W
hen Nicola Walker was
in her twenties she was
given a warning. “Older
actresses would put a
kind hand on my knee
and say, ‘Work as much as
you can now because when you turn
40 it gets really tough,’” she says. “They
told me that parts are few and far
between, and if you have a child you
might as well call it a day.”
Walker is now 51, with a 15-year-old
son, and she is being offered more parts
than ever. “The last ten years have been
the best of my career,” she says, sound-
ing surprised. “I didn’t see it coming.”
Ever since she played the poised MI5
analyst Ruth Evershed in Spooks, Walker
has inspired a particular kind of devo-
tion, with a string of hits from Last Tango
in Halifax to Unforgotten. She specialises
in women holding it together despite
inner turmoil.
There are parallels with Olivia Col-
man’s career. Both went to Cambridge
and started out with bit parts in TV and
film (Walker played one half of a “fright-
ful folk duo” in Four Weddings and a
Funeral and then moved into theatre).
It was only when they hit 40 that their
careers took off. Chris Lang, who wrote
Walker’s role DCI Cassie Stuart in ITV’s
Unforgotten, said: “I have never had
anything approaching the volume of
response I got about Cassie to any tele-
vision I’ve written. People loved her.”
Walker gauges her success by visits
to the supermarket in Essex, where she
lives with her husband and fellow actor
Barnaby Kay (brother of Dr Adam Kay
of This Is Going to Hurt) and their son,
Harry. “People engage me in lively
debate about my characters — it’s the
part of fame I like.”
What is it about her roles that strikes
such a chord? “I don’t want to be faux
humble,” she says, with characteristic
self-depreciation, “but it really is all
about the writing.” I’m not convinced.
Walker is thoughtful, emotionally intel-
ligent, dedicated and completely
unpretentious. She’s also smaller than
I expected — 5ft 2in, in chunky Nike
trainers, black skinny jeans and a black
high-necked blouse.
Tomorrow she returns to television
screens in the third series of Abi Mor-
gan’s drama The Split, which uses whathappens at a divorce law firm to explore
how we act in relationships. Walker is
Hannah, a lawyer who has just told her
husband, Nathan (Stephen Mangan),
that she had sex with another man,
and they are making plans for
divorce. What she didn’t expect
is for him to fall in love with
someone else so quickly,
let alone an “annoyingly
hot” psychologist (Lara
Pulver, who was with
Walker in Spooks).
“We’d do a scene
where one of us
was emotionally poi-
sonous and then they would
shout cut and I’d grab her face and
tell her, ‘I love you, I respect you.’”
Walker admits to being nervous about
interviews. “My dad would say, ‘Why
would you get stressed? Just act.’ If I’m
in a crime drama I always get frightened
I’ll blurt out who the killer is. When we
were doing press for Unforgotten, San-
jeev Bhaskar told me to lie.” She once
did, joking that her son was namedTELEVISION
‘I DIDN’T FIT THE TELEVISION L
At 5ft 2in Nicola Walker missed out on TV parts — then she hit 40 and it all
changed for the scrap-metal dealer’s daughter and star of The Split
SUSANNAH
BUTTER
FOUR WEDDINGS STARS ON TV NOW
Kristin Scott Thomas
As Fiona in Four
Weddings and a Funeral
she used sarcasm to
mask being in love with
her best friend. Now she
plays the steely MI5
boss Diana Taverner in
an adaptation of Mick
Herron’s Slow Horses on
Apple TV+.Rowan Atkinson
Almost 30 years after
playing the confused
vicar, Atkinson is still themaster of comic chaos
— catch him this
summer in Netflix’s Man
vs Bee, about a man
who battles with an
insect.Anna Chancellor
The famous wedding
guest “Duckface”
plays the formidable
lawyer Melanie
Aickman in The Split
and is about to star in
the film of Mrs Harris
Goes to Paris.ALAMYA near national
treasure Nicola
Walker; left, as
a singer in Four
Weddings and
a Funeral10 3 April 2022