The actor talks deepfakes, “slopaganda” — and why she stays off social media
Add The Capture to your watchlist Holliday Grainger has been scene-stealing since the age of six, when she landed her first role in the BBC’s All Quiet on the Preston Front (1994). Now 37, she’s firmly in her detective era. As well as continuing her role as the unflappable Robin Ellacott in Strike (series seven will air later this year), she’s back as the inscrutable surveillance boss Rachel Carey, diving into the murky world of deepfakes and institutional cover-ups, in BBC One’s The Capture. What was the hardest part about filming this third series? To be honest, the hours! But to be more specific, the learning of the procedural jargon. You’ve got to make it look easy, otherwise you’re doing your job wrong. Give me a stunt scene any day. It doesn’t require as much homework. I really enjoyed doing a lot of the action stuff this season. I love how Rachel doesn’t try to be likeable — is that important? Yes, and I do, too. I also love that you don’t get a major back story with her. It’s all about the plot and the work. This is a generalisation, but women tend to be people-pleasers. She’s not. I really like her bluntness. It makes it all the more poignant when you see a little slip into her inner emotional life, although those are few and far between. When The Capture first aired in 2019, the idea of “deepfakes” felt outlandish. Now that the internet is littered with fake Artificial Intelligence (AI) videos, do you feel it was ahead of its time? Completely. At the time, most people thought the idea was so far-fetched. Now, it’s not just the scary ways people in power might be manipulating footage, it’s day-to-day manipulation on social media, and how easy it is for anyone to create fake content. I don’t think we would’ve believed it in 2019. Today, how do we sort fact from fiction? I don’t think we can at the moment. We’ve just got to keep an open mind. The more cynical we are, the more it’s probably the truth. Working on this new series completely reframed how I read world events. We are having to question what we see and the reasons for it in a way that we didn’t before. We all need a Rachel Carey in our lives with Operation Veritas! Have you ever been fooled by anything online? Probably. There’s a line in the show, “What is the truth? Does truth even exist?” I’m questioning everything. Recently, I read something about the Lovers’ Arch in Italy collapsing on Valentine’s Day, and my first thought was, “Is that real?” My favourite word of the year is “slopaganda”. It’s not just about the dangerous, propaganda that’s out there, it’s AI regurgitating someone’s s**t that they spewed on Wikipedia. Which is the scariest? The propaganda or the slopaganda? Do you worry about your image being used without your consent — especially as a woman? Yes, though I’m more worried about being forced to sign something that says it’s OK to do things with my image; of it legally being taken out of my hands. You can’t control the slopaganda. But I’m not on social media, so I’d just never know. It’s always women [who are typically more affected]. It’s a scary and sad thing that it’s so easy to do now. People can do it at the click of a button. We need to make sure the prevalence of it doesn’t make us normalise it. You started acting at six, and have said that your mum was your chaperone when you were a teenager. What was that like? Thank God for my mum! I wouldn’t be acting otherwise. I enjoyed it because I was with her. I hated being with chaperones as I felt really infantilised. She made it OK for me. Being a teenage actress in the noughties, there were experiences that meant you needed a good grounding. As someone who grew up in Manchester, do you feel Northern talent is better represented now than when you started out? Definitely. In the same way that more women’s stories are being told, as a society, we’re more interested in opening our minds to stories of different regions, cultures and abilities, almost in a way that I don’t even notice it now. You play investigators in both The Capture and Strike. Who is most like you: Rachel or Robin? Probably Robin. I’m way too much of a people pleaser to be Rachel. Robin is probably a version of me. And after solving so many TV crimes, do you think you’ve become good at reading people? I’d like to think I am. I do think that I can get a sense of someone quite quickly. For the first season of The Capture, I did quite a bit of shadowing in the police, and came away thinking, “I could do this”. I wanted to get stuck into some of the investigations. Would I be a good Celebrity Traitor? Is that the question? Ha! I’ve never watched The Traitors. Maybe I should, and then I’d know…
The Capture star Holliday Grainger talks Strike, deepfakes and Northern representation
Grainger spoke with Radio Times magazine about the third season of her hit BBC techno-thriller.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Holliday Grainger has been scene-stealing since the age of six, when she landed her first role in the BBC’s All Quiet on the Preston Front (1994). Now 37, she’s firmly in her detective era. As well as continuing her role as the unflappable Robin Ellacott in Strike (season 7 will air later this year), she’s back as the inscrutable surveillance boss Rachel Carey, diving into the murky world of deepfakes and institutional cover-ups, in BBC One’s The Capture. What was the hardest part about filming this third series? To be honest, the hours! But to be more specific, the learning of the procedural jargon. You’ve got to make it look easy, otherwise you’re doing your job wrong. Give me a stunt scene any day. It doesn’t require as much homework. I really enjoyed doing a lot of the action stuff this season. I love how Rachel doesn’t try to be likeable — is that important? Yes, and I do, too. I also love that you don’t get a major back story with her. It’s all about the plot and the work. This is a generalisation, but women tend to be people-pleasers. She’s not. I really like her bluntness. It makes it all the more poignant when you see a little slip into her inner emotional life, although those are few and far between. When The Capture first aired in 2019, the idea of "deepfakes" felt outlandish. Now that the internet is littered with fake Artificial Intelligence (AI) videos, do you feel it was ahead of its time? Completely. At the time, most people thought the idea was so far-fetched. Now, it’s not just the scary ways people in power might be manipulating footage, it’s day-to-day manipulation on social media, and how easy it is for anyone to create fake content. I don’t think we would’ve believed it in 2019. Today, how do we sort fact from fiction? I don’t think we can at the moment. We’ve just got to keep an open mind. The more cynical we are, the more it’s probably the truth. Working on this new series completely reframed how I read world events. We are having to question what we see and the reasons for it in a way that we didn’t before. We all need a Rachel Carey in our lives with Operation Veritas! <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2025/11/Holliday-Grainger-as-Rachel-Carey-in-The-Capture-S3-coming-to-BBC-iPlayer-and-BBC-One-in-Spring-2026-291b2ba.jpg" width="7203" height="4802" alt="Holliday Grainger as Rachel Carey in The Capture season 3, stood in an interview room with her back to a mirror, which reflects her multiple times." title="Holliday Grainger as Rachel Carey in The Capture S3 coming to BBC iPlayer and BBC One in Spring 2026" /> Have you ever been fooled by anything online? Probably. There’s a line in the show, “What is the truth? Does truth even exist?” I’m questioning everything. Recently, I read something about the Lovers’ Arch in Italy collapsing on Valentine’s Day, and my first thought was, “Is that real?” My favourite word of the year is “slopaganda”. It’s not just about the dangerous, propaganda that’s out there, it’s AI regurgitating someone’s s**t that they spewed on Wikipedia. Which is the scariest? The propaganda or the slopaganda? Do you worry about your image being used without your consent — especially as a woman? Yes, though I’m more worried about being forced to sign something that says it’s OK to do things with my image; of it legally being taken out of my hands. You can’t control the slopaganda. But I’m not on social media, so I’d just never know. It’s always women [who are typically more affected]. It’s a scary and sad thing that it’s so easy to do now. People can do it at the click of a button. We need to make sure the prevalence of it doesn’t make us normalise it. You started acting at six, and have said that your mum was your chaperone when you were a teenager. What was that like? Thank God for my mum! I wouldn’t be acting otherwise. I enjoyed it because I was with her. I hated being with chaperones as I felt really infantilised. She made it OK for me. Being a teenage actress in the noughties, there were experiences that meant you needed a good grounding. As someone who grew up in Manchester, do you feel Northern talent is better represented now than when you started out? Definitely. In the same way that more women’s stories are being told, as a society, we’re more interested in opening our minds to stories of different regions, cultures and abilities, almost in a way that I don’t even notice it now. You play investigators in both The Capture and Strike. Who is most like you: Rachel or Robin? Probably Robin. I’m way too much of a people pleaser to be Rachel. Robin is probably a version of me. And after solving so many TV crimes, do you think you’ve become good at reading people? I’d like to think I am. I do think that I can get a sense of someone quite quickly. For the first season of The Capture, I did quite a bit of shadowing in the police, and came away thinking, “I could do this”. I wanted to get stuck into some of the investigations. Would I be a good Celebrity Traitor? Is that the question? Ha! I’ve never watched The Traitors. Maybe I should, and then I’d know… The Capture season 3 will air on BBC One and BBC iPlayer from Sunday 8 March 2026. Add The Capture to your watchlist on the <a id="OWA8b702c45-bee9-94e4-f018-57518e78041b" title="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" href="https://www.radiotimes.com/download-the-app/?af_xp=custom&pid=website&c=editorial_content&is_retargeting=true&af_reengagement_window=30d" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-outlook-id="449c28d9-909e-4aab-b6b8-153454f55d5e" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-linkindex="0">Radio Times: What to Watch app – download now for daily TV recommendations, features and more. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
'There's a lot of prejudice, but I love being deaf'
Rose Ayling-Ellis has shone in everything from EastEnders to Strictly. Now she takes centre stage in a police drama with lip-reading and BSL as her co-stars
Add Code of Silence to your watchlist Few viewers could have failed to be moved – many to tears – by the “silent dance” performed by Rose Ayling-Ellis in the 2021 series of Strictly Come Dancing. Hailed as the show’s “greatest ever performance”, when the music stopped and she continued to dance with her professional dance partner in poignant silence, it simultaneously paid respect and raised awareness of the deaf community. Which is what Ayling-Ellis has been doing ever since. Four years after scooping the trophy, she’s still on a winning streak – the first deaf contestant not only to appear on Strictly but to win it, the 30-year-old actor’s series of firsts also include being the first deaf person to host live sports coverage on British TV (as a presenter for Channel 4’s coverage of the 2024 Paralympics), the first person to work with a major toy company to produce a doll with a hearing aid (Barbie, in 2022) and the first person to sign a Bedtime Story on CBeebies. Her first book, Marvellous Messages, was published in March, part of a ten-book deal that will deepen her advocacy for the deaf community while educating those of us who can hear. Although “educating” sounds too preachy for a person who’d rather entertain and enlighten. Preachy is the last thing that Ayling-Ellis is, which is something that becomes apparent as soon as we start chatting in the tasteful, plump-cushioned environs of a five-star London hotel. “French,” she says definitively, when I ask her what the hardest accent is to lip-read. “They talk with their teeth together. Men are generally harder to lip-read because they mumble too much. Look me in the eyes and open your mouth more, please!” With lip-reading and BSL (British Sign Language) as her co-stars, Ayling-Ellis has just notched up another first, playing the lead in Code of Silence, a tense new ITV drama in which her deafness plays a starring role. Written by Catherine Moulton, who has been partially deaf since childhood, the police drama centres on Alison Brooks, a deaf woman who’s plucked out of working in a police canteen and recruited to lip-read as part of a surveillance operation hoping to thwart a gang planning a dangerous heist. Moulton had the idea for the script after having lip-reading lessons to improve the skills she’d taught herself as a child. “That’s when I learnt that only between 30 and 40 per cent of speech is actually visible on your lips – everything else is complicated guesswork. So you’re looking at the person’s body language, the situation you’re in and what you know about them. It made me think of it as a big puzzle. With lip-reading, you’re putting together clues and then coming up with an answer. Which felt perfect for a detective show.” Ayling-Ellis committed to the role after being shown an outline of the story, encouraged by its ground-breaking format. “So when I wrote the script, I knew I was writing for Rose, which was brilliant, because some of her personality, energy and drive worked its way into Alison,” smiles Moulton. “Then we took it as a package to ITV – my script, and Rose playing the lead.” Ayling-Ellis had zero doubts about taking the role. “I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time. I’ve been acting for about 13 years. When I’ve done theatre, I’ve always had a small role and it used to frustrate me, because I feel there is a story out there that’s not being told. I needed to show everyone I can do this. “Normally, when you get a script about lip-reading, it can make you feel a bit on edge,” she adds, explaining that depictions aren’t always realistic. “But the fact that this one captured how hard lip-reading is, and how it’s like a puzzle, and [showed] how you work it out, really drew me to it.” For the viewer, this means watching subtitles form on screen slowly, letter by letter, at a pace designed to echo that of a lip-reader figuring out the words they’re interpreting. “It took us a long time to work that out,” says Moulton. “There was a lot of back and forth, and Rose had a lot of input.” “We’ve never done anything like that before,” says Ayling-Ellis, explaining that she wanted to capture the process of deduction that deaf people have to go through, given that some words look the same when spoken. “That’s what lip-reading is. For example, ‘elephants’, ‘colourful’ and ‘I love you’ have the exact same patterns.” “Certain words look the same, like ‘leaf’ and ‘leave’,” Moulton adds. “Also ‘police’ and ‘please’ have the same pattern, so there is always room for doubt. You could say, ‘Oh, he wasn’t saying that,’ which is why sometimes you can’t rely on that evidence in court.” It’s one of many elements of a show that places deaf and hearing-impaired people front and centre, reminding everyone of how the world is through their eyes. In one scene, a meeting takes place where the speaker is out of eyeshot, forcing Alison to ask a stranger what’s going on. “Those scenes came quite naturally, because those are things that we experience all the time – being at a school assembly or a play, and too far away [to lip-read],” says Moulton. “It’s so frustrating, but it’s part of our lives.” The plot also emphasises Alison’s quick-witted intelligence, in a way that will feel vindicating to any deaf or hearing-impaired person who’s experienced the hurt and frustration of deafness and slowness being conflated. “There’s a lot of prejudice,” sighs Ayling-Ellis. “You’re slow because of the environment that you’re in. Everyone else is making it slow – it’s not yourself. That’s why I say I love being deaf. There’s no problem with being deaf at all. It’s my environment that makes it harder for me to be deaf. “There’s a famous saying, ‘I’m disabled because the world disabled me’. What makes this script and plot so exciting is how Alison plays with that to her advantage. Everyone will assume she’s ‘just’ a deaf girl. It happens to me a lot. I have people talking about really uncomfortable situations in front of me, assuming I won’t hear them.” Brought up in Hythe on the Kent coast, Ayling-Ellis’s hospital worker mum and surveyor dad found out she was deaf when she was 18 months old, after she “failed” a hearing test. It was presented as a problem that needed fixing. Her parents’ decision, controversial at the time, to teach their daughter BSL (some professionals claim it can delay speech) is covered movingly in her 2023 documentary, Signs for Change. “Sign language is brilliant, but it needs to be made more accessible,” she says. “Medical services need to think about deaf people in relation to mental health. Domestic abuse helplines as well. How are people going to call on the phone?” Given that an estimated one in two deaf people have mental health issues, it’s an urgent point. After a film-making weekend organised by the National Deaf Children’s Society sparked a love of performing as a teen, she was encouraged to join a deaf youth theatre group in London, and kept her passion alive while at university in Rochester. A deaf actors’ Facebook group led to a part in Casualty, as well as other small parts, which eventually led to her getting an agent, and winning the part of Frankie in EastEnders, which she played for two years. “It was great training for me, because it made me learn how to hit my marks, how to get things [done] quickly, because they don’t have time. If you make a mistake, that’s it.” As well as appearing in the BBC1 thriller Reunion this year, she’s also joined the Whoniverse, with Russell T Davies describing her role in last month’s story The Well as “an astonishing performance of terror, anger and bravery in one of the most frightening episodes we’ve ever made”. “It was really fun, and great for building up my acting skills,” she says of the experience, adding that “a lot of coffee” helped her to act suitably jittery and scared. Davies recently revealed that the role wasn’t originally written for a deaf actress, but that he incorporated feedback from Ayling-Ellis during script development. In the future, would she prefer to play deaf characters with storylines written to reflect this, or roles without reference to being deaf? “I don’t have that privilege,” she says. “No matter what I do, it’s going to be deaf because it’s in my accent, my wearing my hearing aid and in the way I communicate. That can never be taken away.” She and Moulton are optimistic that deaf representation, for cast as well as crew, is improving. “I hope so,” says Moulton. “The talent is there, and it would be a real shame not to give people more to do. I think things are changing.” “There’s more realisation that a disabled story can be entertainment, and not be preachy,” adds Ayling-Ellis. Strictly fans may be aware that Ayling-Ellis can sometimes hear the beat of a song: still, I wonder whether it’s insensitive to ask whether music has a role in her life. “Oh, I love music,” she beams. “I have Bluetooth in my hearing aid that I connect to my phone. I can control it so that there’s no background noise – I can’t hear anybody, and then I put my music on, whack it up really loud so I can’t hear the traffic or people shouting – just music. It’s great. Hearing people don’t have that luxury.” Her tastes are wide-ranging. “Dolly Parton is my favourite. My favourite dance music would probably be Show Me Love by Robin S, or Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton. For my 30th birthday, I had proper 70s old school music. It was a crisps party.” Despite – or maybe because – I’m the world’s number one crisp fan, I think I’ve misheard her. A crisps party? “I love crisps,” she beams. “I wrapped the whole venue in foil, so it would look like the inside of a crisp packet. And everyone had to dress up as a different crisp. One friend put a spacesuit on – Space Raiders – and another’s got lovely long ginger hair. She had an orange dress and hat on, fluffed up her hair and sprayed it with hairspray, and she was a Wotsit.” What did the birthday girl wear? “I wore cheese and onion Walkers crisps. You put the packets in the oven and they shrink, and then I made them into a 1960s-style dress. They’re my favourite childhood crisp. Now, it’s Tyrrells, but those were a bit too expensive to make into a dress.” Like music, fashion isn’t a subject she’s often asked about, despite having studied it at university. Today, she’s wearing a black top, black trousers and a new pair of black slingbacks. “This year I’m really trying not to buy new clothes, and I’ve been doing really well until these shoes came along,” she laughs. For fancier occasions, she loves Chloé and Stella McCartney. “I wore her to collect my MBE. I love her clothes, and she’s a really smart businesswoman.” It’s hard to imagine Ayling-Ellis has much spare time, but while she doesn’t much like cooking (“It’s outrageous to spend two hours cooking something you eat in ten minutes”) or exercise (“Who does?”) she’s recently become addicted to padel. “I’ve been going three or four times a week. I’ve got one big arm and one small one.” She’s also been learning some DIY. “My dad is teaching me. He taught my brother but never me, and I told him that’s wrong. I live in an old Edwardian house; my next task is stripping the paint off the window frame.” Having achieved so much already, it must be tiresome to be asked what she wants to achieve next. “I’ve got no job at the moment, which is actually quite nice,” she smiles. “So I think I’m going to enjoy the quietness.” She should enjoy it while she can. Her world might be quiet, but her professional life is destined to be anything but.
