Lauren Lyle: 'Karen Pirie has female rage, which I feel a lot inside myself'

Lyle, who comes in at 5ft 2in, says: “Karen’s the boss now and I love the comedy of it, that she’s trying to talk down to someone from below them. It really helps me as an actor to feel other people tower over her. It makes you feel like a little dog that wants to fight all the time. She’s pushed into corners and has to bite back.”

Does Lyle share this experience in real life? “All the time. No one could believe they’d found a Scottish woman at the right age and height.”

We sit down to talk in a corner of a disused office building in Glasgow that today is serving as the police station in which Pirie, newly promoted to detective inspector for the second season of the show, leads her team through a labyrinthine cold case. It soon becomes apparent that Lyle shares much more than stature with her alter ego.

“We’ve gone on a strange parallel journey together,” says Lyle. Referring to Pirie’s outspokenness, her readiness to cut through social niceties as well as red tape to get the job done, she says: “Karen has female rage, which I feel a lot inside myself. Through her, I get to exorcise things I wish I could do in my real life.”

The series, for which Lyle won a best actress Scottish Bafta on its debut in 2022, is adapted by Emer Kenny (who also co-stars) from the books of Val McDermid – tagged the queen of “tartan noir” for her bestselling crime fiction, including a series of novels that became ITV’s Wire in the Blood.

Against familiar tropes – a police team assigned to reopen a 40-year-old case where an heiress and her child went missing – Pirie stands out, quite different from the TV detectives Lyle describes as, “middle-aged men, grumpy about their lives, usually with a drink problem, going through a divorce, not really wanting to do their job. Demons, demons! Whereas Pirie is funny, bright, excited about her job. Her only cross to bear is that she wants to bring people to justice.”

She adds: “It’s not Rebus. Rebus is allowed to be grumpy and move up the ranks in the boys’ club. Karen is constantly grilled, but she doesn’t care. She just thinks, ‘I’m going to have to use my own methods.’ It’s everything every woman can relate to.”

Again, Lyle – now aged 32 with a decade of acting experience under her belt – didn’t have to reach far for this in her own life. “For women, there’s definitely something about needing to be liked and appeasing much more. There have been times on jobs where I’ve had an opinion and I’ve had to think about the right way of coming across, while a guy will come in and say, ‘I don’t like that,’ and he’s perceived as a genius but I’d be perceived as difficult.” She pauses. “Or vain. I never bother about looking pretty and neither does Karen. The way she looks is about being practical, not about being pretty or hot.”

Which is in itself attractive, right? She grins. “I think it’s hot to do what you need to do. I think I’m hot for having a brain.”

But how realistic is this young force of energy that tears through her police force seniors before delivering the results to confound any doubts and all expectations? Surprisingly true to life it seems. “It does happen,” says Lyle, who reports meeting characters similar to Pirie. “You don’t assume it could, but you could also ask – is it realistic for a girl like me to be leading a show? Well, yes, because I’ve done it.”

Lyle knew she wanted the role as soon as she got the script. The Glasgow-born star made her name playing Marsali MacKimmie Fraser in the historical drama Outlander and as activist Jade Antoniak in Vigil, the submarine-set thriller from the same team at World Productions behind Line of Duty and now Karen Pirie.

“We had the read-through for the whole cast of Vigil and producer Simon Heath spotted me and said, ‘Who’s that?’ knowing that Karen Pirie was bubbling down the road,” says Lyle. Despite her physical appearance making her tailor-made for the role, it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

“Val McDermid had to approve the casting. Before I met her, I was worried about the accent – I’m from Glasgow and Karen is from Fife, although I guess English people might not know the difference. After I met her, I was back on the phone, ‘Let them know I can do a stronger accent if I need to.’ There was a week of waiting and feeling really anxious, until at 8pm on a Friday night I got a call from my agent. Then I flipped.”

Lyle says she knew immediately it would work: “The writing was so good and I understood who the character was, what she was trying to say, plus her having that imposter syndrome thing of thinking, ‘Can I do it?’ It was the same for me. I hadn’t led a show before, let alone been the name of the show. It’s on your shoulders, you have to do it and be good. I realised it was the same for Karen – you have this case, you have to solve it.”

And here we are in the midst of solving another one, with Lyle on set, despite the fact this was meant to be her first day off in six weeks – “but we didn’t finish the scene last night, so we go again,” she smiles.

Alongside her is writer Emer Kenny, charged with adapting McDermid’s words for screen and appearing as Pirie’s colleague, River Wilde. “During series one, people said, ‘You got the job because you’re her best friend’, but I’d never met her before,” remembers Lyle. “With the volume of lines, Emer is the only person working at the same intensity as me. That’s how we became close and we’ve created an amazing shorthand. By series two, she was writing for me.” Does Kenny ever slip her a note on a scene? She smiles. “Sometimes if I’m too funny, I get told to bring it back to drama.”

In her rare breaks between acting jobs, Lyle just wants to be in London with her boyfriend and the group of friends she made when she moved to the city aged 19. “Life has definitely got more hectic,” she says, “plus there’s a distrust about why people want to be your friend. So I just want to hang out with the people I already know.” As she stands up and prepares to go again, she finishes: “What’s the point of this life if it isn’t to have a good time and make some good stuff?” Then she’s off, walking tall.

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Karen Pirie season 2 will air from Sunday 20th July 2025 on ITV1 and ITVX.

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