Nicola Walker - the least starry of stars

In little over two decades, Nicola Walker has crawled deftly and diligently under the radar up into the Premier League of TV drama. To have done so without flashy starring roles, a parallel career in the movies, hackneyed fashion shoots or the spotlight of tabloid celeb columns is quite remarkable. But it is thoroughly deserved. Researching this, I hadn’t realised how many of her series I had missed – from Chalk to Babylon, River to Torn – but luckily there are so many I have been privileged to watch. 

Probably the first time Nicola came to my attention was in 1999 when she had a major role as an MoD scientist trapped in a railway tunnel with cryogenic gas and a miscellaneous bunch of passengers in The Last Train. I won’t deny I was initially hooked by the idea of a mystery set aboard a train but this apocalyptic sci-fi serial proved an entertaining mix of drama and fantasy. A year later she was another young mystery woman in a Dalziel and Pascoe episode: is she who she says she is, and will her past come back to haunt her?  I forget the answer to the first but am pretty sure the second can be answered in the affirmative. 

Around the same period, Nicola also began to win roles as police officers, and this particular career thread continues to this day. Fortunately she has specialised not as a stereotypical all-action, bed-hopping maverick but as a competent but angst-ridden detective with recognisable human frailties. I doubt there was much to sink her canines into as a WPC (that’s what they were still called back then) in a 1998 Jonathan Creek but in Paul Abbott’s excellent Touching Evil she was swiftly raised to a plain-clothed Inspector alongside Robson Green. In 2004 she was transferred to the army as an unglamorous horsey Major in the BBC’s Red Cap before a police promotion to DCI beckoned in Prisoners’ Wives, a hard-hitting drama a far cry from other, more salacious series featuring the ‘Wives’ moniker. 

Only last month, she was back in hometown London for the fourth series of ITV’s ever-watchable Unforgotten. While the budget is clearly substantial enough to attract superb supporting casts, and Sanjeev Bhaskar as a sidekick, the programme’s heartbeat is Nicola Walker as DCI Cassie Stuart. She doesn’t get to smile much, unsurprising given the often gruesome scenes she witnesses or the mental anguish arising out of family problems such as her dad’s descent into dementia. However, we are treated to her full array of subtle facial tics, nervous smiles and gestures, as she carries us on her journey with Bhaskar’s ‘Sunny’ to solving a cold case. Regarding the latest series conclusion I won’t risk a spoiler…. 

Her best roles are those when her character is torn between the job and family or personal relationships, and they don’t have to involve the police force. Another recent hit drama is BBC One’s The Split. It’s not a thriller, there are no bodies. Instead, Nicola portrays a fair-haired divorce lawyer who sometimes finds herself brokering reconciliations while her own marriage to the oh-so-nice Stephen Mangan goes down the tubes. Such family dramas don’t always hold my attention for long, but even I have been enthralled by its two series, and I’d expect there to be more. 

So far, so standard middle-class fare. But very occasionally, Walker steps into left-field territory. In 2018’s Collateral, a convoluted thriller featuring the likes of Carey Mulligan, John Simm and Billie Piper, she played a lesbian vicar. Best of all, when I finally caught up on the first series of Luther, I was delighted, shocked even, to find her in the role of working-class wife whose bloke turns out to be a murderer. Blimey! 

Nevertheless if there is one character which has defined Nicola Walker more than any other, it’s probably Ruth Evershed in Spooks. She joined the cast in series two way back in 2003, making an ignominious entrance into MI5 as a bit of a clumsy hippy-dippy transfer from GCHQ but went on to become one of the best loved characters. Ruth was not one of the good-looking stars running around shooting suspected terrorists but harvested the intelligence for our heroes to act upon, an ideal part for Walker’s unflashy style.

Occasionally Ruth was allowed out into the real world, even managing to let her hair down and find herself in a spot of bother then, following Nicola’s real-life maternity break, she made a popular return to ‘The Grid’ in series eight. Hardcore Spooks fans seem more fixated on her ‘will-they-won’t-they?’ relationship with boss Harry, equally shy and inept in matters of expressing feelings. However, for me Spooks was never supposed to be romantic fiction but, in my view, the professional v personal quandary enabled Nicola Walker to turn in some of her finest acting.