Vicky McClure: ‘I would love to see a working-class version of The Crown’

Ten minutes into chatting to Vicky McClure and I’m already asking about Line of Duty... Three years after the finale of the six-season search for corrupt cop “H” left the nation groaning over its improbable ending, a recent news report suggested that we might not have seen the last of McClure’s DI Kate Fleming, nor Adrian Dunbar’s diesel-sucking Ted Hastings. Dunbar, I float gently, seems to think the mega-hit show is returning (“‘Looks like’ Line of Duty is coming back” teased The Times above an interview with Dunbar). “That headline was a corker, wasn’t it?” she laughs. “But then you read the article, and he’s quite rightly said, ‘We’d all love to do it, and until all those stars align, nothing’s happening.’”

Hmmm, is she sure she hasn’t been warned by writer Jed Mercurio not to let anything out of the bag? No, she says, “that’s all on you lot. That’s fine. You crack on, because we would love to, but until we actually say something, or Jed says something, or something gets announced, it’s just headlines.”

So there you have it – and there’s something about being told to “crack on” by the no-nonsense Nottingham-born star that has a definitive ring about it. “I like to be honest,” she tells me, her blue eyes transmitting a striking frankness and teller-of-home-truths sincerity that can be extraordinarily powerful on screen. We’ll still be seeing plenty of her, though. After this summer’s creepy thriller Insomnia on Paramount+, she’ll soon be back in a third series of bomb-squad drama Trigger Point, which began on ITV before moving to Peacock, as well as in Kenneth Branagh’s psychological thriller The Last Disturbance of Madeline Hynde, alongside Jodie Comer and Michael Sheen. She’s forbidden to talk about the latter, but says working with Branagh “was a dream”.

We’re in the National Portrait Gallery, where the National Lottery is celebrating its 30th birthday with a temporary exhibition showcasing 30 stories that exemplify its successes over three decades of funding. They include the help given to the Lionesses – England’s Euro-22-winning women’s football team – and to the film that inspired many young women to take up the game, Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 comedy Bend It Like Beckham.

McClure is giving a speech because the lottery helped fund the film that gave us one of her most memorable characters, skinhead girl Lol in Shane Meadows’ This Is England (2006) – “a film and series that, without working-class voices, would never be told authentically”, as McClure puts it in her speech. She also talks about the funding of Nottingham’s TV Workshop, which she joined at the age of 11 (she’s now 41) – an enterprise that has produced many famous actors over the years, from Samantha Morton to Jack O’Connell and Bella Ramsey. She mentions, too, the fund’s valuable contribution to her Dementia Choir project – the subject of a two-part BBC documentary, as well as a Christmas special – which continues to change people’s lives.

Amid the hubbub, we sneak off to one of the portrait galleries, where McClure sits opposite Peter Lely’s simpering 17th-century portrait of the future Queen Mary – rouged and sumptuously robed in orange silk satin, with tumbling curls. McClure is in a grey rollneck sweater, black boots and trousers, dark hair cut boyishly short. And it is the inequities of the present that are much on her mind.

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She’s furious that the number of people in the arts who come from a working-class background continues to decline. The Television Workshop’s artistic director Alison Rashley describes, in her speech, her shock that 41 years after the workshop was set up “to ensure that working-class regional accents were better represented on screen”, the presence of people from such backgrounds across the film and TV industry as a whole has fallen to just 8 per cent. The day before, a new report by the Sutton Trust suggested that the situation is wholly elitist and prevents young people from poorer homes from accessing careers in the arts. “People are definitely being blocked,” McClure says, pointing out that, without support, the financial imbalances can easily become overpowering.

At the beginning of her own career, after a part in Meadows’ affecting, disturbing A Room for Romeo Brass (1999), she almost gave up. “I did leave the workshop for a short period of time, because I was at a stage in my life where I was finding it really difficult to carry the rejection. I’d done A Room for Romeo Brass, but there was definitely no sign of anything sticking. And it was tough. And then I rang the workshop and went, ‘I’ve made a massive mistake,’ and they allowed me to re-audition. Thank God they did.”

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Of course, the arts have been starved of funding for decades by successive governments – does she expect anything to change under Keir Starmer? “If you look at football, the FA and the bodies that surround football that have financial weight, they put money into grassroots football,” she says. “They ensure that children have pitches and equipment. And I’m sure there’s lots of funding that goes on locally for certain clubs, and that’s how we find these amazing players.

“I feel like our industry needs to do something similar and put something structurally in place, where every streamer, every channel, has a responsibility to tap into the upcoming talent – and that requires financial help, whether that’s fees for attending drama school or the ability to actually function in London, because it’s near on impossible for a lot of people.”

Are we too obsessed with toffs and money, then – Rivals being a case in point? She hasn’t seen it yet, she says, “but I love Danny Dyer. We do Soccer Aid with him and Paddy [Considine]; it’s such a brilliant bunch of people. I love what Rivals is doing. It’s creating a storm, and it sounds like it’s great fun and rather racy. I will watch it.”

