Jayde Adams

Watch Leanne in Alma's Not Normal while Alma is talking. Jayde Adams does not pull focus and does not wait for her line; she listens, with the slightly tired patience of someone who has heard this plan before and knows how it ends. It is a plain piece of acting and it is harder than it looks, because the series around her is loud, and the easy choice would have been to be louder.

Adams did not get here by the usual road. She started in youth theatre and dance in Bristol, studied drama at the University of Glamorgan, then went to London and worked the drag and cabaret circuit as an Adele impersonator before beginning stand-up in 2011. The stand-up is big: songs, grief, class and a great deal of noise, and the stage persona could fill a room on its own. Her account of the route is blunt: "I want to be an actor, but because I’ve got no nepotism available to me, I’ve had to do it via standup." Television parts followed from 2015, small ones, and then Sophie Willan cast her as Leanne in the Alma's Not Normal pilot in 2020, with series in 2021 and 2024.

What is odd, and interesting, is how little of the stage Adams brings to the screen. When we first watched Alma's Not Normal, Siobhan Finneran and Lorraine Ashbourne took most of our attention, and Leanne looked for a couple of episodes like a sidekick. We underrated her, and were quietly pleased to be wrong: when Leanne's life stops being a subplot and becomes a problem of its own, it lands because Adams has spent the preceding hours being so steady that we had stopped checking on her. Willan writes her the space to do that, and the two of them play the friendship as something old enough to survive being taken for granted.

The understatement cuts both ways. Ruby Speaking (2023), the Bristol call-centre sitcom she created, wrote and led, was built around the same quiet, decent woman rather than the stand-up act, and most critics found it gentler and slower than they had expected from her; it ran for one series. The lead in Greatest Days (2023) and guest parts in Good Omens (2019), The Outlaws (2021–2022), Beyond Paradise (2023) and Midsomer Murders (2025) show that casting directors have noticed her, though none of these has yet asked for the whole of her.

That is the question for whatever comes next. Adams has shown she can be the one who listens. Somebody now needs to write her a part that lets her be the woman at the end of the sofa and the woman on the stage at the same time, and we would like to see what happens when they do.