NEW YORK, NY.- The elevator pitch for the six-episode British miniseries “Vigil” is irresistible for genre fans: A troubled detective (we’re listening) is dispatched to solve a crime (keep going) … on a submarine engaged in a secret mission (pass the popcorn).

Viewers flocked to “Vigil” when it premiered in Britain in August (the show lands on Peacock Thursday). But what seemed to appeal even more than the many plot twists was Detective Chief Inspector Amy Silva, a cop who’s going through a rough patch (she’s on antidepressants) and questioning her entire life while stuck in sweaty, claustrophobic quarters underwater.

“I think that I go after characters with journeys, characters with fight, characters who have things to figure out,” Suranne Jones, the actress playing Amy, said on a call from London.

Her words bore a certain sense of understatement; right before “Vigil” debuted, Jones starred in “I Am Victoria,” an installment of a Channel 4 anthology series in which she plays a wife and mother who cracks under the pressure to lead a perfect life. In the Georgian-era HBO and BBC period series “Gentleman Jack,” she plays swashbuckling West Yorkshire landowner Anne Lister, kicker of men’s butts and conqueror of women’s hearts.

Jones, 43, is perhaps best known in the United States for her role in “Jack,” which debuted in 2019. But her popularity has been growing steadily in Britain, where she has been busy portraying complicated women on the stage and screen since her breakout stint on the soap “Coronation Street” about 20 years ago. “Vigil,” which, according to the BBC, was its most watched new drama in three years (with 13.4 million viewers in a country of 67 million), has expanded her reputation even more.

It also expanded the notion of the submarine thriller for viewers whose first reference may be “Das Boot.” While Jones' Amy must find out who killed officer Craig Burke at sea, she is also coming to terms with her feelings for a female colleague, Detective Sgt. Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie, of “Game of Thrones” and “The Good Fight”).

“What was wonderful is that the show put a complex female relationship at the heart of what would normally be a male kind of thriller, on a submarine,” Jones said.

In a way, Amy is a perfect embodiment of the actress's appeal: Jones is remarkable at exploring the doubts, fears and weaknesses wedged in the interstices between a confident exterior and internal turmoil, between what a woman wants and the obstacles in her path. It’s something the actress is painfully familiar with: She has been candid about her struggle with anxiety and depression, and she drew from her own experience in “I Am Victoria.”

And yet Jones — lanky and subtly beautiful, with a sharp, proud nose that precedes her like a ship’s prow — has an uncanny ability to project a competence that viewers both admire and trust. When she plays a physician, as she did in the BBC One drama “Doctor Foster” (2015-17), you readily sign up for a checkup; in “Gentleman Jack,” you believe Lister can run her family estate with her eyes closed.

“She brings a sense of absolute intelligence to the role,” Tom Edge, creator and showrunner of “Vigil,” said of Jones' performance in a recent video chat. “Even when she is just watching, she absolutely convinces as somebody who has an analytical mind and for whom the process of observing is indicative of something complex going on.”

For as strong as her characters are, Jones deftly excavates vulnerabilities, as when Amy finds herself isolated on the submarine, facing hostile sailors in an environment that is literally and metaphorically pressure-filled.

“We’re asking her to carry the duality of somebody who is good at their job but is placed into a situation where they are stripped of all of the things that they have come to need in order to function,” Edge said.




To dig into Amy’s isolation, director James Strong delayed Jones' meeting the actors playing the sub’s crew, who started rehearsing without her. She also modified her process. “Usually I do like to research a lot, but it was fun to not,” she said with a laugh.

For the more emotional scenes, she worked closely with Leslie. “When we were together for our scenes, we’d improvise during our rehearsals on set, and that allowed for both of us to gauge the other,” Leslie said in an email. “It informed me on Amy’s feelings and her intentions towards our relationship, and that in turn made a real difference to my demeanor.”

Digging deep allows Jones to create a bond with viewers. It would be easy to turn against the obsessive title character in “Doctor Foster,” yet Jones never loses the audience’s sympathy. “I, for one, didn’t like who Dr. Foster was, but I was still rooting for her,” Leslie said. “A fantastic ability.”

It may not be a coincidence that Sandra Bullock’s recent Netflix movie “The Unforgivable” is a remake of a three-part drama, “Unforgiven” (2009), starring Jones: Both stars somehow manage to keep viewers on their side. Sally Wainwright, who created “Unforgiven” and “Gentleman Jack,” neatly summed up that elusive connection, saying of Jones: “She’s not an actress who just women follow or just men follow — she has this genuine, quite rare universal appeal across the sexes. I think men fancy her and women want to be her.”

And sometimes audiences both fancy her and want to be her: In “Gentleman Jack,” whose long-awaited second season finally wrapped in November, disparate constituencies have rallied around a character common in period romances: the dapper, dashing seducer just about ready to settle with the right person. Except this time, the seducer and the seduced are both women.

“It’s the story of a marriage — a secret marriage that has many things thrown at it by society and how they survived it,” Jones said by way of a preview. “It is a beautiful study of human relationships in a time when everything was so complex and complicated, and difficult and dangerous.”

Wainwright’s professional relationship with Jones dates back to the black comedy “Dead Clever,” from 2007, and also includes five seasons of ITV cop show “Scott & Bailey” (2011-16), which paired Jones with Lesley Sharp as a British answer to “Cagney & Lacey.”

Despite that familiarity, or maybe because of it, Jones was not an early candidate to take on the role of Lister, whose prodigiously extensive diaries, sometimes written in code, documented her social and sexual life in minute detail and inspired “Gentleman Jack.”

“I didn’t immediately think of her as being the right person because she has a very modern kind of vibe,” Wainwright said. “But with ‘Gentleman Jack’ we wanted her to feel like she was from a different planet, almost, so that really works.”

Jones was taken with Lister’s alien quality as well: “She’s fine being odd and different,” she said. “Sally did a wonderful job of taking a period drama and making it quite punk.”

What dominates “Gentleman Jack” is Lister’s lustful appetite for life, which Jones evocatively embodies with panache and humor. (Wainwright went out of her way to praise the actress's comic skills.) In a sense, Amy of “Vigil” must figure out how to be more like Lister: how to choose life and be in the moment. That she must do it while solving a crime only adds to the audience’s enjoyment.

“I think that a lot of my characters have been through trauma, or they are big social talking points, like Victoria or Gentleman Jack,” Jones said. “But ‘Vigil’ has you on the edge of your seat, and you just remember how much fun it can be watching things like that.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.