Nicola Coughlan plays Mary Maloney, the pregnant housewife of Roald Dahl’s 1953 short story “Lamb to the Slaughter,” for Netflix’s six-part anthology of Dahl’s dark adult tales, and she was filming the moment Mary goes into labour.
The bump is a prosthetic.
In the story, Mary’s husband, a police detective, announces he’s leaving her. She kills him with a frozen leg of lamb, then roasts it and serves it to the officers who turn up to find the murder weapon. By the time dinner’s over, the evidence is gone.
During the labour scenes, Mary clashes in a heated exchange with the characters played by Naomi Scott and Josh Finan.
The series is being shot under the working title “Zoltar” and adapts Dahl’s stories in the style of ITV’s “Tales of the Unexpected,” which ran from 1979 to 1988. A young couple marooned in a faded seaside town ties the episodes together, crossing paths with conmen, adulterers, murderous mothers and snake charmers as they try to escape their fate.
Danny Brocklehurst (“Fool Me Once”) is writing it, with Runyararo Mapfumo and Ben Gregor directing. The cast also includes Imelda Staunton, Dominic West, Toby Jones, Carmen Ejogo and Clarke Peters.
Coughlan, 39, best known as Penelope Featherington on “Bridgerton” and Clare Devlin on “Derry Girls,” called the show “very twisted and dark and strange.”
Filming runs through mid-December, with a 2027 release expected.
