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Suranne Jones is a guest on this week's The Graham Norton Show  – she's swinging by to discuss her latest role in Christmas Carole, a contemporary take on the classic Dickens tale. Since she made her name on the long-running British soap opera Coronation Street in the early 2000s, Jones has established herself as one of the most popular actresses working on U.K. TV. In 2016, she won a BAFTA award for her performance in Doctor Foster, and she's gone on to star in the hit series Gentleman Jack, Vigil, and Save Me.

So, ahead of the show's premiere Friday (December 23) at 11pm EST on BBC America, here are a few things you may not know about her.

1. Her real name is Sarah-Anne Jones. 

Though Suranne is just her stage name, it's one with a strong sentimental connection for the actress. She told The Herald: "My great gran was called Suranne and when my dad told the priest he wanted to call me Suranne, too, he said: 'Now, that's not a proper name.' So I was christened Sarah-Anne. When I got the chance to pick a stage name, my dad asked if I would consider Suranne."

2. She believes she has overcome snobbery in her acting career.

She attributes this mainly to the fact she got her break on Coronation Street. "I did a Btec national diploma in performing arts, but that isn’t quite the same as drama school," she told The Daily Telegraph. "I've been acting since I was eight, but I've felt more snobbery over the fact that I was in a soap than that I didn't train through the traditional route. It's sad."

3. Before her acting career took off, she worked in a call center.

Jones actually took phone calls for The Camelot Group, the company that runs the U.K.'s National Lottery. However, she told The Herald that she didn't last long because "I used to answer in silly accents just to keep myself entertained."

4. She also worked as a kind of singing career advisor.

As she recalled on a previous visit to The Graham Norton Show, Jones was a "cragrat" who toured British schools with song-and-dance numbers designed to encourage kids to consider their life choices. It sounds like quite a unique apprenticeship for her future acting career.

5. One of her first acting jobs was a TV commercial for Maltesers.

Credit where it's due: Jones' performance in this lighthearted ad will probably make you crave some chocolate.

6. She and her husband have their own production company.

It's called TeamAkers Productions LTD and had its first series commissioned earlier this year. As we reported in March, the series is a three-part relationship drama called Maryland in which Jones will play Becca, a Manchester woman who reconnects with her estranged sister after they receive some "devastating news." Jones co-created the show and its intense emotional themes sound as though they're very much in her wheelhouse.

7. Sadly, she collapsed on stage while performing in London's West End in 2018.

At the time, Jones was starring in the emotionally draining Bryony Lavery play Frozen, about a woman whose daughter is abducted by a pedophile. Jones has since attributed the incident to the unresolved trauma she experienced after losing her mother and becoming a parent herself around the same time.

She told The Times that it was "perhaps to do with fight or flight because I was being looked at by a thousand-odd people and I was trying to fight something, tell a story and be a character, when my body was saying, ‘You can’t be on this stage right now because you’re experiencing something else much more pertinent and you need to rest because you've had trauma.'"

8. She suffers from carpophobia, an intense fear of wrists.

And Jones believes this was probably triggered by her religious upbringing. "I hate wrists," she told the Daily Mirror. "Growing up as a Catholic girl, seeing Jesus on the cross with the stigmata has made me not like wrists. You can see people's veins."

9. She has spoken openly about her mental health issues.

Jones suffers from anxiety and revealed earlier this year that she had a breakdown after losing her father to Coronavirus during the pandemic. "I'm on medication and, at some point, I'll aim to get off that," she said on the My Happy Place podcast. "There's a huge taboo around it and I wasn't going to say it but I decided last night I should because it's important I think."

10. And finally, she once impersonated Madonna on British TV.

Yes, really! Jones appeared on a special celebrity edition of Stars in Their Eyes, a show in which members of the public pay tribute to famous singers. Jones chose to perform Madonna's early 2000s club hit "Music" and made a pretty good job of it, as you can see below.

Are you looking forward to watching Suranne Jones on The Graham Norton Show?