In The Responder Adelayo Adedayo spends much of the night shift in a passenger seat and makes it the second most interesting place in the series to look. She keeps score, gives nothing away, and turns what could have been a foil into a person with her own trouble.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing Adelayo Adedayo does in The Responder is not talk. Rachel Hargreaves is the probationer stuck in Chris Carson's car for the night, and while Martin Freeman comes apart in the driver's seat, Adedayo sits beside him and watches, and lets us see her filing everything away. There is trouble of her own at home, and she is not going to mention it, and the not mentioning is where the performance lives. It is a part that in most police dramas exists so the lead has someone to explain himself to. Here it is a second story, told mostly in glances at the windscreen.
She came to this by way of comedy. After small television parts from 2007 she was the lead, as Viva Bennett, in the sitcom Some Girls (2012–2014), and by her own account it settled the question of what she was for: "I dropped out of law school because of Some Girls." Timewasters (2017–2019) kept her in ensemble comedy. The Capture (2019) was the turn towards drama, The Responder (2022–2024) was where it was noticed, and Supacell (2024), in which she plays Dionne Ofori, gives her a lead in something with no jokes to hide behind. We have not reviewed the others and will not pretend to have weighed them.
What she does well, on the evidence of the one series we can speak to, is play a person who believes in the rules while sitting next to someone who has thrown them out, and register the strain of that without a speech. We found, somewhere in the early hours of the first episode, that we were watching her rather than Freeman when he was the one talking, because her silence was doing more work than his lines, and we were slightly cross with the series for not giving her more of the car. That is a compliment to Adedayo and a small complaint about Tony Schumacher's script, which knows the stolen-drugs plot is the least interesting thing in it and still spends time on it that Rachel could have used.
The honest caveat is that the dramatic side of her career is still short. A decade of sitcom taught her timing and how to hold her own in a crowded scene, and both show in The Responder, but a probationer keeping score is not the same as carrying the weight of a series alone, and we have not yet seen her asked to.
So for now the recommendation is narrow and firm. Watch The Responder for Freeman, as everyone will, and then watch the passenger seat.
Biography
Adelayo Adedayo is a British actress. She was born on 18 December 1988 in Dagenham, London, and is of Yoruba Nigerian descent. She studied law at Brunel University and trained part-time at the Identity School of Acting.
Adedayo made her feature film debut in Sket (2011). On television she is known for her roles in the BBC Three sitcom Some Girls (2012–2014) and the ITV2 series Timewasters (2017–2019). She plays Rachel Hargreaves in the BBC One series The Responder (2022–2024), opposite Martin Freeman, and Dionne Ofori in the Netflix series Supacell (2024). In 2023 she received a British Academy Television Award nomination for her performance in The Responder.
