Nicola Walker: ‘People used to sidle up to me on the tube – it was strange’-Meghna Amin-Entertainment – Metro

Nicola Walker has revealed some bizarre fan encounters from her Spooks days (Picture: BBC/KUDOS)

Spooks actress Nicola Walker has revealed the bizarre fan interactions she’s faced on public transport, from cryptic messages on newspapers to strangers whispering codenames.

The Annika and Unforgotten star played Ruth Evershed in the BBC spy drama, which ran from 2002 to 2011, alongside the likes of Peter Firth and Matthew Macfadyden.

More than a decade later, Spooks’ fans remain loyal and share their love for the series with her in rather strange ways.

Recalling these encounters, she told Metro: ‘That used to happen in the Spooks days, they were the best, and when I say strange I mean in a good way, because they were incredible encounters with fans.

‘They were usually spy craft, so someone would sidle up on the tube, lean over and say to me, “The Eagle is flying tonight at ten past six and will land at Whitehall,” and then they would just walk away.

‘I had a Post-It note left on a newspaper on the tube once, they looked at me, put the paper down and got up and walked away and I looked down and it said, “I love Spooks”.’ 

That’s not the only character people have mistaken Nicola for really being.

The stage and screen actress is now reprising her role as Hannah Stern in The Split, as the beloved family drama returns for a two-part special.

The series first aired in 2018 and last three seasons, following the Defoe family through familial romance, affairs, grief, and the trials and tribulations of modern marriage.

It quickly became a fan-favourite, with Nicola sharing the moment she knew it turned into a sucess.

She told us: ‘I realized they were enjoying it when I started getting people in the supermarket and on the tube coming up to me and saying, these are quotes, it happens quite a lot: “I wish you’d have done my divorce,” and then telling me about their divorces.

The Defoes are back for two specials of The Split (Picture: BBC / BBC Studios / Sister)

‘Me occasionally having to say, “I actually don’t know that much about family lawyer, I’d be a terrible family lawyer”.

‘And then people saying whether or not they were team Christie or team Nathan, that’s that started happening quite a lot. And I thought, “oh, people are enjoying this as much as we enjoy filming it”.’ 

Teasing what we can expect from the new episodes, airing after Christmas, she added: ‘What’s brilliant about them is that you get to see where they are a few years on. There’s no sense we’re picking up where we left off, we are not, stuff has moved on, their lives have moved on.

‘And we get to see them out of their normal environment in Barcelona for my daughter’s wedding, and it’s all very sunshiny, and exactly what we all need in dark December here.

‘But of course, the Defoes are the Defoes and there are little implosions, emotional explosions throughout this wedding weekend.’

Nicola returns as Hannah Stern, with Stephen Mangan back as her ex-husband Nathan (Picture: BBC / SISTER)

Talking about the programme returning  two years after the third (and what was thought to be the final) season, she went on: ‘We were all thrilled we were getting to come back and see each other. We were very happy, in whatever way it was coming back, we just wanted to be in front of the camera with each other saying Abi’s [writer Abi Morgan] words.

‘We didn’t expect it to come back. Abi had written what I think is a brilliant ending to the season, I thought what was so clever about her ending was that you had a sense that these people were going to get up and live their lives, they were all going to keep going.

‘I think endings are really hard to write, but I thought Abi had written a beautiful one, but we’d always secretly, well actually, not that secretly, we all very openly hoped that there might be a time further down the line.

‘So when this happened, we were just thrilled and to get to do it in another country, to take these characters out of the environment that we’re all used to seeing them in, that felt really exciting as well, because the great joke for me when I read the scripts was, “Oh, they’re just even more like themselves in Barcelona, we haven’t lost anything, they are just like themselves turned up to 11”.’

The specials come two years after the third (and what was thought to be the final) season (Picture: BBC / SISTER)

Her on-screen ex-husband Stephen Mangan also spoke to Metro about returning to his old role, likening it to ‘putting an old pair of shoes back on’.

