Charlie Murphy gets the parts a plot needs rather than the parts it loves, the kidnapped girl, the union organiser, and plays each as a person with a life outside the scene. That is rarer than it sounds; Happy Valley shows why.
Fi1m perspective
In Happy Valley (2014) Ann Gallagher is the young woman whose kidnap sets the story going, which on paper makes her a device: the thing the villain does and the thing the policewoman must undo. Sally Wainwright hands the series to Sarah Lancashire, and hands Charlie Murphy the consequences. What happens to Ann after the first episode we will not describe. What we can say is that Murphy plays it as a woman to whom something has been done, not as a plot point with a face, and that the series is careful about that difference in a way most crime dramas never bother to be.
It is a habit she brought with her. Murphy started in small Irish television roles from 2009 and was first noticed at home as Siobhán Delaney in Love/Hate (2010–2014), a crime drama in which she was again the person the men's decisions landed on. There was a film, '71 (2014), and a run as Queen Iseult in The Last Kingdom (2015), and alongside all of it a good deal of theatre, three productions with Enda Walsh and one with Mark O'Rowe. Then Wainwright cast her twice, and Happy Valley ran until 2023.
Peaky Blinders (2017–2019) gave her Jessie Eden, a trade unionist who existed. By series four Steven Knight's saga had grown grand and slow, and most of the people in it were practising a stare. Murphy's Eden argues about wages. We had stopped expecting anyone in that series to talk about anything but Tommy Shelby, and the plain relief we felt when she started talking about pay is, we think, exactly the effect Knight wanted and could not get from anyone else. Murphy herself put it simply: "It was great timing playing Jessie. She is based on a real person and fought the battles we are fighting now for equal pay."
The reservation is not about the acting. It is that in fifteen years she has been the best supporting player in other people's shows more often than she has carried one of her own, and the international series since, Halo (2022–2024) and Obsession (2023), have not changed that. Nobody has yet written her a lead that asks as much of her as Ann Gallagher did in a part that was, technically, third billing.
Until someone does, watch Happy Valley, and watch what Murphy does in the scenes where the script has moved on and she has not.
Biography
Charlie Murphy is an Irish actress. She trained at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin from 2006 to 2008.
She is known for her roles as Ann Gallagher in the BBC series Happy Valley (2014–2023) and Jessie Eden in Peaky Blinders (2017–2019). Other television credits include Siobhán Delaney in Love/Hate (2010–2014), Queen Iseult in The Last Kingdom (2015) and Makee in Halo (2022).
Murphy has won four Irish Film and Television Awards, including for Love/Hate, Happy Valley and Peaky Blinders. Her stage work includes a performance as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion at the Abbey Theatre, for which she received the Irish Times Irish Theatre Award.
