Nicola Walker is not new to being famous. She has been a stage and television actor in the U.K. for 30 years and a star for more than 20. A performer of deep humanity who can take a character from cheeky humor to gimlet-eye resolution as quick as a weather change on the English coast, she has won an Olivier award (for “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”) and received multiple BAFTA nominations for her work in television.
In 2015 alone, she headlined three hit series (“Last Tango in Halifax,” “Unforgotten” and “River”) and a Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.” (“Even my own family members were getting tired of seeing my face,” she says.) Since then, she has starred in a National Theater production of “The Corn Is Green” as well as the TV series “Marriage,” “Annika,” “Mary and George” and “The Split.”
So Walker knows the business. What she didn’t know, at least until she did the new comedy “Alice and Steve,” which dropped on Hulu on Monday, was a Disney-owned-streamer level of publicity. The set-visit stories, the many interviews, the debut on La Croisette at Canneseries festival (where “Alice and Steve” won multiple awards, including best series) and a recent press trip to New York (where I spoke with her, via Zoom.)
“It’s definitely a different level,” she says. “If you do press for the BBC or ITV or production companies in England, you’re led into a small dark room with some sandwiches and awful coffee and 10 people come in and talk to you.”
This may explain why her name recognition is perhaps not what it should be in the U.S. Not that Walker cares — she’s thrilled that streaming has made it possible for 20-somethings to approach her on the Tube to gush about her role in the early aughts series “MI6” (formerly known as “Spooks”).
But those of us who have loved her well and long from across the pond do; it’s about time Walker got some good old-fashioned American adulation, which, with any luck, “Alice and Steve” will provide.
Nicola Walker as Alice in Hulu’s “Alice and Steve,” which won best series at Canneseries this year.
(Lara Cornell / Hulu)
A gasp-laugh-cringe-inducing comedy of betrayal and vengeance created and written by Sophie Goodhart (“Sex Education,” “Rivals”), “Alice and Steve” chronicles the epic fallout between two longtime besties after Alice (Walker) discovers that Steve (Jemaine Clement) has slept with, and wants to keep seeing, her 26-year old daughter Izzy (Yali Topol Margalith).
Over-the-top doesn’t begin to describe Alice’s feelings of betrayal or her escalating attempts to break up the couple and punish Steve for his betrayal, which is precisely what drew Walker to the project.
“I hadn’t really read a script where a woman at my age was so recognizably full of love and rage and joy,” she says. “Those shades of anger that we experience as we get older? Women are not meant to show those levels.”
Much of the pre-debut coverage has fixated on Walker’s “leap” to comedy. Though her screen debut was as part of the quirky folk-singing duo in “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” quickly followed by a role in Steven Moffat’s 1997 school sitcom “Chalk,” Walker’s career leans heavily toward dramas, including many crime various police investigations.
“Some journalist recently counted how many cops I’ve played and it was a terrible number,” she says. That terrible number is eight, though, as mentioned above, two aired in the same year, prompting the Guardian to run a comparison under the headline “Who’s the best new TV cop, ‘River’s’ Nicola Walker or ‘Unforgotten’s’ Nicola Walker?”
But, she says, back in the 1990s, “if you weren’t the hot girlfriend or the young wife, which I just wasn’t, there really was only police officer.”
Still, even when dealing with corpses, Walker’s characters can deftly deliver a one-liner or a bad pun when the mood needs lightening; she doesn’t really think along drama versus comedy lines.
“You’re looking for a good script and I don’t know any actor who views a script like that,” she says. “I do know people who are very well known for comedy — people who have funny bones like Jemaine. I don’t pretend for a second to have that. I’m looking for a person to believe in, and it’s light and dark. It’s always a mixture.”
“I didn’t view it as such a big deal,” she adds with a laugh. “It’s only now people are saying it that I’m thinking, “Oh, crikey, maybe it is a big deal.”
Jemaine Clement and Nicola Walker in “Alice and Steve”: “I do know people who are very well known for comedy — people who have funny bones like Jemaine. I don’t pretend for a second to have that. I’m looking for a person to believe in, and it’s light and dark. It’s always a mixture.”
(Lara Cornell / Hulu)
Comedy or drama, Walker was excited to play a woman who really lets go.
Alice, she says, “feels like the mad woman shouting in the middle of the room who everyone is trying to shut up, but she feels like she’s right. And she’s proven right, in my opinion,” Walker adds, “but maybe she should have found a better way to go about it. She definitely needs some therapy.”
