The Capture star Holliday Grainger talks Strike, deepfakes and Northern representation

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!

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.

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