Sara Vickers

In Endeavour (2013), Sara Vickers gives Joan Thursday a convincing inner life without making a display of every feeling. Her restraint makes Joan worth following even when the investigations themselves feel over-familiar. Shaun Evans and Roger Allam supply much of the programme’s warmth, and Vickers works well within that company. We rate her for the emotional detail she brings to a recurring character.

Her early work was concentrated in theatre, taking in Ibsen, Jacobean tragedy and Shakespeare. The film role of Eilidh in Sunshine on Leith (2013) accompanied the move towards screen work, but Joan was the breakthrough. Across Endeavour from 2013 to 2023, she had time to develop a woman negotiating social constraints. That sustained acquaintance makes her subtle approach easier to appreciate. Watchmen (2019), her first major international credit, offered a much stranger setting and less straightforward access to the people in it.

At the manor in Watchmen, Vickers’s maid, Ms Crookshanks, attends Jeremy Irons’s Adrian Veidt alongside Tom Mison’s manservant, Mr Phillips. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross give these scenes jaunty music, encouraging us to enjoy their strangeness. Vickers fits comfortably into this peculiar household, although the writing keeps our attention on the puzzle surrounding it. We grew impatient with the manor scenes because Damon Lindelof kept withholding the explanations that would give them some purpose. Asking Vickers to make more of an impression would scarcely solve that problem.

As Erin McKee in Guilt (2021), she takes a starring part in contemporary Scottish black comedy-drama. It is a welcome move beyond the period settings that have supplied so much of her screen work. We would like more such opportunities, with room for the emotional nuance that makes Joan persuasive. Start with Endeavour, provided familiar detective plots are a price worth paying for the people around them.