As an actor, however, the role felt surprisingly healthy. Walker often plays professional women forced to button down their emotions more than occasionally, in part because the struggle not to cry is considered more powerful, and interesting to watch, than the tears themselves. “As a result,” Walker says, “you’re keeping hold of this emotion through the day, the week, two weeks.”
Alice, on the other hand, lets it all out, leaving Walker feeling “light as a feather. Everything that woman felt went down the lens, so in the end, I actually felt good.”
Though Walker says she is not often asked to play women who can be as “selfish and cruel” as Alice, her characters often find themselves making bad choices while caught in a maelstrom of love and fury.
In the U.S., the actor is probably best known for “Last Tango in Halifax,” for which she received two BAFTA nominations. The series chronicles the joining of two very different families after a youthful romance between two grandparents — Alan Buttershaw (Derek Jacobi) and Celia Dawson (Anne Reid) — is rekindled.
Walker plays Alan’s daughter Gillian, a sheep farmer with a troubled past who often clashes with Celia’s daughter Caroline (“Happy Valley’s” Sarah Lancashire), the headmistress of a posh private school. Their scenes of fracture and forgiveness become as strong an emotional spine as their parents’ late-in-life romance.
For Walker, working with Jacobi, Reid and Lancashire, was the golden ticket. “Those three, who are titans of British theater and screen, carry all that ability and public renown so lightly on their backs,” she says. “I don’t know how they did it, but they made the rest of us so relaxed.”
During what she calls her favorite afternoon on any set, the four of them were waiting to go on, when someone suggested they name the ways they’ve died on screen. “Derek had the longest list, obviously, but I’ve met some appalling ends.”
When she was was young, Walker says, she thought acting would involve a lot more running and jumping, which, by in large, it hasn’t (unless you count walking across London’s Millennium Bridge countless times in high heels as she did in “The Split”).
Nicola Walker, Josh Bolt and Sarah Lancashire in a scene from “Last Tango in Halifax.”
(Matt Squire / PBS)
“Last Tango,” however, did provide her with what she calls her “Tom Cruise stunt moment.” Walker had learned much about handling sheep and farm equipment, but when a scene called for her to back up Gillian’s 1970s tractor, a stunt double appeared. “I was mortified. Then she tries about three times and walks off saying that the tractor was too old,” she recalls. “But I knew that tractor, so I said, ‘That’s OK, I can do it,’ and I backed it up around a corner in the first take.
“It was the one time I felt really cool, my version of Tom Cruise hanging on a plane with no ropes.”
“Alice and Steve” also required her to do a few stunts in a series of intense scenes toward the end of the series, which Walker found exhilarating and worrisome. “I say I love doing stunts, but I was thinking, ‘Please don’t be the middle-aged woman who breaks her ankle jumping from a small height.’”
With 30-odd years in television, Walker has benefited from, and anguished over, the many changes in the industry, including the increasing number of female producers and executives.
“[Producer] Jane Featherstone got me the job on ‘Touching Evil.’ Then she started a production company that did ‘Spooks’ and then another that did ‘River’ and ‘The Split.’ I very much owe my career to her moving up, so I saw that change in the business where women were moving into positions of power.”
Streaming too has increased the reach of her shows, but she’s personally torn about the binge model.
“I keep thinking, all this fabulous effort, months and months of work, and someone like me, I will binge something in two nights,” she says.
The one thing that has her, and many people, truly worried is AI. Walker snorts when discussing a recent AI-generated “announcement” that she and Cillian Murphy would be starring in a noir thriller — ”Wouldn’t that be great?” she says — but last year, she was one of thousands who signed an open letter demanding more transparency about and protection against body scanning.
“No one has ever tried to scan me,” she says, “but that’s because I’m much older and they wouldn’t. What Equity [the British performing arts union] was pointing out is that young actors thinking they have to allow it, which they don’t. I feel it’s really important to protect the generation that’s coming in now.“
Amid the flurry of publicity for “Alice and Steve,” Walker isn’t sure what comes next; the series ends with a very dramatic cliffhanger, which could set up a second season. Or not. Walker is definitely game, though she’s happy either way.
“We were going to leave everything on the dance floor with this one,” she says, “and it works as a stand alone. We would love to do more, but if we never hear from them again, it will be one of the favorite endings of anything I’ve ever done.”
Meanwhile, she says, she’s looking for the next job. What about making real that hallucinated series with Cillian Murphy?
“Wouldn’t it be awful,” she says, laughing uproariously, “if that they tracked that thing down and it came from my IP address?”
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