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But, she adds, she’d like to see something similar about more ordinary folk. “I would love to see a working-class [The] Crown – something that’s given that much budget and attention, PR and backing.” She is very aware of the vogue for “big kitchen dramas” that make wealth itself part of the appeal of what’s on screen. “People love to see a nice kitchen,” she says. “You know, who wants to film in a poky little kitchen? ... I do.”

This Is England stands as a monument to what is possible if the vision is there. An independent film, it was followed by three TV sequels on Channel 4, the first of which, This Is England ’86, remains a high-water mark for British TV drama in the new millennium. It’s almost a decade since the last series, although many would like to see it return. “I can’t see it happening in the short term,” McClure says. “I speak to Shane on a very regular basis. We live very close to each other in Nottingham, so I’d know.”

So she does see him revisiting those characters in the long term? “Yeah, I do. I’d love to. I think everyone in the show would love to. I think Shane would love to. It’d be a very sad day if he said, that’s it, I’ve shut up shop on that whole world, because it became such a world, you know – the characters were real and it felt so raw. It has the heart of the working class completely embodied in that show; the accents, too. But everyone’s on their own journey now, and that’s brilliant.”

She’s referring to the way in which many of the drama’s alumni have gone on to further success, from Stephen Graham to Joe Gilgun (in Sky 1’s Brassic) to Michael Socha (star of BBC One’s recent Showtrial) to Perry Fitzpatrick (in Sherwood).

In 2019, she and Fitzpatrick made a remarkable drama about coercive control, I Am Nicola, with director Dominic Savage. Her performance as a woman slowly realising that the oppressive nature of her relationship is not something she can easily extricate herself from is among her very best work; every line in it feels lived.

Since then, McClure stresses, the situation in the UK has altered for the better. “The law has changed,” she says, referring to the effect of the 2015 introduction of a controlling or coercive behaviour offence and a 2021 amendment, which extended its protections to partners and family members who are not cohabiting – “We’ve come on leaps and bounds in terms of behaviours towards women and what’s deemed OK.” She stresses the need to “keep putting a spotlight” on the issue, though. She watched Queen Camilla’s recent ITV documentary about domestic violence against women, Her Majesty the Queen: Behind Closed Doors, and notes that “years ago, from what we learned in that documentary, [coercive behaviour] was just the norm”.

“I’m sure people would have watched that documentary – I know that people who watched I Am Nicola got in touch with me and said, ‘It just made me realise, I don’t need to be going through this’ ... I mean, that’s the power of telly – how it can ignite somebody to change the way they live their life.”

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It’s important to remember that abuse doesn’t just happen to the young and inexperienced, McClure adds. “It doesn’t matter what age you are, it’s all about self-belief and support. If you haven’t got a good support network around you, if you’re being told that you’re not worth [much], then that’s how you’ll feel. It’s a cycle of behaviour, and we need to spend time making sure that we’re educating people properly about it.”

She feels a sense of enormous urgency, too, about the cause she has championed in her Our Dementia Choir programmes for the BBC. She knew nothing about dementia before she “cut my first ribbon”, she says, shortly after winning the Best Actress Bafta in 2011. But when she opened a Memory Walk for the Nottingham branch of the Alzheimer’s Society, she explains, she looked it up and read about “old people with memory loss. And I thought, well, that’s terribly sad. But now I’m deep into so much work, research, connections, real-life comings and goings within my own family.

“My Nonna, Iris, who is the reason for Our Dementia Choir, had it. Since then, my Nonna on the other [maternal] side also had dementia towards the end of her life.” McClure’s grandad, Ralph, with whom she made a programme, My Grandad’s War, for ITV last year, about his experience of manning a landing craft on D-Day, has also been diagnosed. “I have friends of all ages, with all different types of dementia.”

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She sees “people living well” with the disease, she adds, “but I know that many aren’t living well, and that’s because of misdiagnosis and the lack of support, financial backing, the constant sort of mis-hope of drug treatments, of ‘Oh, we found something, but we’re not allowed to have it’, you know? It’s a rocky, rocky road. This is the UK’s biggest killer. So it has to be a much bigger priority for the government. They have to put more money into it, because we’re all going to face it. And it’s one of the diseases that people fear most.”

Has she noticed any telltale signs of dementia in either the incumbent or incoming president of the US? “No,” she says. “To be honest, I’m not well versed enough in American politics to give you a solid answer.” Are the rest of us too obsessed with American culture generally, I wonder – does it get in the way of us being able to tell our own stories in this country? She points out that “not on purpose or by trying to make a point, I’ve just never been to LA. I’ve never needed to. I’ve got a career and life over here.” (She lives with the Welsh actor and filmmaker Jonny Owen, whom she met in 2012 during the shooting of the film Svengali, which Owen wrote, and the pair started a production company, Build Your Own Films, in 2021 – its first fruit, Without Sin, starring McClure, aired on ITV in 2022.)

“I think there’s a lot of great things that we take from America,” she adds. “But I live in Nottingham. I live in that world, you know? I don’t live in the industry, day in, day out. I wake up and have a bowl of Frosties. I am still, very much, feet on the ground, because I don’t want to get sucked into the stuff.”

In November, the National Lottery marks 30 years since the first draw. Thanks to National Lottery players, £50bn has since been raised for good causes including Our Dementia Choir