“I’m a bad liar. Everything shows on my face and I’m not good at masking how I feel,” says actor Nicola Walker. “It’s easier at work because I can channel it into my character, or I can go neutral in a role. But in real life, my face gets me into heaps of trouble.”
Through her roles on TV shows including Spooks, Unforgiven, Last Tango in Halifax and Abi Morgan’s glossy divorce drama The Split, Walker has cornered the market in weary exasperation. With a single eye roll, she can do the work of five pages of a script. Hers is a face that invites a lingering closeup. “Sometimes I watch back and go, ‘ooh, those frown lines are getting really ingrained’,” she says, ruefully. “I’m, like, ‘can we have some more light between the eyes please?’”
Walker adds that she won’t be having any tweakments because, “I’m too much of a coward and, with my luck, I’d end up looking weird and I would never work again”.
“I’ve worked with lots of people who have had bits and bobs done and look incredible. But I need to work, and I live in fear of it going wrong.”
Walker, 56, is parked on a sofa in the lounge of a smart hotel just off London’s Embankment. Next to her is 26-year-old rising star Yali Topol Margalith, last seen in the BBC’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and, before that, historical drama House of David. It’s early morning and the pair are impeccably turned out in summer dresses and high heels, though Walker shows me her handbag where she has stashed a pair of comfy trainers. “For the journey home,” she grins.