Rose Ayling-Ellis on Code of Silence and how "a lot of coffee" helped with intense Doctor Who role
The Code of Silence star spoke exclusively to Radio Times magazine about her new role.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Few viewers could have failed to be moved – many to tears – by the “silent dance” performed by Rose Ayling-Ellis in the 2021 series of Strictly Come Dancing. Hailed as the show’s “greatest ever performance”, when the music stopped and she continued to dance with her professional dance partner in poignant silence, it simultaneously paid respect and raised awareness of the deaf community. Which is what Ayling-Ellis has been doing ever since. Four years after scooping the trophy, she’s still on a winning streak – the first deaf contestant not only to appear on Strictly but to win it, the 30-year-old actor’s series of firsts also include being the first deaf person to host live sports coverage on British TV (as a presenter for Channel 4’s coverage of the 2024 Paralympics), the first person to work with a major toy company to produce a doll with a hearing aid (Barbie, in 2022) and the first person to sign a Bedtime Story on CBeebies. Her first book, Marvellous Messages, was published in March, part of a ten-book deal that will deepen her advocacy for the deaf community while educating those of us who can hear. Although “educating” sounds too preachy for a person who’d rather entertain and enlighten. Preachy is the last thing that Ayling-Ellis is, which is something that becomes apparent as soon as we start chatting in the tasteful, plump-cushioned environs of a five-star London hotel. “French,” she says definitively, when I ask her what the hardest accent is to lip-read. “They talk with their teeth together. Men are generally harder to lip-read because they mumble too much. Look me in the eyes and open your mouth more, please!” With lip-reading and BSL (British Sign Language) as her co-stars, Ayling-Ellis has just notched up another first, playing the lead in Code of Silence, a tense new ITV drama in which her deafness plays a starring role. Written by Catherine Moulton, who has been partially deaf since childhood, the police drama centres on Alison Brooks, a deaf woman who’s plucked out of working in a police canteen and recruited to lip-read as part of a surveillance operation hoping to thwart a gang planning a dangerous heist. Moulton had the idea for the script after having lip-reading lessons to improve the skills she’d taught herself as a child. “That’s when I learnt that only between 30 and 40 per cent of speech is actually visible on your lips – everything else is complicated guesswork. So you’re looking at the person’s body language, the situation you’re in and what you know about them. It made me think of it as a big puzzle. With lip-reading, you’re putting together clues and then coming up with an answer. Which felt perfect for a detective show.” Ayling-Ellis committed to the role after being shown an outline of the story, encouraged by its ground-breaking format. “So when I wrote the script, I knew I was writing for Rose, which was brilliant, because some of her personality, energy and drive worked its way into Alison,” smiles Moulton. “Then we took it as a package to ITV – my script, and Rose playing the lead.” Ayling-Ellis had zero doubts about taking the role. “I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time. I’ve been acting for about 13 years. When I’ve done theatre, I’ve always had a small role and it used to frustrate me, because I feel there is a story out there that’s not being told. I needed to show everyone I can do this. “Normally, when you get a script about lip-reading, it can make you feel a bit on edge,” she adds, explaining that depictions aren’t always realistic. “But the fact that this one captured how hard lip-reading is, and how it’s like a puzzle, and [showed] how you work it out, really drew me to it.” For the viewer, this means watching subtitles form on screen slowly, letter by letter, at a pace designed to echo that of a lip-reader figuring out the words they’re interpreting. “It took us a long time to work that out,” says Moulton. “There was a lot of back and forth, and Rose had a lot of input.” “We’ve never done anything like that before,” says Ayling-Ellis, explaining that she wanted to capture the process of deduction that deaf people have to go through, given that some words look the same when spoken. “That’s what lip-reading is. For example, ‘elephants’, ‘colourful’ and ‘I love you’ have the exact same patterns.” “Certain words look the same, like ‘leaf’ and ‘leave’,” Moulton adds. “Also ‘police’ and ‘please’ have the same pattern, so there is always room for doubt. You could say, ‘Oh, he wasn’t saying that,’ which is why sometimes you can’t rely on that evidence in court.” It’s one of many elements of a show that places deaf and hearing-impaired people front and centre, reminding everyone of how the world is through their eyes. In one scene, a meeting takes place where the speaker is out of eyeshot, forcing Alison to ask a stranger what’s going on. “Those scenes came quite naturally, because those are things that we experience all the time – being at a school assembly or a play, and too far away [to lip-read],” says Moulton. “It’s so frustrating, but it’s part of our lives.” The plot also emphasises Alison’s quick-witted intelligence, in a way that will feel vindicating to any deaf or hearing-impaired person who’s experienced the hurt and frustration of deafness and slowness being conflated. “There’s a lot of prejudice,” sighs Ayling-Ellis. “You’re slow because of the environment that you’re in. Everyone else is making it slow – it’s not yourself. That’s why I say I love being deaf. There’s no problem with being deaf at all. It’s my environment that makes it harder for me to be deaf. “There’s a famous saying, ‘I’m disabled because the world disabled me’. What makes this script and plot so exciting is how Alison plays with that to her advantage. Everyone will assume she’s ‘just’ a deaf girl. It happens to me a lot. I have people talking about really uncomfortable situations in front of me, assuming I won’t hear them.” Brought up in Hythe on the Kent coast, Ayling-Ellis’s hospital worker mum and surveyor dad found out she was deaf when she was 18 months old, after she “failed” a hearing test. It was presented as a problem that needed fixing. Her parents’ decision, controversial at the time, to teach their daughter BSL (some professionals claim it can delay speech) is covered movingly in her 2023 documentary, Signs for Change. “Sign language is brilliant, but it needs to be made more accessible,” she says. “Medical services need to think about deaf people in relation to mental health. Domestic abuse helplines as well. How are people going to call on the phone?” Given that an estimated one in two deaf people have mental health issues, it’s an urgent point. After a film-making weekend organised by the National Deaf Children’s Society sparked a love of performing as a teen, she was encouraged to join a deaf youth theatre group in London, and kept her passion alive while at university in Rochester. A deaf actors’ Facebook group led to a part in Casualty, as well as other small parts, which eventually led to her getting an agent, and winning the part of Frankie in EastEnders, which she played for two years. “It was great training for me, because it made me learn how to hit my marks, how to get things [done] quickly, because they don’t have time. If you make a mistake, that’s it.” As well as appearing in the BBC1 thriller Reunion this year, she’s also joined the Whoniverse, with Russell T Davies describing her role in last month’s story The Well as “an astonishing performance of terror, anger and bravery in one of the most frightening episodes we’ve ever made”. “It was really fun, and great for building up my acting skills,” she says of the experience, adding that “a lot of coffee” helped her to act suitably jittery and scared. Davies recently revealed that the role wasn’t originally written for a deaf actress, but that he incorporated feedback from Ayling-Ellis during script development. In the future, would she prefer to play deaf characters with storylines written to reflect this, or roles without reference to being deaf? “I don’t have that privilege,” she says. “No matter what I do, it’s going to be deaf because it’s in my accent, my wearing my hearing aid and in the way I communicate. That can never be taken away.” She and Moulton are optimistic that deaf representation, for cast as well as crew, is improving. “I hope so,” says Moulton. “The talent is there, and it would be a real shame not to give people more to do. I think things are changing.” “There’s more realisation that a disabled story can be entertainment, and not be preachy,” adds Ayling-Ellis. Strictly fans may be aware that Ayling-Ellis can sometimes hear the beat of a song: still, I wonder whether it’s insensitive to ask whether music has a role in her life. “Oh, I love music,” she beams. “I have Bluetooth in my hearing aid that I connect to my phone. I can control it so that there’s no background noise – I can’t hear anybody, and then I put my music on, whack it up really loud so I can’t hear the traffic or people shouting – just music. It’s great. Hearing people don’t have that luxury.” Her tastes are wide-ranging. “Dolly Parton is my favourite. My favourite dance music would probably be Show Me Love by Robin S, or Young Hearts Run Free by Candi Staton. For my 30th birthday, I had proper '70s old school music. It was a crisps party.” Despite – or maybe because – I’m the world’s number one crisp fan, I think I’ve misheard her. A crisps party? “I love crisps,” she beams. “I wrapped the whole venue in foil, so it would look like the inside of a crisp packet. And everyone had to dress up as a different crisp. One friend put a spacesuit on – Space Raiders – and another’s got lovely long ginger hair. She had an orange dress and hat on, fluffed up her hair and sprayed it with hairspray, and she was a Wotsit.” What did the birthday girl wear? “I wore cheese and onion Walkers crisps. You put the packets in the oven and they shrink, and then I made them into a 1960s-style dress. They’re my favourite childhood crisp. Now, it’s Tyrrells, but those were a bit too expensive to make into a dress.” Like music, fashion isn’t a subject she’s often asked about, despite having studied it at university. Today, she’s wearing a black top, black trousers and a new pair of black slingbacks. “This year I’m really trying not to buy new clothes, and I’ve been doing really well until these shoes came along,” she laughs. For fancier occasions, she loves Chloé and Stella McCartney. “I wore her to collect my MBE. I love her clothes, and she’s a really smart businesswoman.” It’s hard to imagine Ayling-Ellis has much spare time, but while she doesn’t much like cooking (“It’s outrageous to spend two hours cooking something you eat in ten minutes”) or exercise (“Who does?”) she’s recently become addicted to padel. “I’ve been going three or four times a week. I’ve got one big arm and one small one.” She’s also been learning some DIY. “My dad is teaching me. He taught my brother but never me, and I told him that’s wrong. I live in an old Edwardian house; my next task is stripping the paint off the window frame.” Having achieved so much already, it must be tiresome to be asked what she wants to achieve next. “I’ve got no job at the moment, which is actually quite nice,” she smiles. “So I think I’m going to enjoy the quietness.” She should enjoy it while she can. Her world might be quiet, but her professional life is destined to be anything but. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Code of Silence is coming to ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday 18th May 2025. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
The teenage Bafta winner is almost done with school (just don’t tell his mum)
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in February 2025. Add Am I Being Unreasonable? to your watchlist What’s the view from your sofa? I tend to watch telly in my bedroom, because I love my bed. I have a TV right in front of me, and I’ve actually got my Bafta up on the top shelf – just as a little reminder! [In 2023, he won best male comedy performance for Am I Being Unreasonable?] Bed, telly and a cup of tea. What have you enjoyed on TV recently? The Traitors. I was very sad when Linda left. She was incredible. View oEmbed on the source website Who controls the remote at home? My mum. If something I’m watching is boring her, she’ll make it clear. Tell us about season two of Am I Being Unreasonable? What can we expect from your character, Ollie? He’s a bit more serious. You see a more grown-up side to him. He notices when things are off, some of which his mum can’t see, and he gets a bit annoyed. He loves her but he gets frustrated. We all get frustrated with our mums, don’t we? Oh, yeah. I get frustrated with my mum, to be honest. Any other similarities between you and Ollie apart from that? Apart from the cat killing? He’s like a blunter, more psychopathic version of me. In the last series, when he got his birthday present, he made it very clear that he didn’t like it. I might not like a birthday present, but I wouldn’t let people know. What’s it like working with Daisy May Cooper, your co-star and series creator? She’s incredible – so funny. There’s quite a bit of improvisation on set, which makes the dialogue more realistic and funnier. She’s the queen of improvisation so it’s daunting, but she never makes me feel uneasy and always helps me out. She’s crazy as well! But in the best way. You’re 15 now and have been acting since age seven. That’s some CV… Technically over half of my life! There are still bits that don’t feel real. At the Baftas, I remember thinking, “Last year, I was sitting on my sofa watching this.” What’s been your favourite “pinch me” moment over the past few years? Probably the Bafta win. I still can’t believe it. But it’s not even just the win – the ceremony itself was surreal. I met Cillian Murphy, who is amazing. I’m putting Cillian’s kids to shame now, but he said they’d have been very nervous having to do a speech [like mine] in front of so many people. To be honest, I was bricking it as well. You’ve also appeared a lot on TV as yourself — Taskmaster, Would I Lie to You?, Children in Need… Have you ever considered a career as a comedian or presenter? It’s a tricky one. I do really enjoy comedy, but I don’t know if it’s something that I’d do for ever. It’s good to explore different things. As an actor, there are more pathways. What do your friends make of it all? They don’t really ask a lot of questions about it, which is good. I was so excited when I did Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway because my friends watch it. But when I told them while we were on PlayStation, they just went, “Oh wow! Anyway, what game do you want to play?” They’ve kept me humble… Is it hard to focus on your homework when you have all these amazing experiences? It’s weird being on set one day and in a maths classroom the next. But that’s become more normal to me now. I’m nearly done with school – I’m in my final year. I’ve got a few months left, and then I’m done. I’m going to do my GCSEs, but I’m quite keen to leave. Well, you already have an amazing career. Why, frankly, would you carry on doing maths? Thank you. I’ll need to tell my mum that!
