‘I thought there’d never be enough work!’ Ruth Madeley on sex, success and becoming a star out of sheer nosiness
She is shaking up showbiz and redefining the way disability is portrayed on screen. Ahead of her end-times thriller The Rapture, the star talks about
She is shaking up showbiz and redefining the way disability is portrayed on screen. Ahead of her end-times thriller The Rapture, the star talks about being a Doctor Who badass and why her husband finds her job hysterical The day I met Ruth Madeley in a hotel in central London was the peak of the last heatwave, the buttons on traffic lights almost too hot to touch.
Eerily, this is a major theme of The Rapture, the BBC’s new adaptation of Liz Jensen’s 2009 bestseller. It’s set in a children’s secure psychiatric unit, and the 38-year-old actor plays Gabs, a clinical psychologist recently paralysed in a car accident that killed her husband. She becomes transfixed by the inmate Bethany – a surly, biting performance from India Amarteifio who has been convicted of killing her own mother.
Gabs is hard-boiled, as far from gullible as you could imagine, and Bethany’s “visions”, which pour out of her in frenetic drawings of faces, disasters, landscapes, don’t fall on fertile ground. Yet Gabs cannot help but notice when they start to come true. In the background, the heat is stultifying and climate crisis activists are begging the world to take notice. “Yes, it’s feeling very timely,” she says wryly.
This is on-brand; her first major role was in Russell T Davies’s Years and Years, the apocalyptic smash hit that ends with a monkey flu pandemic (sorry, spoiler), “and then a year later we were in lockdown. I told Russell: ‘You’re not allowed to write anything else, my nerves can’t take it.’” Continue reading...
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