Alice and Steve actress Nicola Walker on playing the ‘mad woman’ everyone wants to shut up
English actress Nicola Walker talks about pivoting from police procedurals to comedy and her ‘Tom Cruise stunt moment’ in a tractor
Nicola Walker is hardly an unknown. She has been a stage and television actor in the UK for 30 years and a star for more than 20. A performer of deep humanity who can take a character from cheeky humour 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.
Her name recognition may not be what it should be outside the UK – though that may soon change with Alice and Steve, which is streaming on Disney+.
A comedy of betrayal and vengeance created and written by Sophie Goodhart (Sex Education, Rivals), Alice and Steve chronicles the epic fallout between two long-time 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 does not begin to describe Alice’s feelings of betrayal or her escalating attempts to break up the couple and punish Steve, which is precisely what drew Walker to the project.
“I hadn’t really read a script where a woman at my age was so recognisably 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 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, quickly followed by a role in Steven Moffat’s 1997 school sitcom Chalk, Walker’s career leans heavily towards dramas, including various police investigations.