Lenny Rush on Am I Being Unreasonable? return: 'Ollie is like a more psychopathic version of me'
Rush is back for the second season of Daisy May Cooper and Selin Hizli's comedy-thriller.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. What's the view from your sofa? I tend to watch telly in my bedroom, because I love my bed. I have a TV right in front of me, and I’ve actually got my BAFTA up on the top shelf – just as a little reminder! [In 2023, he won best male comedy performance for Am I Being Unreasonable?] Bed, telly and a cup of tea. What have you enjoyed on TV recently? The Traitors. I was very sad when Linda left. She was incredible. Who controls the remote at home? My mum. If something I’m watching is boring her, she’ll make it clear. Tell us about season 2 of Am I Being Unreasonable?. What can we expect from your character, Ollie? He’s a bit more serious. You see a more grown-up side to him. He notices when things are off, some of which his mum can’t see, and he gets a bit annoyed. He loves her but he gets frustrated. We all get frustrated with our mums, don't we? Oh, yeah. I get frustrated with my mum, to be honest. Any other similarities between you and Ollie apart from that? Apart from the cat killing? He’s like a blunter, more psychopathic version of me. In the last series, when he got his birthday present, he made it very clear that he didn’t like it. I might not like a birthday present, but I wouldn’t let people know. What's it like working with Daisy May Cooper, your co-star and series creator? She’s incredible – so funny. There’s quite a bit of improvisation on set, which makes the dialogue more realistic and funnier. She’s the queen of improvisation so it’s daunting, but she never makes me feel uneasy and always helps me out. She’s crazy as well! But in the best way. You're 15 now and have been acting since age seven. That's some CV… Technically over half of my life! There are still bits that don’t feel real. At the BAFTAs, I remember thinking, "Last year, I was sitting on my sofa watching this." What's been your favourite "pinch me" moment over the past few years? Probably the BAFTA win. I still can’t believe it. But it’s not even just the win – the ceremony itself was surreal. I met Cillian Murphy, who is amazing. I’m putting Cillian’s kids to shame now, but he said they’d have been very nervous having to do a speech [like mine] in front of so many people. To be honest, I was bricking it as well. You've also appeared a lot on TV as yourself — Taskmaster, Would I Lie to You?, Children in Need… Have you ever considered a career as a comedian or presenter? It’s a tricky one. I do really enjoy comedy, but I don’t know if it’s something that I’d do for ever. It’s good to explore different things. As an actor, there are more pathways. What do your friends make of it all? They don’t really ask a lot of questions about it, which is good. I was so excited when I did Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway because my friends watch it. But when I told them while we were on PlayStation, they just went, “Oh wow! Anyway, what game do you want to play?” They’ve kept me humble… Is it hard to focus on your homework when you have all these amazing experiences? It’s weird being on set one day and in a maths classroom the next. But that’s become more normal to me now. I’m nearly done with school – I’m in my final year. I’ve got a few months left, and then I’m done. I’m going to do my GCSEs, but I’m quite keen to leave. Well, you already have an amazing career. Why, frankly, would you carry on doing maths? Thank you. I’ll need to tell my mum that! The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Am I Being Unreasonable? season 1 is available to watch on BBC iPlayer, with season 2 set to premiere at 9:30pm on Wednesday 5th February on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Jessica Brown Findlay says Playing Nice reflects the "hazy, wild, visceral reality" of parenthood
The star of ITV's new drama on returning to the screen after navigating motherhood and the NICU.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. In recent months, fans of Lady Sybil Crawley could be forgiven for wondering whether she’d swapped the high life for one below stairs, so yawning has been the absence of actor Jessica Brown Findlay from our screens. In fact, the Downton Abbey star has been busy with another role – her most demanding yet – as the mother of twin boys. Since welcoming them in November 2022, she’s been in what she describes as a "nappy bubble". "I’d spent the year at home with the boys, pottering around. After my first trimester, I wasn’t able to work; being pregnant with twins, I was high risk." When she was approached to play Lucy - a talented artist married to the entrepreneurial Miles (James McArdle) - in ITV's Playing Nice, it felt like fate. "I’d been out [of commission] for a while, so to read something this good, with this cast, blew my mind," she recalls. "I devoured the script. "It felt like such a gift of a role. As dark as it is, it also felt like the perfect step out of maternity leave. I’m a strong believer that your real life is the only way to learn how to be an actor. So, to be able to bring to the table the experience that I’d been living for so long felt serendipitous." As was how she came to the role in the first place. "Years ago, I’d done a short film with James [Norton]. We ended up chatting away for a couple of hours on a train back to London, then went our separate ways. I’d see him over the years, but only peripherally. Then this came to me as an offer." Like any new mother returning to work, she was nervous. "On my first day back, I thought, 'Whoa – is my brain going to be able to work at speed again? In one sense [as a new mum], your synapses have been popping off and you’ve been learning every second of every day – but in a different way. After that first day at work, to realise it was all still there – that there was more in my brain, and more in my heart – felt amazing. I was grateful for the opportunity, and also for my partner, who was saying, 'Go! Fly! We’ll be here. We’ll make it work.' That proclamation is pretty important." It sounds as though her husband, the actor Ziggy Heath, is the polar opposite of her screen husband, Miles, a bully of a man whose response to the hideous circumstances he and his wife find themselves in – bringing up the "wrong" son after their baby was accidentally swapped at birth – is to control his environment, particularly his wife. Brown Findlay deftly captures the coiled, careful nature of Lucy, a woman always seemingly flinching as though from an invisible blow. "Lucy is inherently kind but lives a life where she’s not necessarily given much agency. There’s a real expectation as to what she should be like, what she should wear, how she should act. But it all seems fine on the surface." As the only real-life parent of the quartet, Brown Findlay undoubtedly felt the harrowing storyline more viscerally. "It definitely hit me in a deeper way. This was my first real foray back into the work space after our twins were born. It sounds so weird, because of the subject matter, but I couldn’t have had more fun. Sometimes the darker a story is, the more you rally together. I was very well supported. My family and I all moved down to Cornwall together, so everyone was a ten-minute drive away from set. That was incredible, because I didn’t have to take on a role that could really mess with my head while being separated from my children. But I had to be very protective of myself, and make sure that I could always go back and kiss them." The drama offers a rare window into the tense world of the neonatal unit, an environment Brown Findlay has experienced first-hand herself. "We spent 12 days in the NICU after our boys were born," she says. "We were in hospital for over two weeks, from me going into labour to us leaving. When we filmed those scenes, our boys had just turned one. I kept thinking, 'I was in here this time last year.' "I still had my post-baby bump. Some of those feelings were still in my body, and felt so natural but so overwhelming." She’s full of praise for the sensitive way in which she was treated. "Our director, Kate Hewitt, was incredible. She’s a mum herself, and she’d come over in a kind and deeply respectful way, just checking in on me, but not in front of everyone or making it a big deal. It was quite surreal. But hopefully within that, I was able to honour what it feels like as a parent to sit in those spaces, and give some of the hazy, wild, visceral reality of being there." The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Playing Nice will air on ITV1 on Sunday 5th January at 9pm, with subsequent episodes airing on Monday and Sunday in the same timeslot. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
James Norton on Playing Nice: 'When I see injustice, I get really p****d off'
Norton's psychological thriller explores modern masculinity, parental dilemmas, and post-natal depression.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. From tall, ginger and handsome in Grantchester to tall, blond, murderous and handsome in Happy Valley, James Norton has finally ticked every box on the archetype by dyeing his locks dark brown. "The tabloids are convinced I’m massively vain about my hair," he says when I mention it. "Of course my hair changes… I’m an actor." The 39-year-old actor’s latest role is his most challenging yet – if not in terms of range, then certainly in terms of responsibility. He’s starting 2025 with a bang by starring in Playing Nice, a psychological thriller based on the 2020 novel by JP Delaney. The fact it’s the first TV drama from Rabbit Track Pictures, the production company he co-founded with Kitty Kaletsky in 2019, makes it a project more personal and onerous than most. "It was the first book we optioned," says Norton. "We saw the potential for a TV show, and knew it was the kind of thing we wanted to make – great characters, an incredible hook, a real thriller." Insofar as Rabbit Track has a creative mandate, "good storytelling" is it. "When you develop something, you have to be with it for years. So, if you don’t love it initially, you’re dooming yourself. At the beginning, we’d only gravitate towards what we loved. Now, we’ve got 12 projects in development, and there’s a sense of a through line. It’s quality drama, the characters have to be nuanced and identifiable. We don’t like heroes and villains, or broad brushstrokes. Putting these rich characters into mad circumstances and stretching them, threatening them and thwarting them is what we love." That’s a spot-on description of Playing Nice, whose big questions are tailor-made for the watercooler (or group chat, if you work from home). How would you feel if your baby was accidentally swapped at birth, and you only found out three years later? Would you want your biological child back, or would you be too bonded to the child you thought was yours? That is the dilemma facing journalist Pete (Norton) and his restaurateur wife Maddie (Niamh Algar), whose lives become intertwined with those of entrepreneur Miles (James McArdle) and his artist wife Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay), as they navigate a psychological minefield that is every parent’s nightmare. Filming took place in Cornwall over three months, with the four cast members quickly bonding. "We became a really insular unit, with weekends spent surfing. It really was fun – sometimes too much fun.”" One of the perks of having your own production company is choosing your own cast. For Norton, that meant finally getting to work with James McArdle, a former Rada classmate. "That was the best phone call," he smiles, recalling the moment when he asked McArdle if he’d be interested. "James is special. He’s so good." He only knew the others loosely, but says, "Jessie and Niamh were top of the list of people I admired, so to be able to bring everyone together was the best feeling. They’re all great actors who were firing on all cylinders. They came and they cared. A trust was formed early on that meant the scenes just fizzed. We had a great director in Kate Hewitt and a great script by Grace Ofori-Attah. When that alchemy hits, it’s the best job in the world." Norton is equally full of praise for the child actors who played Theo and David, as well as the casting director, Fiona Weir. "One of the best in the business." You don’t have to be Inspector Clouseau to identify a theme running through Norton’s most recent work, Playing Nice having been preceded by Joy, the true story of the world’s first IVF baby, in which he plays scientist Robert Edwards. He’ll also be adapting Magpie, Elizabeth Day’s novel about fertility, for TV. "Kitty has coined my casting bracket right now as Sad Dad. It’s quite true, although Magpie isn’t something I’ll necessarily be in. The majority of the projects we’re developing are not for me to be in. But, yeah, children – I’m in that pocket of life where even though I don’t have kids of my own, kids are everywhere. And if you’re looking for big drama, kids are the highest of all stakes." View oEmbed on the source website One of the drama’s themes is post-natal depression, a subject Norton was determined to treat with care. "It’s important to tell those stories more, because they haven’t had the air time or compassion that they require. Women’s health hasn’t, generally. The number of people who have come forward after watching Joy and said it’s great to see a movie talk about endometriosis – it’s so prevalent, yet hugely underrepresented. Visibility is important. "It’s a really horrible truth that male health is way more developed than women’s. It felt like a good opportunity to tell a story about someone who has gone through post-natal depression, and address some of the taboos around it." Norton was set to play Miles, the villain of the piece, but was more drawn to Pete. "You might think Pete’s less of a challenge, but when you play somebody who’s close to you [in character], it’s a different type of challenge. There’s more introspection. I spent a lot of time thinking about him. Pete is a good guy who sees the best in people. He’s optimistic. What interested me was the question of what it is to be a modern man, post-Me Too, with the attempt to rebalance the patriarchal crimes of the past. With a lot of men there’s a misconception that what we should be doing is making space, stepping back and almost becoming passive." So what should men be doing instead? "Pete’s a good man, but he’s an avoidant. He makes a very admirable choice, to give up his career to look after Theo and become the primary caregiver – which friends of mine have done, and I’m full of respect for. It’s a big choice. It still comes with some people’s taboos attached to it. "Pete makes that choice, then makes the mistake of thinking that a modern man should just make space for their wife. He eventually realises that a man also has to step up. You have to be proactive and, sometimes, confrontational. When there are men like Miles out there, you can’t play nice all the time. You have to be a bit of a prick, and play nasty. A modern man is a mixture, and so to have those conversations around modern masculinity was interesting." For Norton, this is what makes a good psychological thriller: the ability to prompt heated debates. "If you have a group of people on different sides of an argument around a character, you know you’re doing something right, because you’re getting to that nuanced space where you’re at the nub of what it is to be human." What would he do in Pete’s shoes? "I would not be a Pete! I’m a relatively calm individual, but when I see injustice, I get really f***ing p****d off. And the older I get, the less I can cope with it. I will say stuff, and I will confront. I grew up in a family of people who confronted. We’re not passive-aggressive. I’m not confrontational by nature, but I’m not averse to saying what I think – probably sometimes to a fault." After a big family Christmas in Oxfordshire ("country walks, big meals, classic, traditional"), Norton is ending the year spending a week in a Buddhist retreat in France. "It’s confronting in a good way," he smiles. "It’s semi-silent, but your phone is off for the whole week, which is great. And New Year is very special – 500 retreatants in a big community, with lots of meditation and walking. It’s very moving. I’d recommend it for the setting up of the year." It certainly beats waking up with a hangover. With a busy 2025 ahead – he has roles in Heart of Darkness, King and Conqueror and House of Guinness, not to mention his production work – Norton will need that clear head. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Playing Nice will air on ITV1 on Sunday 5th January at 9pm, with subsequent episodes airing on Monday and Sunday in the same timeslot. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
He was the ultimate villain in Happy Valley and now James Norton is back in a dark drama facing a parent’s worst nightmare. But this time he was torn on whether to stay nasty or start Playing Nice
