The I, Daniel Blake actor plays a fading porn star in the new TV drama. She understands the business’s appeal – and its perils
Jolene Dollar is drifting off into the same mental to-do list any one of us might have at work, while a colleague is boring on about his planning permission issues: put the washing on, get the mince out of the freezer, iron some school shirts. She also has one fishnet-stockinged leg hitched up over a desk, and he is about to enter her from behind once the cameras start rolling again. A fairly average day at work, then, for Britain’s top adult performer, as she dabs at her eye with a tissue and swills her mouth out.
In Adult Material, the new four-part Channel 4 drama set in the world of porn, Jolene is one of the “last of the old-timers, for want of a better phrase”, says Hayley Squires, who plays her, chatty but thoughtful on the phone from her home in Kent. This is a first TV lead for Squires, who has been in the dramas Collateral and The Miniaturist, and numerous theatre roles, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the West End. She is still best known for her role as a desperate single mother in Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake, for which she was nominated for a Bafta and won most promising newcomer at the British independent film awards.
