those scenes so much easier to do,” she continued. “Because it’s based in reality, and all good acting should be based in reality and truth.”

Grantchester Season 11 airs Sundays on PBS Masterpiece on Prime Video, PBS Passport, the PBS app and broadcasting on PBS (check local listings). 

For more​​ news and exclusive interviews, follow Showbiz Cheat Sheet’s Instagram. 

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