Add Playing Nice to your watchlist From tall, ginger and handsome in Grantchester to tall, blond, murderous and handsome in Happy Valley, James Norton has finally ticked every box on the archetype by dyeing his locks dark brown. “The tabloids are convinced I’m massively vain about my hair,” he says when I mention it. “Of course my hair changes… I’m an actor.” The 39-year-old actor’s latest role is his most challenging yet – if not in terms of range, then certainly in terms of responsibility. He’s starting 2025 with a bang by starring in Playing Nice, a psychological thriller based on the 2020 novel by JP Delaney. The fact it’s the first TV drama from Rabbit Track Pictures, the production company he co-founded with Kitty Kaletsky in 2019, makes it a project more personal and onerous than most. “It was the first book we optioned,” says Norton. “We saw the potential for a TV show, and knew it was the kind of thing we wanted to make – great characters, an incredible hook, a real thriller.” View oEmbed on the source website Insofar as Rabbit Track has a creative mandate, “good storytelling” is it. “When you develop something, you have to be with it for years. So, if you don’t love it initially, you’re dooming yourself. At the beginning, we’d only gravitate towards what we loved. Now, we’ve got 12 projects in development, and there’s a sense of a through line. It’s quality drama, the characters have to be nuanced and identifiable. We don’t like heroes and villains, or broad brushstrokes. Putting these rich characters into mad circumstances and stretching them, threatening them and thwarting them is what we love.” That’s a spot-on description of Playing Nice, whose big questions are tailor-made for the watercooler (or group chat, if you work from home). How would you feel if your baby was accidentally swapped at birth, and you only found out three years later? Would you want your biological child back, or would you be too bonded to the child you thought was yours? That is the dilemma facing journalist Pete (Norton) and his restaurateur wife Maddie (Niamh Algar), whose lives become intertwined with those of entrepreneur Miles (James McArdle) and his artist wife Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay), as they navigate a psychological minefield that is every parent’s nightmare. Filming took place in Cornwall over three months, with the four cast members quickly bonding. “We became a really insular unit, with weekends spent surfing. It really was fun – sometimes too much fun.” One of the perks of having your own production company is choosing your own cast. For Norton, that meant finally getting to work with James McArdle, a former Rada classmate. “That was the best phone call,” he smiles, recalling the moment when he asked McArdle if he’d be interested. “James is special. He’s so good.” He only knew the others loosely, but says, “Jessie and Niamh were top of the list of people I admired, so to be able to bring everyone together was the best feeling. They’re all great actors who were firing on all cylinders. They came and they cared. A trust was formed early on that meant the scenes just fizzed. We had a great director in Kate Hewitt and a great script by Grace Ofori-Attah. When that alchemy hits, it’s the best job in the world.” Norton is equally full of praise for the child actors who played Theo and David, as well as the casting director, Fiona Weir. “One of the best in the business.” You don’t have to be Inspector Clouseau to identify a theme running through Norton’s most recent work, Playing Nice having been preceded by Joy, the true story of the world’s first IVF baby, in which he plays scientist Robert Edwards. He’ll also be adapting Magpie, Elizabeth Day’s novel about fertility, for TV. “Kitty has coined my casting bracket right now as Sad Dad. It’s quite true, although Magpie isn’t something I’ll necessarily be in. The majority of the projects we’re developing are not for me to be in. But, yeah, children – I’m in that pocket of life where even though I don’t have kids of my own, kids are everywhere. And if you’re looking for big drama, kids are the highest of all stakes.” One of the drama’s themes is post-natal depression, a subject Norton was determined to treat with care. “It’s important to tell those stories more, because they haven’t had the air time or compassion that they require. Women’s health hasn’t, generally. The number of people who have come forward after watching Joy and said it’s great to see a movie talk about endometriosis – it’s so prevalent, yet hugely underrepresented. Visibility is important. “It’s a really horrible truth that male health is way more developed than women’s. It felt like a good opportunity to tell a story about someone who has gone through post-natal depression, and address some of the taboos around it.” Norton was set to play Miles, the villain of the piece, but was more drawn to Pete. “You might think Pete’s less of a challenge, but when you play somebody who’s close to you [in character], it’s a different type of challenge. There’s more introspection. I spent a lot of time thinking about him. Pete is a good guy who sees the best in people. He’s optimistic. What interested me was the question of what it is to be a modern man, post-Me Too, with the attempt to rebalance the patriarchal crimes of the past. With a lot of men there’s a misconception that what we should be doing is making space, stepping back and almost becoming passive.” So what should men be doing instead? “Pete’s a good man, but he’s an avoidant. He makes a very admirable choice, to give up his career to look after Theo and become the primary caregiver – which friends of mine have done, and I’m full of respect for. It’s a big choice. It still comes with some people’s taboos attached to it. “Pete makes that choice, then makes the mistake of thinking that a modern man should just make space for their wife. He eventually realises that a man also has to step up. You have to be proactive and, sometimes, confrontational. When there are men like Miles out there, you can’t play nice all the time. You have to be a bit of a prick, and play nasty. A modern man is a mixture, and so to have those conversations around modern masculinity was interesting.” For Norton, this is what makes a good psychological thriller: the ability to prompt heated debates. “If you have a group of people on different sides of an argument around a character, you know you’re doing something right, because you’re getting to that nuanced space where you’re at the nub of what it is to be human.” What would he do in Pete’s shoes? “I would not be a Pete! I’m a relatively calm individual, but when I see injustice, I get really f***ing p****d off. And the older I get, the less I can cope with it. I will say stuff, and I will confront. I grew up in a family of people who confronted. We’re not passive-aggressive. I’m not confrontational by nature, but I’m not averse to saying what I think – probably sometimes to a fault.” After a big family Christmas in Oxfordshire (“country walks, big meals, classic, traditional”), Norton is ending the year spending a week in a Buddhist retreat in France. “It’s confronting in a good way,” he smiles. “It’s semi-silent, but your phone is off for the whole week, which is great. And New Year is very special – 500 retreatants in a big community, with lots of meditation and walking. It’s very moving. I’d recommend it for the setting up of the year.” It certainly beats waking up with a hangover. With a busy 2025 ahead – he has roles in Heart of Darkness, King and Conqueror and House of Guinness, not to mention his production work – Norton will need that clear head.
Playing Nice was a different sort of challenge for new mother Jessica Brown Findlay
Add Playing Nice to your watchlist In recent months, fans of Lady Sybil Crawley could be forgiven for wondering whether she’d swapped the high life for one below stairs, so yawning has been the absence of actor Jessica Brown Findlay from our screens. In fact, the Downton Abbey star has been busy with another role – her most demanding yet – as the mother of twin boys. Since welcoming them in November 2022, she’s been in what she describes as a “nappy bubble”. “I’d spent the year at home with the boys, pottering around. After my first trimester, I wasn’t able to work; being pregnant with twins, I was high risk.” When she was approached by Rabbit Track to play Lucy, a talented artist married to the entrepreneurial Miles [James McArdle], it felt like fate. “I’d been out [of commission] for a while, so to read something this good, with this cast, blew my mind,” she recalls. “I devoured the script. It felt like such a gift of a role. As dark as it is, it also felt like the perfect step out of maternity leave. I’m a strong believer that your real life is the only way to learn how to be an actor. So, to be able to bring to the table the experience that I’d been living for so long felt serendipitous.” As was how she came to the role in the first place. “Years ago, I’d done a short film with James [Norton]. We ended up chatting away for a couple of hours on a train back to London, then went our separate ways. I’d see him over the years, but only peripherally. Then this came to me as an offer.” Like any new mother returning to work, she was nervous. “On my first day back, I thought, ‘Whoa – is my brain going to be able to work at speed again? In one sense [as a new mum], your synapses have been popping off and you’ve been learning every second of every day – but in a different way. After that first day at work, to realise it was all still there – that there was more in my brain, and more in my heart – felt amazing. I was grateful for the opportunity, and also for my partner, who was saying, ‘Go! Fly! We’ll be here. We’ll make it work.’ That proclamation is pretty important.” It sounds as though her husband, the actor Ziggy Heath, is the polar opposite of her screen husband, Miles, a bully of a man whose response to the hideous circumstances he and his wife find themselves in – bringing up the “wrong” son after their baby was accidentally swapped at birth – is to control his environment, particularly his wife. Brown Findlay deftly captures the coiled, careful nature of Lucy, a woman always seemingly flinching as though from an invisible blow. “Lucy is inherently kind but lives a life where she’s not necessarily given much agency. There’s a real expectation as to what she should be like, what she should wear, how she should act. But it all seems fine on the surface.” As the only real-life parent of the quartet, Brown Findlay undoubtedly felt the harrowing storyline more viscerally. “It definitely hit me in a deeper way. This was my first real foray back into the work space after our twins were born. It sounds so weird, because of the subject matter, but I couldn’t have had more fun. Sometimes the darker a story is, the more you rally together. I was very well supported. My family and I all moved down to Cornwall together, so everyone was a ten-minute drive away from set. That was incredible, because I didn’t have to take on a role that could really mess with my head while being separated from my children. But I had to be very protective of myself, and make sure that I could always go back and kiss them.” The drama offers a rare window into the tense world of the neonatal unit, an environment Brown Findlay has experienced first-hand herself. “We spent 12 days in the NICU after our boys were born,” she says. “We were in hospital for over two weeks, from me going into labour to us leaving. When we filmed those scenes, our boys had just turned one. I kept thinking, ‘I was in here this time last year.’ I still had my post-baby bump. Some of those feelings were still in my body, and felt so natural but so overwhelming.” She’s full of praise for the sensitive way in which she was treated. “Our director, Kate Hewitt, was incredible. She’s a mum herself, and she’d come over in a kind and deeply respectful way, just checking in on me, but not in front of everyone or making it a big deal. It was quite surreal. But hopefully within that, I was able to honour what it feels like as a parent to sit in those spaces, and give some of the hazy, wild, visceral reality of being there.”
Playing Nice shines a light on women's mental health
Add Playing Nice to your watchlist How did you come to be cast as Maddie? I was asked! It was an offer, and it came from James Norton and Kitty Kaletsky from [their production company] Rabbit Track. I knew it was their first TV venture, and I jumped at the chance to work with James. He has great taste in projects, I really admire his work and he’s such a lovely guy. What was it like filming in Cornwall? The main four cast members [Algar, Norton, James McArdle and Jessica Brown Findlay], we pretty much moved our lives down there for the autumn and winter, and bonded immediately. There’s a big surfing community, and they really embrace the outdoors. I grew up in the countryside [in Mullingar, Ireland], so for me, it was like a home from home. Maddie has a career, while Pete’s has taken a back seat. Was it important to represent the stay-at-home dad? Definitely. It’s role reversal, in the fact that you’ve got a loving, stay-at-home father, who is supported by this woman who runs her own business, but is equally as loving and caring towards their child. For them, it’s normal. Why would it even be a conversation? Fathers who raise their kids while their wife works should be represented [on TV] as well. Post-natal depression (PND) is another of the themes running through Playing Nice. What research did you do around the subject? Grace Offori-Attah, who wrote the series, was previously a doctor, and also has a degree in psychiatry, so I could lean on her as a reference. I also spoke to people who had suffered from PND. When you really delve in, you realise how common it is, yet it’s not represented a whole lot on screen. It shouldn’t be so uncharted. Women should feel there’s a platform for stories like that, and a space to be able to have those conversations. Did you enjoy working with the little boys who play your sons, Theo and David? They put in amazing performances. [Laughing] Honestly, it was great to finally work with professionals. I was like, “McArdle and Norton — take notes!” It’s always brilliant when you’ve got kids on set. Everyone just melts. So you managed to have fun, despite the traumatic storyline? We did. When the subject matter is heavy, your emotions are so high that all it takes is for someone to make a funny noise and everyone starts laughing. It’s like a valve on a kettle. You can’t sit in the pain all the time — you need to allow it to be released. Jessie, James and James are all such giving actors. When you’re surrounded by people that you really care about and trust, it’s easy to delve into those deep, dark places, then be taken out of them straightaway. We found ourselves hysterically giggling up until the point of action.
A strong bond lightened the mood for the show's stars
Add Playing Nice to your watchlist Can I start by saying how much I hate Miles? Congratulations on creating such an unlikeable character! Great — job well done! Miles is extremely controlling, isn’t he? Definitely. The coercive control element was something we wanted to handle delicately. Jess [Brown Findlay, who plays Lucy, his wife] and I spoke about that a lot. We played siblings in [2022 drama] Life after Life, so already knew each other, which really helped. There are some dark moments between us, so it was important to me that she was safe and happy. We trusted each other. But as we say in Glasgow, he has “all the gear and nae idea”. Everything is a tactic to undermine and emasculate, all done with a political smile on the face. How did you come to be cast? James Norton and I were in the same year at drama school, so we’ve known each other for ages, and had always wanted to find something to work on together. When he sent me the script, it was a no brainer. Was there any discussion around you keeping your accent? Kate [Hewitt, director] was keen I did. Usually if I’m getting to be Scottish, I’m speaking Shakespearean words, so it felt unusual to play a Scottish character with contemporary language. Without that extra layer, I could think about the psychology of the character straightaway. Kate wanted to back-foot people, which was quite a genius stroke, as the Scots accent is known to be warm, self-effacing and instil trust. Were there any light moments in filming such a heavy show? Sometimes the heaviest hits are the times you have the most laughs. Being trapped in Cornwall for four months together, socially, it was actually one of the happiest jobs of my life. People at work started to call us Abba, because of how we look, so when the locals invited us to a Halloween party, we went as Abba… Some of us may have turned up to work the next day still dressed as Abba.
As series two of Bad Sisters signals more trouble for the Garveys, stars Anne-Marie Duff, Eve Hewson, Eva Birthistle and Sarah Greene reveal how burying their characters' secret has forged an unbreakable bond between them
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'JP still controls her from beyond the grave'
Add Bad Sisters to your watchlist It’s no spoiler to say that Grace starts this series with a smile on her face… We find her in a really lovely space. She’s loved up, she’s free of JP and she’s moved forward in her life. But there’s a time bomb ticking away – her guilty secret. In that way, JP still controls her from beyond the grave. How has Grace changed since we last saw her? For the outside world, she played the role of grieving widow. She’s reconnected with the church and formed a close friendship with a character who’s played by the incredible Fiona Shaw, and she becomes her support. So she’s swapped one controlling relationship for another? Totally. Sadly, until we sit in a therapist’s chair, we tend to be repeat offenders, don’t we? We put the washing machine on the same cycle until we learn to confront certain aspects of ourselves. Coercive control is such an important issue. Did you feel a responsibility portraying it on screen? Absolutely. Both Claes [Bang, who played JP] and I were committed to telling this story properly. We had to, because if we didn’t make it as true as possible, the audience would not have been willing the sisters to kill him. You had to make it that they felt desperately sorry for Grace. Also, you don’t know who’s watching. There will undoubtedly have been more than one person who has found themselves in a similar situation, and just to hear their story being told will be really powerful for them. So you have to serve it well. Did you research or talk to anyone who’d been in that situation? I did. I’ve worked on projects over the years where I’ve involved myself with Women’s Aid and I’ve been to refuges and spoken to women who are in violently abusive relationships and controlling coercive relationships. So, I’d had conversations with people who had experienced it first-hand. Do you share any traits with Grace? We’re quite different, actually. But I suppose trying to see the good in people. I’ve got that sort of idealism that she has, but without the denial that she has along with it. How is it working with your on-screen sisters? They’re such funny, extraordinary women, all of them. It’s really good fun to be in their company. I love being part of a sister family. I don’t have any sisters – I have one older brother – so that was gorgeous, to actually be inside of that dynamic. Who would you say is the strongest Garvey sister? I don’t think you could. They all have their own strengths, and that’s the thing about all of us as human beings. Everybody is everything. And that’s what’s clever about Sharon’s writing. She doesn’t write Spice Girl sisters. She doesn’t go, “This one’s this Spice, this one’s that Spice.” Every single character is beautifully swollen with many things. And that is what makes it so enjoyable for the audience, because that’s what the audience wants to see. They want to see complicated characters.
