‘The Buccaneers’ Star Imogen Waterhouse Reveals that Jinny’s Asylum Scenes Felt “Quite Real” to Her: “There’s a Lot of Screaming” 

No matter how much you already hated Lord James Seadown (Barney Fishwick), The Buccaneers Season 2 Episode 6 “Every Single Piece of My Heart” will make you loathe the Apple TV+ villain even worse.

**Spoilers for The Buccaneers Season 2 Episode 6 “Every Single Piece of My Heart,” now streaming on Apple TV+**

In just the space of a single episode, Seadown kidnaps his own child, murders his own brother, and commits his wife, Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse), into an asylum. Jinny’s time in the asylum is absolutely horrifying, especially when you consider how otherwise lovely The Buccaneers is.

“I think it’s such an intense idea that you can be taken to an asylum just for being ‘deemed’ as, like, crazy,” Buccaneers star Imogen Waterhouse told DECIDER. “And I think there’s so many experiences of women of that time who were [in an asylum] and definitely didn’t need to be in those situations, that were just because it’s a way that someone had some sort of power said, ‘Put them in there.’ So it was, it’s kind of intense.”

“We were very keen to show at some point during the series — and it’s alluded to in Season 1 Episode 8 — that at that time if a woman had a baby, it belonged to the husband,” Buccaneers EP Beth Willis said. “Even when that baby was still inside Jinny, she had essentially stolen his property.”

“The mother had no rights, and, yeah, as Beth says, when she came back, she would have been regarded as mad or a criminal,” The Buccaneers creator Katherine Jakeways said. “So we talked about it and we said, ‘Could we actually see her in jail? Could we see her in jail or an asylum?’ How would that feel in a kind of Buccaneers world of everybody sort of being glamorous?”

When Jinny is in the asylum, she is kept locked away from everyone she knows and loves. She’s force-fed and treated like a monster. It’s harrowing to watch and it was even more so for Buccaneers star Imogen Waterhouse to experience.

“When you are shooting that stuff, you are going through the motions of what it would be like to be in that kind of environment. So it does feel, it feels quite real and you’re like, ‘Wow,’” Waterhouse said. “It was intense, actually. There’s a lot of screaming. Like, you know, the force-feeding medicine.”

“You are acting, but you’re also like, ‘This is actually also like happening to me.’”

“Immy, who plays Jinny, was really brilliant and was very careful with the character,” Jakeways said. “We wanted to sort of make sure that it felt real and that it felt affecting.”

For The Buccaneers team, the reason it was so important that they did show how awful Gilded Age asylums were was because it further explained the lengths to which Nan (Kristine Frøseth), Guy (Matthew Broome), and Jinny went to shield her from Seadown.

“The alternative would have been that Jinny just comes back and it’s kind of all fine, but actually to show what the real risks were and the reason she had to run, and the reason that Nan has to stand up and speak up for her sister, and the reasons Nan married Theo in the first place to save her sister is that these women were genuinely at risk of terrible things happening to them,” Jakeways said.

The Buccaneers executive producer Joe Innes added that it was important that even though Seadown takes everything from Jinny, she still stands up to him before the end of the episode.

“She has that amazing scene with Seadown where she sort of says, ‘I will be your wife, but I will never love you again,’” Innes said. “It was so important to us to give Jinny a moment of triumph. He hasn’t broken that, try as he might. She remains strong and she remains head held high.”