Nicola Walker is especially good at showing the strain behind a capable woman's composure. We value her willingness to let hurt people behave badly, and her skill at drawing laughter from anger that can still do damage.
Fi1m perspective
In Alice and Steve (2026), Nicola Walker lets Alice's fury get well ahead of any reasonable grievance. Her exchanges with Jemaine Clement have the impatience of people who know each other well enough to dispense with good manners. When they begin using that knowledge to hurt each other, the friendship remains believable. We laughed at the excess of her anger, then felt for her because her retaliation makes it clear how much she misses her friend. Walker gives us reasons to care about Alice without making her conduct any easier to excuse.
That willingness to show uncomfortable feelings sits alongside a long run of composed professionals. As the MI5 analyst Ruth Evershed in Spooks (2003–2011, with a break), she established herself as a television lead, making analytical dialogue sound like something she had just thought through. DCI Cassie Stuart in Unforgotten (2015–2021) and divorce lawyer Hannah Stern in The Split (2018–2024) put that intelligence under different pressures. The recurring pleasure is watching her maintain a professional manner while allowing enough uncertainty through to make the person credible.
The comedy in Alice and Steve gives her more room to be unreasonable. With Clement, she makes Goodhart's sharper lines sound addressed to a particular friend, with all the accumulated irritation that implies. There is no sense of a performer pausing to present a joke. Alice's claim to be acting as a concerned mother is complicated by the jealousy Walker allows us to see. She does not ask for sympathy at the expense of that selfishness, and the performance keeps the feud interesting when the revenge becomes busy.
There are limits to what she can do for an uneven script. In Alice and Steve, Alice's anger receives more attention than the younger woman whose relationship has provoked it. Walker makes that imbalance easy to overlook for a while, but the romantic complication remains less persuasive than the friendship. Try it for Walker and Clement, with modest expectations of the romance. Fi1m
Biography
Nicola Walker is an English actress. Born on 15 May 1970 in Stepney, East London, she began her screen career with a role in the 1994 film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
She is known for her long-running television roles, including Ruth Evershed in the spy drama Spooks (2002–2011) and DCI Cassie Stuart in Unforgotten (2015–2021). Other credits include appearances in River (2015), Collateral (2018) and Inside No. 9 (2014).
In 2026 she starred as Alice in the comedy-drama series Alice and Steve.