From murder to the menopause, Sharon Horgan covers it all as her Bafta-winning Bad Sisters return to face the aftermath…
This article was first published in Radio Times magazine in November 2024. Add Bad Sisters to your watchlist As its fans would vouch, the five sisters in Bad Sisters aren’t actually “bad” at all: they are good sisters driven to do a bad thing. If series one explored the circumstances that led up to the bad thing, series two explores the aftermath. If only guilt, doubt, fear and recrimination could be disposed of as tidily as a dead body. “You’re absolutely spot on,” says Sharon Horgan, the show’s producer, writer and co-star, who, to the delight of Bad Sisters’ fans, is reprising her role as eldest sister Eva Garvey in series two of the Apple TV+ drama. “That was one thing I thought about a lot when we were considering the second series. Having researched women who’ve killed their partners and ended up in prison being punished, it doesn’t mean that they stop loving that person. As well as capturing the idea of their conscience and their guilt, there’s the question of who looks after these women, who are victims themselves. How do you move on from that?” This is the thorny question facing the Garvey sisters – Eva, Ursula, Bibi and Becka – as they rapidly realise that Grace’s problems haven’t disappeared with the same finality as her murdered husband, John Paul, aka “The P***k”, or JP. “Grace has this family that’s there to support her, but in the two years that have passed [since John Paul’s death], they’ve been damaged by it, too. While they are there for each other, they’re all acting out in different ways.” View oEmbed on the source website Although, they weren’t supposed to be acting out at all. Bad Sisters was originally conceived as a one-off (based on Belgian drama, Clan), but Horgan says her mind was changed after being “blown away” by the viewers’ response. “You hope that people will connect with the characters, but you never know. We had a sense that it could have legs for more, plus I kept having ideas for what could happen, post the offing of The P***k. Maybe we could find a bigger enemy. We did a writers’ room to figure out if there was anything there, and the idea for a second series became stronger. Plus, we really enjoyed making it. We really like being a big gang of sisters.” Thankfully, it wasn’t hard to get the cast back together again, despite Eve Hewson (Bono’s daughter, who plays Becka) since starring with Nicole Kidman in The Perfect Couple and the other sisters – Anne-Marie Duff (Grace), Sarah Greene (Bibi) and Eva Birthistle (Ursula) – all having filming schedules to juggle. “They’re all busy, but they wanted to do it, which was great,” Horgan smiles. “They all enjoyed it the first time around, so they were happy to come back.” After bonding so deeply during the making of series one, she says they’re now like sisters in real life. “There’s a real sense of being supportive of each others’ endeavours. We miss each other [now that filming has ended], and we’re getting giddy for doing the press, so we all get to be together again. It’s a lovely feeling. It was an unexpected bonus that came from making this series, getting to be friends with all those girls.” The second eldest of five children (her parents moved from London to Ireland when she was four, jacking in running a pub and taking up turkey farming), Horgan is open that her family informs her writing, albeit indirectly. “I’d already used my brothers for inspiration in Catastrophe, although they’ll kill me for saying that. With Bad Sisters it was more about capturing the feeling of family and the giddiness of when you’re all together. You get to stop being parents and regress to how you were when you were younger. “I tried to tap into my own family for that. Because I play Eva, who’s the eldest, I also tapped into my relationship with my older sister. We were just talking about it on [our family] WhatsApp, actually – the familial anxiety we all have, and how we manage to buoy each other but also panic each other at the same time.” Grace’s abusive relationship was at the heart of series one; a finely wrought study of the invisible devastation wreaked by a husband’s coercive control. “Part of the reason why the responsibility of doing another series was such a big one was due to the amount of people who got in touch with me saying that they’ve been through that experience themselves, and it was such a huge thing to see it on screen,” reveals Horgan. “We’ve seen domestic violence dramatised, but the coercive control aspect – the isolation, the financial control – those things are less explored. Having had women contact me whose sisters, mothers, daughters and friends have been through that, it was such a relief to feel like we got it right, and to know that seeing that story out there made them feel less like they were f***ing crazy.” Coercive control was only made a crime in 2015, and is still notoriously hard to prove, since the gaslighting and verbal abuse leave no physical marks. “It’s so hard to help someone when they don’t want to be helped,” says Horgan. “And it’s not that they don’t want to be helped – it’s just that they’ve been diminished and gaslit to such an extent that they don’t think there is a problem. “In the first series, we had to be so careful that you were behind these sisters and this choice that they make, which is not moral in any way, but you’ve got to see the reason why they’re doing it – love. They’re losing their sister, but they also see that it’s going to impact on her daughter Blanaid, and the effect that it’s going to have. I’m not condoning how they decided to approach it, but I am trying to show the reality of that situation, and the truth of it.” Horgan is one of few writers skilful enough to weave humour into such a tragic storyline. “It’s a tricky thing to do,” she acknowledges. “But I think you reach people in a different way when you can make them laugh – more so than if it’s a hard-hitting drama, because sometimes that can be painful to watch.” There’s certainly much to find funny about Eva, who’s now a fitness and wellness freak –complete with her own menopause coach. “She’s just trying to throw a bit of money at her problem,” smiles Horgan. “Eva doesn’t have a family, and she’s in this situation where she thinks she’s got to fix herself. I love each of these sisters in a way that’s almost not healthy. Obviously the thriller aspect of the story is so important, but I also wanted to show life – Ursula’s separation, the cuckoo parenting – and that none of it’s not complicated, or tricky, but they’re all just getting along with it. I hope there’s enough time spent with the sisters that you understand who they are and who they’ve become.” Horgan is currently cuckoo parenting herself (she separated from her partner in 2019; they share two teenaged daughters). If Pulling was about her 20s, Catastrophe was about meeting someone and settling down and Motherland was about parenting, Bad Sisters is another show whose plot reflects her life, grim murder notwithstanding. Does she ever feel too exposed by what she’s written? “Oh God, all the time!” she hoots. “Even when it seems less obvious, like this, which is a thriller, or even when I’ve done shows that I’m not in at all, I feel exposed, because you’re writing from your own experience, and people know that. I suppose I’ve not been shy about saying that. You get a bit nervous before it goes out, thinking, ‘Oh, I hope people don’t think I’m a psycho’ – or worse. I hope they relate to it. Because if they don’t relate to it, there’s something wrong with me.” Aah, so does that mean she does actually have a menopause coach? “Ha! Well, not strictly a menopause coach, but someone who figured it out with me, who I talked to and worked out what it was I needed and what was missing. I still am going through the menopause and trying to find a way around it. There were so many things wrong with me that are now not too bad. It’s wild that [menopause] is not more widely talked about. There’s a lot of change now, which is amazing, but it’s extraordinary how much we go through that’s not even questioned, because there’s so little research and time that’s gone into it. I think we all help each other by talking about it.” And laughing about it – which is arguably the best medicine of all.
Add Bad Sisters to your watchlist As one of four siblings, do you relate to the relationships the Garvey sisters have? Totally. Me and my sister are two years apart, so we’re very close. We steal each other’s clothes and fight all the time, but we love each other, and we would literally kill for each other – I would happily do that. But my brothers are eight and ten years younger than us. So we’re not a squash. My sister and I were more about changing their nappies and kind of being mini babysitters for them. It was a different kind of dynamic. I read that you formed a band with your siblings over lockdown. How did that work out? I didn’t form a band, but I found the rest of my siblings writing songs as if they’d formed a band, and I’d not been invited. Then I tried to get in on the action, but they were like, “You have to leave”. Why? Are you tone deaf? No! I had too many great ideas, and they were jealous of how good I was! Are you now close to your on-screen sisters? Very! Almost too close. We are in communication with each other at all hours. We have many different forms of WhatsApp group. We literally talk on three different WhatsApp groups a day. We were just reunited last week in London [for the publicity tour], which was lovely. We also have three days coming up in New York. Lots of dinners and spa trips have been planned. So, where do we find Becka at the start of the new series? She’s matured in the last two years. She’s seen more of life, and she’s in a healthy place. She’s got this new boyfriend, she’s more of a grown-up – or she’s at least attempting to be. What are her best and worst traits? Her best are hard to choose, because I quite like a lot of her. I like that she’s like a million different emotions in one second. Her most annoying trait? Chewing loudly. All the Garvey sisters are brilliantly complex. What do you think is so special about Sharon’s writing? I guess how honest it feels. It feels as though these are real people, living real lives. The marriage of drama and comedy is so difficult to get right, and Sharon has such a specific tone. I think that’s why people love the show: you feel as though you’re watching real people. Oftentimes when a friend is going through some sort of challenge in their life, it feels very Bad Sisters-y. Like, “Whoa, this could literally be a scene from Bad Sisters.” Sharon can capture a woman in distress and make her a heroine, and also have this charm to her and be comedic, all wrapped up in one. That’s what I see when I look at my own friends going through their lives. Sharon can capture reality for women. Did you appreciate filming back in Ireland? It was great. I love filming in Ireland because I get to be at home. But it’s always really cold and rainy – we had four hurricanes. That’s the main challenge about shooting in Ireland – the weather is atrocious.
Sharon Horgan explains why Bad Sisters is returning after being designed as a one-off
"We really like being a big gang of sisters."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. As its fans would vouch, the five sisters in Bad Sisters aren’t actually "bad" at all: they are good sisters driven to do a bad thing. If season 1 explored the circumstances that led up to the bad thing, series two explores the aftermath. If only guilt, doubt, fear and recrimination could be disposed of as tidily as a dead body. "You’re absolutely spot on," says Sharon Horgan, the show’s producer, writer and co-star, who, to the delight of Bad Sisters’ fans, is reprising her role as eldest sister Eva Garvey in series two of the Apple TV+ drama. "That was one thing I thought about a lot when we were considering the second series. Having researched women who’ve killed their partners and ended up in prison being punished, it doesn’t mean that they stop loving that person. As well as capturing the idea of their conscience and their guilt, there’s the question of who looks after these women, who are victims themselves. How do you move on from that?" This is the thorny question facing the Garvey sisters – Eva, Ursula, Bibi and Becka – as they rapidly realise that Grace’s problems haven’t disappeared with the same finality as her murdered husband, John Paul, aka "The P***k", or JP. "Grace has this family that’s there to support her, but in the two years that have passed [since John Paul’s death], they’ve been damaged by it, too. While they are there for each other, they’re all acting out in different ways." Although, they weren’t supposed to be acting out at all. Bad Sisters was originally conceived as a one-off (based on Belgian drama, Clan), but Horgan says her mind was changed after being "blown away" by the viewers’ response. "You hope that people will connect with the characters, but you never know. We had a sense that it could have legs for more, plus I kept having ideas for what could happen, post the offing of The P***k. Maybe we could find a bigger enemy. We did a writers’ room to figure out if there was anything there, and the idea for a second series became stronger. Plus, we really enjoyed making it. We really like being a big gang of sisters." Thankfully, it wasn’t hard to get the cast back together again, despite Eve Hewson (Bono’s daughter, who plays Becka) since starring with Nicole Kidman in The Perfect Couple and the other sisters – Anne-Marie Duff (Grace), Sarah Greene (Bibi) and Eva Birthistle (Ursula) – all having filming schedules to juggle. "They’re all busy, but they wanted to do it, which was great," Horgan smiles. "They all enjoyed it the first time around, so they were happy to come back." After bonding so deeply during the making of series one, she says they’re now like sisters in real life. "There’s a real sense of being supportive of each others’ endeavours. We miss each other [now that filming has ended], and we’re getting giddy for doing the press, so we all get to be together again. It’s a lovely feeling. It was an unexpected bonus that came from making this series, getting to be friends with all those girls." The second eldest of five children (her parents moved from London to Ireland when she was four, jacking in running a pub and taking up turkey farming), Horgan is open that her family informs her writing, albeit indirectly. "I’d already used my brothers for inspiration in Catastrophe, although they’ll kill me for saying that. With Bad Sisters it was more about capturing the feeling of family and the giddiness of when you’re all together. You get to stop being parents and regress to how you were when you were younger. "I tried to tap into my own family for that. Because I play Eva, who’s the eldest, I also tapped into my relationship with my older sister. We were just talking about it on [our family] WhatsApp, actually – the familial anxiety we all have, and how we manage to buoy each other but also panic each other at the same time." Grace’s abusive relationship was at the heart of season 1; a finely wrought study of the invisible devastation wreaked by a husband’s coercive control. "Part of the reason why the responsibility of doing another series was such a big one was due to the amount of people who got in touch with me saying that they’ve been through that experience themselves, and it was such a huge thing to see it on screen," reveals Horgan. "We’ve seen domestic violence dramatised, but the coercive control aspect – the isolation, the financial control – those things are less explored. Having had women contact me whose sisters, mothers, daughters and friends have been through that, it was such a relief to feel like we got it right, and to know that seeing that story out there made them feel less like they were f***ing crazy." Coercive control was only made a crime in 2015, and is still notoriously hard to prove, since the gaslighting and verbal abuse leave no physical marks. "It’s so hard to help someone when they don’t want to be helped," says Horgan. "And it’s not that they don’t want to be helped – it’s just that they’ve been diminished and gaslit to such an extent that they don’t think there is a problem. "In the first series, we had to be so careful that you were behind these sisters and this choice that they make, which is not moral in any way, but you’ve got to see the reason why they’re doing it – love. They’re losing their sister, but they also see that it’s going to impact on her daughter Blanaid, and the effect that it’s going to have. I’m not condoning how they decided to approach it, but I am trying to show the reality of that situation, and the truth of it." Horgan is one of few writers skilful enough to weave humour into such a tragic storyline. "It’s a tricky thing to do," she acknowledges. "But I think you reach people in a different way when you can make them laugh – more so than if it’s a hard-hitting drama, because sometimes that can be painful to watch." There’s certainly much to find funny about Eva, who’s now a fitness and wellness freak –complete with her own menopause coach. "She’s just trying to throw a bit of money at her problem," smiles Horgan. "Eva doesn’t have a family, and she’s in this situation where she thinks she’s got to fix herself. "I love each of these sisters in a way that’s almost not healthy. Obviously the thriller aspect of the story is so important, but I also wanted to show life – Ursula’s separation, the cuckoo parenting – and that none of it’s not complicated, or tricky, but they’re all just getting along with it. I hope there’s enough time spent with the sisters that you understand who they are and who they’ve become." Horgan is currently cuckoo parenting herself (she separated from her partner in 2019; they share two teenaged daughters). If Pulling was about her 20s, Catastrophe was about meeting someone and settling down and Motherland was about parenting, Bad Sisters is another show whose plot reflects her life, grim murder notwithstanding. Does she ever feel too exposed by what she’s written? "Oh God, all the time!" she hoots. "Even when it seems less obvious, like this, which is a thriller, or even when I’ve done shows that I’m not in at all, I feel exposed, because you’re writing from your own experience, and people know that. I suppose I’ve not been shy about saying that. You get a bit nervous before it goes out, thinking, 'Oh, I hope people don’t think I’m a psycho' – or worse. I hope they relate to it. Because if they don’t relate to it, there’s something wrong with me." Aah, so does that mean she does actually have a menopause coach? "Ha! Well, not strictly a menopause coach, but someone who figured it out with me, who I talked to and worked out what it was I needed and what was missing. I still am going through the menopause and trying to find a way around it. There were so many things wrong with me that are now not too bad. It’s wild that [menopause] is not more widely talked about. "There’s a lot of change now, which is amazing, but it’s extraordinary how much we go through that’s not even questioned, because there’s so little research and time that’s gone into it. I think we all help each other by talking about it." And laughing about it – which is arguably the best medicine of all. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Bad Sisters season 2 will premiere on Wednesday 13th November on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes, then new episodes weekly. Season 1 is available to stream on Apple TV+ – sign up to Apple TV+ here. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Eve Hewson: 'Sharon Horgan captures reality for women in Bad Sisters'