‘We’ve worked together for a few years now making this show, and so it felt like an exciting treat, especially to go away to a place like Barcelona in the spring and film on beaches and in vineyards. I mean, how lucky are we?’ he said.

The final season of the show ended with Hannah and Nathan embarking on their life as divorcees, the former finding herself as an individual, and the latter starting a young family again.

Despite fans begging for them to come back together, the new series leaves Hannah embarking on her own new journey of romance.

‘I think the easy trap to fall into would be to go back to what we did in the earliest series, and make it about that marriage,’ Nathan commented.

Nathan and Hannah’s relationship is officially in the past (Picture: BBC / SISTER)

‘But that marriage has run its course, and the reason I think that she wanted to stop when she stopped before, is that that story of that relationship unfolding and then divorcing had been told so to then go back and crack it open again and get them back together, probably would have felt a bit forced.

‘So, what do you do? Well, you look at what happens next, and Nathan’s obviously already found somebody, and suddenly has this young family, and is just embarking on raising a family from scratch all over again.

‘So the question is, then, what happens to Hannah? What’s her next move? And focusing on that made a lot of sense.’

Creator Abi added: ‘Every series of The Split has ended with a wedding, part of the rhythm of it is that we’re often dealing with the fallout or the build-up to someone getting married or the pre-nup or the financial reckoning after a couple split up, so I loved the idea of taking the family to somewhere else, a different country, and a way of taking them out of all the armour they normally have.

‘Hannah doesn’t have her briefcase and her high heels and her suits, and her expansive, walk through, urban London and long glass lines and modern offices in the centre of town. It felt like a way of getting into the soft underbelly of this very different moment in time for this family.

Creator Abi Morgan teased the new specials saw Hannah at a ‘lost weekend’ after the open-ended finale of season three (Picture: BBC / Sister)

‘We’d left series three with Hannah on this open prairie of like, “It’s going to be okay, but I don’t know what comes next”.

‘So I guess for me, the chance to go back and just let the incredible number of fans who had written to me and said, I’d love to know what happened, I’m just going to send you a postcard and go here you are.

‘So to me, it’s a postcard from the edge that says, “Look, here you go, here’s where they are”. This is where Hannah is and I didn’t want the series three to end with this idea that Hannah had to be in a relationship to be complete. It was always the idea that Hannah needs to really put herself front and center and find herself and focus on herself and understand herself.

‘But when we meet her at the start of the show, her kids are nearly cooked, her eldest daughter is getting married. She’s done very well in her career, but she’s used to living on her own now in the family home.’

Abi went on: ‘We’re really capturing Hannah at this kind of lost weekend, and you put that with the kind of dynamism of a wedding and the hen nights and the stag dos and the dancing on the beach and the sangria and the meeting up with the exes and the connections with your past and the arrival of the new… it just felt like it was a great melting pot for drama.’

The Split continues to show that ‘nobody lives in a perfect family’ (Picture: BBC / SISTER)

Talking about the special episodes landing at the perfect time for bingeing leftover Christmas chocolates on the sofa, she added: ‘It was always meant to land as nugget at Christmas when there’s a lot of tensions. We have expectations of being in the perfect family, and Christmas has to be when we’re at our happiest. And we all know that Christmas isn’t always like that.

‘There’s great moments of fun and joy, but it also can reveal the tensions and the divisions and the things that don’t quite work. And I guess I want a show that is filled with joy and love, but it’s also not afraid of showing its divisions and showing that it’s not a perfect family.

‘So I hope an audience will watch it and love that about it, love the fact that, although we’re looking at this kind of quite aspirational family, they’ve got those same levels of dysfunction and madness and the rest that all of us have in families.

‘There is no such thing as a perfect family. We only have to look at our own royal family, for example, or the celebrity family like The Kardashians, any of those, and we see that nobody lives in a perfect family.’

The Split: Barcelona will air on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday 29 and Monday 30 December. Both episodes will be available on BBC iPlayer from 29 December.

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