Kelly Macdonald loves to keep her audience guessing. After the drama of Line of Duty, the actor is now playing a secret agent in a wartime thriller. She tells Tim Lewis about big breaks and avoiding the spotlight
At 9pm, on a Sunday in early May last year, almost one in four of us on our scared, fractious, divided island hunkered down to watch the finale of the sixth series of the BBC police procedural Line of Duty. It was the largest television audience for a drama in Britain since modern records began almost 20 years ago. It was also a rare moment of mass connection, between genders, ages and demographics, that usually only occurs during football tournaments or the Olympics. One that felt especially heightened because of the crappy, house-bound year we’d all just lived through. Mainly, though, it was just fizzing, nerve-jangling TV.
The woman at the centre of it all, DCI Joanne Davidson, also known as the 45-year-old Scottish actor Kelly Macdonald, was not one of the 16 million people watching. For the previous six episodes, we’d tried to figure out just how much of a bad egg she was – whether she was a “bent” copper, in the lingo of the AC-12, Line of Duty’s dogged anti-corruption unit. The denouement was a true water-cooler moment, even if many of us had not seen a water cooler, or even a colleague, for 15 months.