"I think that’s why people love the show: you feel as though you’re watching real people."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. As one of four siblings, do you relate to the relationships the Garvey sisters have? Totally. Me and my sister are two years apart, so we’re very close. We steal each other’s clothes and fight all the time, but we love each other, and we would literally kill for each other – I would happily do that. But my brothers are eight and 10 years younger than us. So we’re not a squash. My sister and I were more about changing their nappies and kind of being mini babysitters for them. It was a different kind of dynamic. I read that you formed a band with your siblings over lockdown. How did that work out? I didn’t form a band, but I found the rest of my siblings writing songs as if they’d formed a band, and I’d not been invited. Then I tried to get in on the action, but they were like, "You have to leave". Why? Are you tone deaf? No! I had too many great ideas, and they were jealous of how good I was! Are you now close to your on-screen sisters? Very! Almost too close. We are in communication with each other at all hours. We have many different forms of WhatsApp group. We literally talk on three different WhatsApp groups a day. We were just reunited last week in London [for the publicity tour], which was lovely. We also have three days coming up in New York. Lots of dinners and spa trips have been planned. So, where do we find Becka at the start of the new series? She’s matured in the last two years. She’s seen more of life, and she’s in a healthy place. She’s got this new boyfriend, she’s more of a grown-up – or she’s at least attempting to be. What are her best and worst traits? Her best are hard to choose, because I quite like a lot of her. I like that she’s like a million different emotions in one second. Her most annoying trait? Chewing loudly. All the Garvey sisters are brilliantly complex. What do you think is so special about Sharon’s writing? I guess how honest it feels. It feels as though these are real people, living real lives. The marriage of drama and comedy is so difficult to get right, and Sharon has such a specific tone. I think that’s why people love the show: you feel as though you’re watching real people. Oftentimes when a friend is going through some sort of challenge in their life, it feels very Bad Sisters-y. Like, "Whoa, this could literally be a scene from Bad Sisters." Sharon can capture a woman in distress and make her a heroine, and also have this charm to her and be comedic, all wrapped up in one. That’s what I see when I look at my own friends going through their lives. Sharon can capture reality for women. Did you appreciate filming back in Ireland? It was great. I love filming in Ireland because I get to be at home. But it’s always really cold and rainy ­– we had four hurricanes. That’s the main challenge about shooting in Ireland – the weather is atrocious. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Bad Sisters season 2 will premiere on Wednesday 13th November on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes, then new episodes weekly. Season 1 is available to stream on Apple TV+ – sign up to Apple TV+ here. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Rebecca Hall "waged an aggressive campaign" to land The Listeners role
Rebecca Hall speaks to Radio Times magazine about new drama The Listeners, which begins airing next week on BBC One.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. Silence is elusive. Does silence even exist? The very question is enough to drive you mad. Pursue it and all you’ll hear is noise. These aural assaults will only be amplified by watching The Listeners, a haunting new BBC drama that tells the story of Claire, a 40-something English teacher who begins to hear a low humming sound whose faintness is in inverse proportion to the chaos it unleashes in her life. This unravelling is portrayed beautifully by Rebecca Hall, who is mesmerising as Claire. A veteran of stage and film, it’s a thrill to see her on the small screen again, starring alongside Prasanna Puwanarajah (The Crown, Ten Percent) and Gayle Rankin (Perry Mason, The Greatest Showman). "Claire craves a depth and intensity to her life," says Hall, when asked what drew her to the role. "Hearing this hum changes her understanding of the world. We all have an understanding that reality is exactly like this and then, when you delve into the physics and scratch the surface, suddenly the fabric of the universe peels away. And actually, it’s chaotic. Nothing about this is ordered or normal." "Oh, weird!" she suddenly exclaims. "There’s steam coming out of the top of your head. What is that? They’re pumping a smell into the atmosphere. It’s intense." At first, I think she’s riffing on her theme of chaos, but turning around, I see that we appear to be sitting next to the source of a pungent odour, with vapours billowing through a vent in the wall that presumably pass for room fragrance in the upscale hotel we’re in. "I’m very easily distracted by my environment," Hall apologises. Based on Jordan Tannahill’s bestselling novel of the same name, The Listeners is beautifully shot, with a whimsical quality that amplifies the unsettling nature of the story. Claire is happily married but unfulfilled, yearning for a connection that she finds in the unlikeliest of places, after discovering that one of her pupils, Kyle, can also hear the hum. Their pursuit of its source takes them on a journey that, like the hum itself, can be read as a metaphor. "There are many meanings," Hall agrees. "What’s great about long-format television is that there is the opportunity to go on the journey with Claire down the rabbit hole and have a belief system as a viewer that is then subverted and shifted again and again. Or if you’re not really sure what your belief system is, that, in a sense, is what the show is about – how beliefs are formed in isolation." Convention is another theme, explored through Claire’s friendship with Kyle, which some view as problematic. "The Kyle relationship is really complicated, [and in some ways] an inappropriate relationship. But Claire is not predatory. She’s utterly isolated in an experience which is destabilising her own reality. So, when she comes across someone where there is parity, it feels necessary to connect. "Every aspect of this story makes me think of the way we exist now. There’s an absence. We don’t have the structures that we had in the 20th century of community, whether you take that to mean unions, social clubs, church – all these things that would bring us together in a space where we could fact-check our experience with each other in real time. Instead, we’re living in these entirely algorithmic environments, where our experience is sort of tailored and so our experience of reality becomes isolated." Five minutes with Hall is enough to discern that the 42-year-old is incredibly bright. She wears the benign expression of someone used to engaging with people on a shallower intellectual level, but she’s utterly affable and warm. She’s also an actor who picks her projects with great care, which is likely why we haven’t seen her on our TV screens since Parade’s End some 12 years ago (though she did appear briefly in Amazon Prime’s Tales from the Loop in 2020). Is this because nothing has appealed? "Yeah," she laughs. "I mean, is it that? Plenty of stuff has appealed that I haven’t got offered." The appeal of working on The Listeners was very much linked to its director, Janicza Bravo, whom Hall had met before. "I’d developed a complete admiration crush on her. She's so insightful and so brilliant, and we immediately got on. I’d been hoping there would be an opportunity to work with her and when my agent told me about The Listeners, I definitely waged an aggressive campaign. I immediately got in touch with Janicza and asked to read it [the script]." She says she didn’t do any research into hearing impairments – "not out of laziness, but because it was important that the character was ordinary and relatable. In that sense, the best job that you can do as an actor is to ask how you’d behave if this happened to you. So it wasn’t really rooted in anything beyond that." At first, the sound department gave her an earpiece to wear during a take to enable her to hear the hum that no one else can hear, but she didn’t use it throughout the shoot. "I didn’t want to latch onto any sound that was too consistent. Claire goes to many different emotional places, so I wanted the sounds to shift. In a sense, imagination became easier than actually having something that was real." Although she was helped, inadvertently, by the sound of the camera that Bravo used to shoot The Listeners. "It’s incredibly rare [to use 35mm film] for TV. One of its weird idiosyncrasies is that when the camera starts rolling, there’s this tick-tick-tick sound of the film turning over inside the camera. I’m a real believer in film. The granular quality and softness allows you to focus on different things, whereas the HD experience can sometimes create an alienating effect. There’s an immediacy to film that I think is closer to our experience of the world." She says she shares a few characteristics with Claire. "Sound generally drives me a bit nuts. I’m very sensitive to it – this chair right now is driving me crazy. I can barely eat if there’s too much noise." Like Claire, she’s also a bad sleeper. "I’ve been terrible since I was seven years old." Has she tried any remedies? "Everything. I have a system. I can sense if it’s going to be a bad patch and I know what to do. It’s a combination of magnesium, maybe a little melatonin, CBD oil.." She says she doesn’t know what started it. "No idea. Well, probably I do. I had quite an insane childhood, so it probably kicked off around then. But it quickly became something that was just my reality. It means I’ve always got a lot done," she says brightly. "I read a lot." Interviewed by The New Yorker in 2017, Hall recounted how her parents, the opera singer Maria Ewing and the theatre impresario Sir Peter Hall (who divorced when she was seven) would take her along to dinner parties as a child and allow her "to stay up very late just to sit and listen to people". Can we assume she prefers to listen than talk? "Yes. I’m naturally a person that is curious about people. This is very unnatural for me," she smiles, alluding to being interviewed. I tell her it’s unnatural for me, too, and that – no offence – I prefer writing to the interview process itself. "I'd rather be writing, too!" she smiles. "I'm writing a couple of things. I’ve always got a couple of things going." She acknowledges that it’s not the easiest time for independent film-makers. "It’s difficult to get things off the ground at the moment. It’s a very risk-averse climate, although there are obviously big swings still being taken. "Nobody really knows what the formula is for success. No one has ever known. I wish there were better avenues of funding for people who want to take artistic risk in this country, and also in America, where there’s no government subsidy at all." Hall was born in London and read English literature at Cambridge, but has lived in America for the past ten years, a fact that surprises her. "I never really thought I’d moved. And then I woke up one day and realised that I had, without quite ever making the decision. I always thought of myself first and foremost as a Londoner." She lives in upstate New York ("rural nowhere – happily") with her husband, actor Morgan Spector, and their five-year-old daughter, Ida. She confirms she's following up her 2021 directorial debut, Passing, with Four Days Like Sunday, a mother-daughter drama inspired by her own life, in which she’ll also star. "I timed out of getting fully financed this summer, and it’s a weather-dependent movie, so I have to regroup and take stock. But hopefully I’ll shoot that next year. I also have a couple of other things that I’m attached to directing. I’m in a slight 'throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks' situation". Let’s hope it all sticks, for the world needs more Rebecca Hall. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guideto find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Bad Sisters' Anne-Marie Duff: 'There’s a time-bomb ticking away in season 2'
"In that way, JP still controls her from beyond the grave."
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. It’s no spoiler to say that Grace starts this series with a smile on her face… We find her in a really lovely space. She’s loved up, she’s free of JP and she’s moved forward in her life. But there’s a time bomb ticking away – her guilty secret. In that way, JP still controls her from beyond the grave. How has Grace changed since we last saw her? For the outside world, she played the role of grieving widow. She’s reconnected with the church and formed a close friendship with a character who’s played by the incredible Fiona Shaw, and she becomes her support. So she’s swapped one controlling relationship for another? Totally. Sadly, until we sit in a therapist’s chair, we tend to be repeat offenders, don’t we? We put the washing machine on the same cycle until we learn to confront certain aspects of ourselves. Coercive control is such an important issue. Did you feel a responsibility portraying it on screen? Absolutely. Both Claes [Bang, who played JP] and I were committed to telling this story properly. We had to, because if we didn’t make it as true as possible, the audience would not have been willing the sisters to kill him. You had to make it that they felt desperately sorry for Grace. Also, you don’t know who’s watching. There will undoubtedly have been more than one person who has found themselves in a similar situation, and just to hear their story being told will be really powerful for them. So you have to serve it well. Did you research or talk to anyone who’d been in that situation? I did. I’ve worked on projects over the years where I’ve involved myself with Women’s Aid and I’ve been to refuges and spoken to women who are in violently abusive relationships and controlling coercive relationships. So, I’d had conversations with people who had experienced it first-hand. Do you share any traits with Grace? We’re quite different, actually. But I suppose trying to see the good in people. I’ve got that sort of idealism that she has, but without the denial that she has along with it. How is it working with your on-screen sisters? They’re such funny, extraordinary women, all of them. It’s really good fun to be in their company. I love being part of a sister family. I don’t have any sisters – I have one older brother – so that was gorgeous, to actually be inside of that dynamic. Who would you say is the strongest Garvey sister? I don’t think you could. They all have their own strengths, and that’s the thing about all of us as human beings. Everybody is everything. And that’s what’s clever about Sharon’s writing. She doesn’t write Spice Girl sisters. She doesn’t go, "This one’s this Spice, this one’s that Spice." Every single character is beautifully swollen with many things. And that is what makes it so enjoyable for the audience, because that’s what the audience wants to see. They want to see complicated characters. The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here. Bad Sisters season 2 will premiere on Wednesday 13th November on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes, then new episodes weekly. Season 1 is available to stream on Apple TV+ – sign up to Apple TV+ here. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.
