New TV drama set in Eastbourne and Hastings: Hollywood star talks about her love for the area

She plays a woman who loses a year’s worth of memories in the Channel 4 thriller Close To Me, which is based on the novel of the same name.

Speaking to RadioTimes.com about the filming of the drama, the Danish actress said: “We were kind of all over the place. Some things were filmed out by Windsor, some down in Hastings and Eastbourne.

“They were in all different places, but they had to come together as a lived-in landscape as well as reality, and then you could put [them] together, and so I think that was really well done.”

A lot of the scenes were shot in Hastings and St Leonards, and Nielsen told RadioTimes.com: “It was lovely, the cliffs were beautiful. I was amazed by the countryside and the physical beauty of the nature; it was just amazing.”

Her co-star, Christopher Eccleston, joked that he took his ‘bucket and spade’ for days out filming on the coast.

Speaking to RadioTimes.com, he said: “We were filming flashbacks from high summer, in autumn, but we had these freak weather days which helped us.

“We’d all been locked away since March, so we had cabin fever and were just delighted to be working, earning, being creative.”

Nielsen added: “The Covid protocols were absolutely exhausting, but the fact that we really adhered to them is the reason why we never had a positive case on our 80-member crew.

“The worst part for me was that as I was travelling back and forth between London and Copenhagen with my children in school, then the borders closed because Denmark had the mink variant, so that was very hard. But the crew were so resilient and worked so hard.”

The actress, who starred in Wonder Woman 1984, plays Jo Harding, a Danish translator and mother-of-two who suffers a brain trauma.

Former Doctor Who star Eccleston plays Jo’s husband Rob in the drama.