Serinda Swan digs into Coroner Season 4

Emergency room doctor-turned-coroner Dr. Jenny Cooper (Serinda Swan) has tried everything to bleed off the emotional overload from her demanding work and chaotic life. We’ve seen her smashing stuff in a rage room, singing in her car, taking anti-anxiety medication, sitting through group therapy and more. This year, Jenny is taking up gardening. And what a change it will be for her, to bury something as a way to start a life rather than as a final goodbye.

She's had death around her so much for the past 3 seasons. Coming to the end of Season 3, I really was like: ‘Hey guys, she needs a break.’ She needs a second; we need to honour the mental health aspect of our show, and understand that this is something that she would need to go and take some time to herself and nurture life,” says Serinda.

(We asked), how does that work within her life? How do we show that growth figuratively and literally? And so we had her start gardening – and being able to see life in front of her that she could nurture – and hopefully not kill, because she's learning how to garden at this point! It was giving her a little bit of something to care for, to show her that not all things die in her life,” explains Serinda.

Read on as Serinda tells us more about the season, her favourite cadavers, and Jenny’s delayed adolescence…

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Speaker for the dead

What keeps you coming back to Coroner?

“My number 1 reason for doing this character is to ensure that she stays a human who happens to be a coroner and not a coroner who happens to be human. So often (in procedural shows) we see the job first; we see the FBI agent and then we sprinkle in a little bit of daily life. We don't necessarily see the human weaving their way through these things. What makes this show unique is that it focuses on this woman's life, who struggles with mental health issues and has a beautiful family – and is in a crazy male-dominated world and yet she has amazing men around her that helps her struggle through it. What ultimately made me sign on for the fourth season, was to explore a different side of Jenny after losing Liam (her long-term boyfriend) and seeing what that looks like. How we evolve from there in a realistic” way.”

What is changing in Jenny’s life this season?

“There are definitely a few crucial decisions for her this season on what it means to be a coroner, and what it means to her relationship with life and with death. I do wish we went a little bit more into her mental health in our fourth season because I think that's such an important aspect. But we dive into some other really important world issues.”

How will we see Jenny’s relationship with her mother come into this season?

“Some love, some trauma. A lot of our biggest life lessons come through family. Peggy (Jenny’s mom, played by Jennifer Dale) is very much back in Jenny’s life, and we need that new sort of element for Jenny. She brings up a lot of the past. She's there in the present and it's sort of a decision on whether or not that's going to move into the future. It's a really interesting plot point this season for Jenny to come up against, and it definitely comes to a head at the end of the season.”

What were your most intriguing corpse props this season?

“Yesterday we had (a prop kidney with) kidney stones and we didn't actually know how you can “pop” them out. That was really fun for all of us, except for the Props (masters) – they’re like: “Stop!” and we’re like (excitedly), “No but look, you can just pop them out!” That was great. We had a throat that we were able to take out – we took the whole organ block out. There was something in the throat and I got to actually squeeze it out of the throat and take it out. That was amazing. We've had some great burns this season. It sounds so morbid! I sound like a psycho. I’m like, “There was an amazing burn, there was a stab wound that I loved.” But there have been a lot of really cool ones and when we see them on set we just immediately – all the actors – lose our minds and we run over and we're like, “Intestines!” and just start pulling them all out. I’d say the throat 1 was really cool and then yesterday the kidney stones were pretty great. We got to saw out some chest plates as well. That was kind of awesome because we got to use power tools.”

There are 2 coroners in the office this season. What was it like playing off Thom Alison as Dr. Eli Thompson?

“We just got along immediately, which was problematic because we’d be mean to each other, and then as soon as they cut we would be like: “I'm so sorry!” It was just this lovely energy between the 2 of us. Jenny is very heart-forwards and Eli is very intellectual, so they butt up against each other this season, and it brings sort of a healing for him through Jenny's natural, organic, weird way of solving these mysteries.”

“And I pitched an idea that this fourth season was about Jenny reclaiming her adolescence. When she gets back to work – because she's on a bit of a hiatus when we first see her – there's like a new “principal” in town. She can't do anything, she can't technically get him fired. My pitch was to have her in this adolescence, because when her mother left and her sister died, she never got to be [a teenager].”

Watch Coroner Season 4 from Thursday, 3 March at 20:00 on Universal TV (DStv Channel 117)

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