Sensitive to sound and an insomniac from the age of seven – Rebecca Hall reveals how her upbringing prepared her for her latest role in The Listeners
Add The Listeners to your watchlist Silence is elusive. Does silence even exist? The very question is enough to drive you mad. Pursue it and all you’ll hear is noise. These aural assaults will only be amplified by watching The Listeners, a haunting new BBC drama that tells the story of Claire, a 40-something English teacher who begins to hear a low humming sound whose faintness is in inverse proportion to the chaos it unleashes in her life. This unravelling is portrayed beautifully by Rebecca Hall, who is mesmerising as Claire. A veteran of stage and film, it’s a thrill to see her on the small screen again, starring alongside Prasanna Puwanarajah (The Crown, Ten Percent) and Gayle Rankin (Perry Mason, The Greatest Showman). “Claire craves a depth and intensity to her life,” says Hall, when asked what drew her to the role. “Hearing this hum changes her understanding of the world. We all have an understanding that reality is exactly like this and then, when you delve into the physics and scratch the surface, suddenly the fabric of the universe peels away. And actually, it’s chaotic. Nothing about this is ordered or normal. View oEmbed on the source website “Oh, weird!” she suddenly exclaims. “There’s steam coming out of the top of your head. What is that? They’re pumping a smell into the atmosphere. It’s intense.” At first, I think she’s riffing on her theme of chaos, but turning around, I see that we appear to be sitting next to the source of a pungent odour, with vapours billowing through a vent in the wall that presumably pass for room fragrance in the upscale hotel we’re in. “I’m very easily distracted by my environment,” Hall apologises. Based on Jordan Tannahill’s bestselling novel of the same name, The Listeners is beautifully shot, with a whimsical quality that amplifies the unsettling nature of the story. Claire is happily married but unfulfilled, yearning for a connection that she finds in the unlikeliest of places, after discovering that one of her pupils, Kyle, can also hear the hum. Their pursuit of its source takes them on a journey that, like the hum itself, can be read as a metaphor. “There are many meanings,” Hall agrees. “What’s great about long-format television is that there is the opportunity to go on the journey with Claire down the rabbit hole and have a belief system as a viewer that is then subverted and shifted again and again. Or if you’re not really sure what your belief system is, that, in a sense, is what the show is about – how beliefs are formed in isolation.” Convention is another theme, explored through Claire’s friendship with Kyle, which some view as problematic. “The Kyle relationship is really complicated, [and in some ways] an inappropriate relationship. But Claire is not predatory. She’s utterly isolated in an experience which is destabilising her own reality. So, when she comes across someone where there is parity, it feels necessary to connect. “Every aspect of this story makes me think of the way we exist now. There’s an absence. We don’t have the structures that we had in the 20th century of community, whether you take that to mean unions, social clubs, church – all these things that would bring us together in a space where we could fact-check our experience with each other in real time. Instead, we’re living in these entirely algorithmic environments, where our experience is sort of tailored and so our experience of reality becomes isolated.” Five minutes with Hall is enough to discern that the 42-year-old is incredibly bright. She wears the benign expression of someone used to engaging with people on a shallower intellectual level, but she’s utterly affable and warm. She’s also an actor who picks her projects with great care, which is likely why we haven’t seen her on our TV screens since Parade’s End some 12 years ago (though she did appear briefly in Amazon Prime’s Tales from the Loop in 2020). Is this because nothing has appealed? “Yeah,” she laughs. “I mean, is it that? Plenty of stuff has appealed that I haven’t got offered.” The appeal of working on The Listeners was very much linked to its director, Janicza Bravo, whom Hall had met before. “I’d developed a complete admiration crush on her. She’s so insightful and so brilliant, and we immediately got on. I’d been hoping there would be an opportunity to work with her and when my agent told me about The Listeners, I definitely waged an aggressive campaign. I immediately got in touch with Janicza and asked to read it [the script]” She says she didn’t do any research into hearing impairments – “not out of laziness, but because it was important that the character was ordinary and relatable. In that sense, the best job that you can do as an actor is to ask how you’d behave if this happened to you. So it wasn’t really rooted in anything beyond that.” At first, the sound department gave her an earpiece to wear during a take to enable her to hear the hum that no one else can hear, but she didn’t use it throughout the shoot. “I didn’t want to latch onto any sound that was too consistent. Claire goes to many different emotional places, so I wanted the sounds to shift. In a sense, imagination became easier than actually having something that was real.” Although she was helped, inadvertently, by the sound of the camera that Bravo used to shoot The Listeners. “It’s incredibly rare [to use 35mm film] for TV. One of its weird idiosyncrasies is that when the camera starts rolling, there’s this tick-tick-tick sound of the film turning over inside the camera. I’m a real believer in film. The granular quality and softness allows you to focus on different things, whereas the HD experience can sometimes create an alienating effect. There’s an immediacy to film that I think is closer to our experience of the world.” She says she shares a few characteristics with Claire. “Sound generally drives me a bit nuts. I’m very sensitive to it – this chair right now is driving me crazy. I can barely eat if there’s too much noise.” Like Claire, she’s also a bad sleeper. “I’ve been terrible since I was seven years old.” Has she tried any remedies? “Everything. I have a system. I can sense if it’s going to be a bad patch and I know what to do. It’s a combination of magnesium, maybe a little melatonin, CBD oil...” She says she doesn’t know what started it. “No idea. Well, probably I do. I had quite an insane childhood, so it probably kicked off around then. But it quickly became something that was just my reality. It means I’ve always got a lot done,” she says brightly. “I read a lot.” Interviewed by The New Yorker in 2017, Hall recounted how her parents, the opera singer Maria Ewing and the theatre impresario Sir Peter Hall (who divorced when she was seven) would take her along to dinner parties as a child and allow her “to stay up very late just to sit and listen to people”. Can we assume she prefers to listen than talk? “Yes. I’m naturally a person that is curious about people. This is very unnatural for me,” she smiles, alluding to being interviewed. I tell her it’s unnatural for me, too, and that – no offence – I prefer writing to the interview process itself. “I’d rather be writing, too!” she smiles. “I’m writing a couple of things. I’ve always got a couple of things going.” She acknowledges that it’s not the easiest time for independent film-makers. “It’s difficult to get things off the ground at the moment. It’s a very risk-averse climate, although there are obviously big swings still being taken. Nobody really knows what the formula is for success. No one has ever known. I wish there were better avenues of funding for people who want to take artistic risk in this country, and also in America, where there’s no government subsidy at all.” Hall was born in London and read English literature at Cambridge, but has lived in America for the past ten years, a fact that surprises her. “I never really thought I’d moved. And then I woke up one day and realised that I had, without quite ever making the decision. I always thought of myself first and foremost as a Londoner.” She lives in upstate New York (“rural nowhere – happily”) with her husband, actor Morgan Spector, and their five-year-old daughter, Ida. She confirms she’s following up her 2021 directorial debut, Passing, with Four Days Like Sunday, a mother-daughter drama inspired by her own life, in which she’ll also star. “I timed out of getting fully financed this summer, and it’s a weather-dependent movie, so I have to regroup and take stock. But hopefully I’ll shoot that next year. I also have a couple of other things that I’m attached to directing. I’m in a slight ‘throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks’ situation”. Let’s hope it all sticks, for the world needs more Rebecca Hall.
Sam Heughan and Eleanor Tomlinson on the "debaucherous fun" of The Couple Next Door
Heughan and Tomlinson caught up with Radio Times magazine about their steamy new Channel 4 thriller.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Four years after Poldark last graced our screens, it still feels odd to see Eleanor Tomlinson minus her Regency gown – and even more strange to see Sam Heughan minus his kilt, cravat and wig, given that the show he’s worn them in, Outlander, is still running. Both actors are period-drama veterans – Tomlinson played Demelza Poldark for six years, while Heughan has played Jamie Fraser for almost ten, and is about to start filming series eight of the popular show. But the pair have far more in common than their roles in 18th-century costume dramas: they also have many mutual friends – including Caitríona Balfe, who plays Jamie’s wife, Claire, in Outlander. All of which made teaming up for Channel 4’s new psychological thriller, The Couple Next Door, a no-brainer. Five minutes into our conversation (Tomlinson is speaking over Zoom from her home in London; Heughan is speaking over Zoom from his New York hotel), it’s clear that their friendship is genuine and close, built on mutual respect for each other’s work, as well as a shared sense of humour. "Caitríona knew El before I did," smiles Heughan. "So I’m already jealous of that situation. I want to say that El is my best friend, not Caitríona’s. But that’s something Caitríona and I will fight over on set." Tomlinson, meanwhile, describes working with Heughan as "debaucherous fun". Debaucherous fun is something the characters in The Couple Next Door very much aspire to, even if it often eludes them. When university sweethearts Evie (Tomlinson) and Pete (Alfred Enoch) move to a cookie-cutter street in a fictitious suburb of Leeds (though the show was largely shot in Antwerp), they’re immediately befriended by Becka (Jessica De Gouw), a beguiling yoga teacher, and her equally beguiling partner Danny (played by Heughan), a traffic cop. But like most suburban streets, theirs harbours myriad secrets. Things are definitely not what they seem. And soon a wedge comes between Evie and her husband, hurtling the mild-mannered primary school teacher down a path she might not otherwise have taken. But let’s not spoil things by revealing more. "It was a real treat – very different for me," says 31-year-old Tomlinson of her reasons for taking the part. "Working opposite Sam, and us both having come from period dramas was a real draw. I’m excited to turn people’s opinions of us on their heads, and show that we can do something very different." "Not having to wear a corset!" jokes Heughan, 43, of his own reasons for signing on. "Not that I wear one every day [on Outlander], but most days. Obviously Outlander is a huge production. You can spend a whole day on one scene, and that’s great, but it was so nice to go on this show, which was so fast-moving and organic. That comes down to the crew and the way the piece works, but it was refreshing to do something completely different and to work with a really core group of actors and cast." They agree that playing contemporary characters is no easier than playing period ones. "I wouldn’t say so, because I didn’t know anything about being a teacher," says Tomlinson. "There was quite a lot of research to do. I called a couple of my friends who are teachers to ask them about protocol. Just as with a period drama, you learn the etiquette. Your performance has to be real, or people don’t relate to you." To research the part of Danny, Heughan spent time with a traffic policeman who worked for Police Scotland. "He was really generous with his time, walking me through procedures. They’re always the first responders [to a road accident], and there are effects of working in such an intense job." Unusually for a show that – spoiler alert – features its fair share of sex, Tomlinson and Heughan didn’t have to do any chemistry tests before being cast in The Couple Next Door. "We didn’t at all," says Tomlinson. "We just talked through the characters, and the vision for the series. I’d been a big fan of Sam for a long time, so when the opportunity came to work with him, it was like a jigsaw piece falling into place. "And then Jessica and Alfred came on board, and I realised it was a really sexy 'core four'. In terms of chemistry tests, we worked through that during rehearsal time before we started shooting, and also on set before each scene." Which feels like a good time to ask: what actually is a chemistry test? "Undoubtedly, Sam will have done more than I have, so I’ll let him answer that one!" laughs Tomlinson. "I always find them such a strange thing," Heughan admits. "Producers do like to look for chemistry [between actors], but if I’m totally honest, I don’t really know, if you’re an actor, whether you feel this chemistry or not. When you’re in the moment, you’re not thinking, 'Oh, is there chemistry here?' –you’re just in it." They worked with a "brilliant" intimacy coordinator, Vanessa Coffey, whom Heughan suggested, having worked with her on Outlander’s sex scenes, which have won praise for their sensitivity. "Everybody felt comfortable," says Tomlinson. "The way that the sex scenes are shot isn’t necessarily what you would expect. I was keen to get across [the idea] that you can make something just as sexy by implying it." "I think we both have a great deal of experience with that perspective," laughs Heughan. "Period dramas are different worlds. I knew Vanessa was great, and had a really nice demeanour about her on set. I think we’ve both maybe struggled in the past with [sex]scenes, and how to portray them without giving away too much or feeling uncomfortable. It was great to push these scenes and make them feel intimate for the viewer without making it really difficult to shoot." The curtain-twitching, status-obsessed claustrophobia of suburbia is well captured by Belgian director Dries Vos, whom Heughan worked with on last year’s James Nesbitt drama Suspect. And both lead actors agree that moving to the suburbs isn’t, perhaps, as aspirational as it was. "It’s hard for people to live in suburbia because everything is so expensive," notes Tomlinson, who married rugby player Will Owen last summer. "And as this show proves, once you’re inside the dream, the reality is different. You get up, leave for work at the same time, and that’s what scares people, that fear of falling into a pattern and not knowing how to get out of it." "But some people choose that life," says Heughan. "Danny and Becka chose it to bring up their child, because they feel it’s a safe environment, but it’s all falling down around him. It might look idyllic, but underneath, we find out it’s a lot more choppy." Have either of them experienced life in suburbia, or is it on their bucket list? "I certainly don’t want the life that’s in our show, no. I was raised in Yorkshire, and that was lovely. But it wasn’t suburbia as it’s portrayed here," says Tomlinson. "My mum’s an artist, I went to a Steiner school, so I guess I had a slightly alternative lifestyle," says Heughan of his upbringing in Dumfries and Edinburgh. "If you choose to become an actor, it’s not your regular, typical life. We all thrive with a bit of stability and routine. Like all of us, I want family, a great relationship and a partner that understands me, but no, I don’t think it’s the life that I want." As the show explores, relationships are rarely straightforward, but when I jokingly ask them their opinions of swinging (not as off-topic as it seems – it’s part of the plot), they are defensive. "I don’t think it’s necessarily swinging as such, it’s more an exploration of non-monogamy, and how to keep a relationship vibrant. There are deeper relationships and mental journeys going on with each individual character," says Tomlinson. "I would say a relationship that perhaps has wider boundaries than other traditional ones is actually a representation of true love," adds Heughan, who is currently single. "To be able to be in love with someone so much that you allow them to explore other situations is the most romantic thing, in a weird way." So non-monogamy could be the key to an idyllic relationship? "I have no idea what the key to an idyllic relationship is," he laughs. "Perhaps someone can tell me sometime." He’s probably too busy to give it much thought. In 2020, he co-wrote, with Outlander co-star Graham McTavish, Clanlands, an international bestseller, and also launched Sassenach Spirits, whose whisky and gin has won numerous awards. "Outlander gave me a great opportunity to go home, and also promote Scotland to the rest of the world. It’s a great country, so I’m claiming myself as an unofficial ambassador. Anywhere you go, people love Scotland. Almost as much as they love Yorkshire," he winks. As for the immediate future, Tomlinson has "two very exciting projects coming out next year" that she’s unable to talk about, while Heughan is poised to film the final season of Outlander, a show destined to leave as many broken hearts, when it ends, as Poldark did. "Mine included," says Heughan. "It’s going to be hard to leave it after such a long time. But everything has to come to an end. I just hope that we end it with satisfaction. We want it to be the best one yet." If he needs advice on how to recalibrate, he has Tomlinson to turn to. "We’ve spoken about it quite a lot," she says. "It is going to be a huge change. But I’m at the end of the phone if you need me." "If I could turn out even slightly like her by the end of it, I’d be happy," Heughan smiles. "Just not as ginger." View Green Video on the source website The Couple Next Door airs on Channel 4 in the UK from Monday 27th November, and on STARZ in the US in 2024. If you're looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide or visit our Drama hub for more news and features. Want to visit Death in Paradise locations in Guadeloupe at a discount? Radio Times is offering savings of up to 7% for registered users booking their next holiday with travel website Expedia. Claim your exclusive Radio Times Expedia holiday discount now. 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Call the Midwife's Helen George and Olly Rix on Trixie and Matthew's "beautiful" wedding
The Trixie and Matthew stars talk wedding drama and keeping their characters' married life "exciting".
