Hotel Portofino just wrapped its third season, but there’s always hope for more – particularly considering how the third season ended. Fangirlish had a chance to talk to star Natascha McElhone about the third season, that devastating ending, and whether the show would return for Season 4, and McElhone was clear that she always knew the show would get darker as it went on, but she understood why the decision was made not to start in such a dark place.
“I get completely that Walter [Iuzzolino] our producer didn’t want to necessarily start with that because he just thought, I want this to be escapist entertainment. I want to show the beauty of Italy. I want to delve into family dynamics. I want to establish the connections that the audience might have with these characters. And then I can afford to go to the external influences. And because by then people will be invested and they’ll care and that they’ll be able to relate.”
But in Season 3, the show kind of has to go there. There’s no escaping it. And for McElhone that places Bella in a difficult position because Bella has always been a character that hasn’t really fit into the standards of the romantic ideal. For McElhone, fighting against perfection has actually been really important. “That’s something that I think, as actors, sometimes we can get attached to, perfecting our characters, making everything they do consistent, rational, fair. It’s boring. No one behaves like that anyway.”
“And our director, Jon Jones. He was great with me. He would say to me, I’d say, oh, I don’t think Bella would do that. It doesn’t make any sense. And he’d be like don’t perfect your character. She’s having a bad day. That’s what she does. And I’ll be like, you’re right.”
Because characters, like people, aren’t perfect, and that’s what McElhone really wanted to get across. “So, I think, you know, she seems quixotic and changeable and maybe slightly untrustworthy, to be honest, at times, misguided and poor in her decision making. With Marco, for example, she’s not consistent. She’s, yes, I want you. No, well, not that much. And I definitely don’t want to be married to you but don’t go away. And there’s stuff that you find yourself wrestling, thinking, hmm, is this woman treating him as she would want to be treated? I think that’s always interesting.”
Not fair, not. But it is interesting.
McElhone always wanted Bella Ainsworth to be more than just a woman of the times. “Though, obviously, she’s a homemaker and she in a sense uses that as her skill set, you know, she upscales that if you like into running a hotel and looking after people and, you know, what are often deemed “maternal qualities” even though I think really, they are parental qualities and men and women have the ability to do these things.”
“I think she’s got a lot of energy and her kids are grown up. So where does she put it? She wants to make something. She wants a legacy other than her children, and she adores them. You can see that, but she’s still, she’s ambitious as well. She’s her own person, not just a mother.”
And she’s not just a wife either, and that’s not just because Cecil Ainsworth is anything but the romantic hero, either. McElhone and Mark Umbers have taken great care to play that relationship as something with a lot of layers. “It’s definitely something that he and I worked on a lot. And we would play the scenes… You know, in a sense, it’s not that you play the subtext, but you look for what the history between them is and what it costs them to say the things that they say and their previous circumstances and the heavy load of that and how that informs how they relate to one another.”
“And that there is some love, even though she may be ashamed of the fact that she still has feelings for him and publicly will dismiss him and say that she doesn’t. There is just a primal connection. You know, they had three kids. They lost one of them. They’ve been through so much. And I think long relationships and certainly how people navigate them is always makes for really interesting drama.”
But what McElhone and Umbers are interested in playing for Bella and Cecil is not the romance, not a rekindling, but just the complexity of what was. “Rather than just what we’ve mostly captured on-screen with romances, the meeting, the first love or the loss, the end, the breakup, the death, the end of something… I think what’s interesting about what I loved playing with Mark was looking at the if you like the sort of the M to the T of a relationship, the middle of the alphabet. The can you make it and can you forgive? And in this case, I guess not. But I think it’s good that the audience doesn’t necessarily know.”
As for how they and the show go from here, McElhone didn’t have a straight answer, but she did have ideas. “Honestly. I don’t know. I mean, I think one of the conversations that they were having was that there would be a big time jump or a different place.”
We, after all, have to take into consideration that the time period means that a time jump, unless it’s big enough, only takes them into an even more complicated time period.
“Who knows? McElhone added. “Maybe we’ll go back in time. Maybe it’ll be like a prequel.” Hey, plenty of shows have done it. “I’ve got no idea what the plan is to be really honest with you. I know that there was a desire to make another one. I also know that there was a practical element of the house, but I think everyone’s contracts were for three years in the first bit and the house that we were shooting in, something else is shooting in this summer. So, it just, I think it made an easy decision to, okay, let’s just put a pin in it for a minute. And I think also there was a thought around not doing it in the summer, around doing it like a Christmas gathering.”
So, not a no. Not a yes. A maybe. And one fans would very much like to see come to fruition.
Hotel Portofino Season 3 is available to stream now on PBS.