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Everyone loves a wedding. Never more so than when it’s that of a much-loved couple whose relationship has been plagued by setbacks. To say the course of true love didn’t run smooth for Matthew and Trixie is an understatement. Since becoming an item in series ten, the couple have experienced more than their fair share of heartache. All of which makes Trixie and Matthew’s wedding day a very special one, destined to be a ratings-buster for the popular show – although we’re not giving away any spoilers by revealing that there are some major hiccups – this is Call the Midwife, after all. Speaking to Radio Times over Zoom from their respective homes in London, Helen George and Olly Rix agree that filming their characters’ big day was an uplifting experience, but also an arduous one. While weddings look wonderful on screen, they can be notoriously tough and drawn-out to film. "It was a long day," Helen confirms, her own hair much longer, wavier and more brunette than Trixie’s. "We did go over our schedule by about an hour and a half. But it was also a beautiful day. There was a real sense of occasion. And it was lovely that all the cast got to be together." Helen says that the look of the nuptials was inspired by society weddings of the time – after all, Matthew is the son and heir of an aristocrat – and that Trixie’s dress referenced a Givenchy campaign starring Audrey Hepburn, a muse to the designer throughout the 1960s. "It was a beautiful photograph of Audrey looking demure and gorgeous with this small pillbox hat on her head, and a long veil. Trixie’s version was loosely based around that." View Green Video on the source website While it would be unfair to call Trixie a bridezilla, her patience is tested when one of her "something old, new, borrowed and blue" accoutrements fails to materialise. Is Trixie’s perfectionism something to which Helen can relate? "I think it’s natural for any woman to want to get it completely right – it’s an important day in anyone’s life," she says. "Something did go wrong on the day of filming, too. We’d been given pizzas, because everyone was starving. And poor Meghan [Cusack, who plays Nancy Corrigan] got grease all over her bridesmaid’s dress. That was a drama." As for whether there will be any drama in the happy couple’s future, Olly thinks not, and believes theirs is definitely a love match. "It’s absolutely that. There’s nothing facile or easy about their relationship. They’ve gone through a lot, especially grief. Trixie helped him learn how to raise a child and Matthew lost his own father just prior to the wedding. That they didn’t postpone is testament to how vital it is for them." Nor does Olly feel that the couple’s different backgrounds make for a mismatch. "Matthew uses his money for the correct causes. He’s an unusual character in that respect, because he uses his money to champion things that Trixie cares about, so I don’t anticipate it being a problem." With more money at her disposal, is Trixie likely to turn into the Hyacinth Bucket of Nonnatus House? "She’s not a gold digger," says Helen, almost indignantly. "It’s coincidental that she fell in love with Matthew. It wasn’t for the money. Yes, the Jag is great, but it’s a nightmare to get in and out of!" While Helen has been in the show since its first episode in 2012, Olly joined in 2020, when Britain was in lockdown, making the tricky issue of being a newbie on a well-established show trickier still. "I joined in series 10, and didn’t meet the rest of the cast until series 11, so I did a whole series pretty much with just Helen," he remembers. "She became a bit of a North Star. It wasn’t easy, but Helen and I really listen to one another, and have done from day one. She also gave me a rundown of the show’s history, because I didn’t sit down to watch ten series’ worth of Call the Midwife." "Olly thought I was a nun for the first three years," laughs Helen. While not all the female characters are nuns, the show is nevertheless a matriarchy, a quality that Olly values. "I’m very close to my mother and younger sister anyway, but before Midwife, I’d also just finished two years of working on the US drama series The Spanish Princess, which was a reframing of the history of Henry VIII through the eyes of Catherine of Aragon. That was also scripted by female writers, directed by female directors and had a very strong, predominantly female cast." That more stories are being told through a female lens requires a particular diligence from male actors, according to Olly. "You have to realise that the camera is not looking at you necessarily in the way you think it is. The eye is female. That’s interesting – for me as well. Because Matthew’s part is written by a woman [Heidi Thomas], I don’t always understand why he’s doing certain things. I often run to Helen and say, 'Would I say that?'" There’s no shortage of gritty TV dramas and Olly notes that "basic stories of kindness and human decency" are increasingly few and far between, which is possibly why viewers respond so strongly to Call the Midwife. "People message me a lot, essentially saying they wish they had somebody in their life that looked after them the way that Matthew looks after Trixie. People are really yearning for some sort of protection; somebody to put their arm around them and tell them it’s going to be OK. They need to feel that there is some decency out there." Ironically, Olly also recalls how, when Matthew first got together with Trixie, he’d receive messages from viewers saying that they didn’t trust him. "We’re conditioned to expect the worst. Obviously, I couldn’t give away any of the storyline, but I wanted to reassure people and say, 'No, it’s not going to be what you think it is. Trixie is actually going to be happy, and Matthew is a decent guy.'" Having been in Call the Midwife from the beginning (bar a brief hiatus in 2021, when she was on maternity leave with her second child), Helen must look back on young Trixie and feel she’s come a long way. "Definitely. In the early series, Trixie was first brought on as the blonde, bubbly friend of Jenny Lee who liked to drink and smoke and talk about boys. It’s been really nice to peel back those layers and get to know her even more. I’m lucky that Heidi and the writers have invested in me in that way." With the ring on her finger, will it soon be time for Trixie to be at the other end of the blanket, with someone else mopping her brow? "Who knows?" laughs Helen. "I’m not going to comment, because it’s out of our hands. As long as there are interesting stories to play, I’m down with that." As for what will happen next to the happy couple, don’t ask. "We have no idea," says Helen. "Honestly, we find out the day before we start shooting. But I think both of us are pretty dedicated to not letting the marriage become too comfortable." "Yes, we’ll resist that sort of happy complacency," Olly agrees. "They’re deeply involved in the community around them, and neither Helen nor I want to see them disappear or recede from that. If anything, we want to see them get more involved." "Fundamentally, it has to be an exciting marriage," says Helen. "If you see them wearing matching slippers, then it’s time to stop." The Call the Midwife season finale airs on Sunday 26th February on BBC One at 8pm, while the series is also available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to see what's on tonight. 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John Torode and Lisa Faulkner on their favourite TV shows and cooking on a budget
We caught up with the couple to find out what they are enjoying watching on telly at the moment.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. The husband-and-wife stars of John and Lisa's Weekend Kitchen, John Torode and Lisa Faulkner, open up about their budget recipes, cooking for their kids and the one show they have to watch. What’s your TV-watching set-up? Lisa: We have a sofa each. I’m in one corner on one and John’s on the other. If the kids are there, I’m on the end. Nobody moves John. Is there anything you’ve recently watched together? John: I liked The Midwich Cuckoos, with Max Beasley and Keeley Hawes. Lisa: [to John] Oh, you did like it. John: I don’t really watch TV. Lisa: John sits there and plays Patience. John: Or Scrabble. Lisa: Or Scrabble. I binge watch. I’ve just finished Everything I Know About Love. I really… John: [interrupting] I quite like a movie. But I’m not very good with drama. There’s enough drama in the world already. Lisa: Hard thing his wife’s an actress. I take it you have the remote, Lisa? Lisa: Yes. John: I have no real desire to have the remote. Lisa: One thing we do watch is MasterChef, but I’ll say we watch it because I want to. John: There’s only so much of your own voice you can listen to. How do you feel about seeing yourselves on screen? Lisa: My acting shows, my things, we haven’t really watched. John: Everything you’ve ever been in, I’ve watched. Lisa: Oh, sorry. OK. I don’t sit down to watch them, so I haven’t seen John watch them. John: But I have to watch MasterChef. Moving on, what can we expect from the new series of Weekend Kitchen? John: We’re trying to do dishes that are doable and a bit of fun. I’ve learnt a lot from Lisa about what people want to cook at home. A lot of basics, especially for Christmas and New Year, which can be really stressful for people. Obviously it’s a worrying time with the cost of food spiralling. Have you been conscious about showcasing budget-friendly recipes? Lisa: Absolutely. Our food shop has doubled, and it’s terrifying. We have a couple of showstoppers, but out of 45 recipes, only two or three are expensive. The others are supermarket value. When it comes to cooking, who takes the reins at home? Lisa: We both cook all the time. John: It depends on what’s going on and who’s there. And what’s in the fridge. Tell us an ingredient you think deserves more love. John: Parsley. Or herbs in general. Lisa: Handfuls of herbs. John: Not a little bit. Not smatterings. Not “a pinch of”. Massive amounts. Put them in salad. Put them in sauces. They really change everything, and they’re good for you. How do your kids feel about eating meat? John: They go through phases, but my oldest son is very much flexitarian. He tries to be as plant-based as possible, but he comes to us and is very happy to have a T-bone steak. Do you ever have to cook separate meals to satisfy everybody’s preferences? Lisa: We try not to. John: No way in the world. If your children are almost at the age where they look after themselves, ask them to cook everyone dinner using what they like. I bet you any money in three weeks’ time they’ll be going, “Oh, no, Mum – I’ll eat whatever you want me to eat.” John and Lisa's Weekend Kitchen continues on Saturday 1st October at 11:35am on ITV. Find something to watch with our TV Guide or visit our Entertainment hub for all the latest news. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.
Daisy May Cooper on Am I Being Unreasonable?: 'They're damaged, but who isn’t?'
We caught up with the writer before her new comedy thriller airs on BBC One this week.
This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. Some people baked banana bread over lockdown. Others learnt Mandarin. But Daisy May Cooper co-wrote Am I Being Unreasonable?, an offbeat comedy thriller about obsessive friendships, women on the edge, a freak accident and a dead cat. Imagine the gnarliest Mumsnet thread come to life and televised, and you’ll get the vibe. “We were very inspired by reading those [Mumsnet] posts,” laughs co-writer Selin Hizli, on the question of whether the show’s title is an allusion to the parenting website’s most overused phrase. “Those posts are so brilliant,” laughs Cooper. “Women talking about how awful their marriages are, and all the other women go, ‘Leave the b*****d.’ They could write that their husband sneezed, and they’d still go, ‘Leave him!’” Ask how the series came about, and you get a surprisingly candid answer. “It was because I was desperately unhappy in my marriage, but didn’t realise it at the time, and then lockdown put this massive spotlight onto it,” says Cooper. “My daughter had asked me to put a pair of dungarees on a Sylvanian Family squirrel. It was like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was completely broken.” In fact, at the time of writing Am I Being Unreasonable?, Cooper and Hizli’s lives very much mirrored their characters’, with both women eventually splitting from their partners (Cooper shares a daughter and son with hers, while Hizli shares eight-year-old twins). “As Daisy says, you don’t realise you’re unhappy until [lockdown] magnifies it,” says Hizli. “We didn’t realise how much we were missing that really important friendship as a source of comfort and connection. That was the starting point for our writing, and also talking about other female friendships that we’ve had, and how some of them get really toxic and make you doubt yourself more.” The plot centres around 40-something mum-of-one Nic (played by Cooper), a cantankerous character bored by her marriage and grieving a loss she’s unable to share with anyone else. When Jen (Hizli) arrives in town, the two soon form an alliance fuelled by a shared love of kitchen discos, crushing hangovers and bitching about other mums. “Nic and Jen are both damaged, but who isn’t?” says Cooper. View oEmbed on the source website Like fellow BBC comedy Motherland, Am I Being Unreasonable? will be familiar territory for any woman who’s ever drunk five too many proseccos while dancing to Promised Land on repeat the night before their toddler’s birthday party. At times, it makes for uncomfortable viewing. But it’s also truly hilarious, peppered with the same pin-sharp dialogue and clever social observations that made This Country so unique and well-loved. And like that previous hit, which Cooper created with her brother Charlie, Am I Being Unreasonable? only exists because of the strong bond between its two creators and stars. “You have to have brutal honesty, but you also have to feel safe to suggest things,” says Hizli. “A lot of this show is about our own lives. You’ve got to feel safe enough to share that with someone and not worry they’re going to dismiss it or not treat it with the care it needs.” “It’s such an intimate thing to be able to write with somebody,” says Cooper, “but fortunately, Selin and I are so close that we can tell each other if we think the other one’s idea is rubbish. I have that with my brother, but I’ve tried to write with other people, and I can’t.” It may surprise fans that the Coopers do have plans to return to This Country – though the death of their friend and co-star Michael Sleggs, aged 33, means it won’t be for a while. “We definitely will, but I’m not ready yet,” she says. “I found the last series so hard when I lost Michael. I’m still trying to process that.” For now, anyway, Cooper has a new writing partner. She and Hizli have been friends since meeting at Rada in 2007 (“I hated her when I first met her,” says Cooper), but had lost touch in recent years, with Hizli’s acting career (she starred in Land Girls and Grantchester) becoming increasingly hard to juggle with twins. At one point, while Cooper was busy making This Country and becoming a big player in the UK comedy scene, Hizli found herself in particularly dire straits. “I had my kids when I was 24, worked a bit and then moved out of London and it just dried up,” she says now. “I live in Kent and I just got a job at a local restaurant waiting tables and cleaning toilets. It was quite grim. I’m genuinely not good at anything else. Acting is all I’ve ever done, so there weren’t a lot of other options. “Neither Daisy nor I went to university; we both just went to drama school. Getting in a car during lockdown in November, having not seen Daisy for years at this point, I had nothing to lose.” “That’s when the greatest stuff is written,” notes Cooper. “JK Rowling did a similar thing. If you’ve got nothing, then you have everything to gain. When we were writing this, Selin was cleaning toilets. She was such a talent. I thought, ‘I can’t let her be doing that.’” “If I’d been ticking along, doing a couple of acting jobs, I probably never would have got in that car,” adds Hizli. “I felt like everything was against me: it was lockdown, work had dried up, I felt like I was failing my kids, my relationship was failing and I just thought the universe was against me. Then a little voice said, ‘What if this is the universe asking how badly you want it, and how much you are willing to risk?’ There was something pulling me towards Daisy.” The two were reunited three days after Cooper had moved out of her marital home. “I had my son in lockdown. It was a mess. They [the hospital] weren’t allowing the husbands to come in. And that’s when I knew I couldn’t go back to him. Because I was actually loving it with all the nurses and all the women. I felt dread at bringing the baby back home. Isn’t that terrible? “My ex-husband is a lovely man, but I just wasn’t in love with him. And he wasn’t particularly in love with me. Writing this show has been therapy for us, in a very weird way. It’s our way of being able to cope with the last couple of years.” The show also explores toxic femininity. “A lot of women are in competition, and it’s all to do with men,” says Cooper. “Why are you being this way? Why do you change when a man walks into the room?” Before the birth of her daughter, Pip, in 2019, she recalls doing NCT classes “with women who I knew had the same cracks as I did, but wouldn’t show me”, which made it hard for her to bond with them. “I found that unbelievably isolating. All I wanted was for someone to say they were struggling as well.” That Cooper and Hizli are both so honest is as much of a bond as their shared life experiences, and it’s clear that working so intensely together has made them an even closer partnership. “You’re so unbelievably supportive,” says Cooper of Hizli. “You don’t judge me. I could say, ‘I think I might have murdered somebody,’ and you’d go, ‘Don’t panic, we’ll wrap him up in a carpet and throw him in the Thames.’ I just know that you’d love me forever. As I do you. Which I’ve struggled to have in relationships I’ve had with men.” In Am I Being Unreasonable?, Cooper and Hizli were also spurred on to create the sort of working class characters that don’t commonly exist on TV. “I still get angry that there aren’t the opportunities for working class talent,” says Cooper.” “Also, if you are working class, it’s tougher to be seen as anything other than that,” adds Hazli. “There are obviously parts, but they are in the minority. I would never even get a look-in at those parts for posh English roses.” “We’ll always be character actresses,” notes Cooper. “If I have to read another script note that says ‘stunningly beautiful – everyone looks at her when she walks into the room…’” says Hizli, rolling her eyes. “I had an audition tape sent through the other day that asked me to send a full body shot and not wear any make-up. How dare you think you can tell me what make-up I should wear?” “Everybody’s aware the times are changing and they’re still covering their arses, but things haven’t really changed,” says Cooper, “and that’s really depressing. All the people that are making the decisions are the posh people.” Notably, Am I Being Unreasonable? was made by a team that was 50 per cent female. “Our producer, Pippa Brown, was great, and having camerawomen changes the atmosphere on set.” While there are still barriers, both agree that it’s an exciting time for female-led drama and comedy, namechecking Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Michaela Coel, Catastrophe and Motherland [both created by Sharon Horgan] as game-changers in the industry. “What’s so lovely is that it’s not like it used to be. It’s not competitive between those [female] peers. Everybody is so supportive. That’s why the best material is being made – everybody’s supporting each other against these fat-cat people who make s**t decisions in offices because they’re trying to justify their jobs.” “You’ve got comedy at the centre of those shows, but you also get really poignant and difficult moments,” adds Hizli. “There’s an honesty that’s a knee-jerk reaction to women having been portrayed in a certain way for so long.” “Like saying women aren’t funny,” adds Cooper. “Even Ricky Gervais doing that stand-up was so unbelievably... I mean, I know he was making a joke out of it, but that’s how he feels and I think that’s how it still is in the culture. ‘Women aren’t funny?’ F**k me – surely our generation has shown otherwise.” Am I Being Unreasonable starts on BBC One at 9:50pm on Friday 23rd September 2022. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight. The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now – subscribe now and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the Radio Times podcast with Jane Garvey.