Susan Tully spent years in front of the camera before she went behind it, and it shows: she directs as an actor's ally, patient with talk, unfussy about tension, and best when two people sit across a table with something to hide.
Fi1m perspective
Two people, a table and a file of paper. The interview rooms in Line of Duty are the show's engine, and they are the hardest thing in it to direct, because they are tense and all talk, and there is nothing to do but hold your nerve and let the questions land. Jed Mercurio writes them; the director's job is to keep still. By series 5, in 2019, that job belonged to Tully, who directed the last two episodes, including the ninety-minute finale, and was the first woman to direct the series at all.
She came to it the long way round. She was a child actress in Grange Hill from 1981 to 1984 and then Michelle Fowler in EastEnders from 1985 to 1995, and she stopped acting in 1998 to retrain as a director on a BBC course. Her first job behind the camera was back on EastEnders, fifteen episodes across 1998 and 1999, in a multi-camera format that gave her no room to hide. Then the apprentice years: The Bill, Silent Witness, The Story of Tracy Beaker in 2002. From the 2010s the work got bigger. She directed the last block of The A Word in 2016 and led its second series, took blocks of Britannia and Tin Star, then Line of Duty, then a run of Strike adaptations, Lethal White in 2020, Troubled Blood in 2022, The Ink Black Heart in 2024, with Too Close in 2021 and Maryland in 2023 alongside. She has said of the switch that she "had a voice in the back of my head saying, 'Direct,' but I didn't have the confidence to say it out loud." Once she did, the industry took her at her word.
What she does well is what you would hope a former actor would do well. Her notes are short and practical rather than theoretical, and she prefers a relaxed set to one wound up for effect, which is why her dialogue scenes feel lived rather than staged. She is good with children and with people who have never acted, as Tracy Beaker showed. We sat forward through the interview scenes of Line of Duty's fifth series, barely aware of how long they had run, and then felt the plot creak around them, as our review says the later series do. We would not lay the creaking at her door. We cannot pretend her episodes escaped it either.
There is no cinematographer or editor we can point to as a regular partner; her steadiest collaborator is a production company, Snowed-In, four times over. That is the shape of a working television director, and it is an honourable one: the material changes, the manner does not. If you want to see what she does, pick a Strike and watch the scenes where two people talk across a table. That is where she has always done her best work.
Biography
Susan Tully, also credited as Sue Tully, is an English television director and former actress. Born on 20 October 1967 in Highgate, London, she began her career as an actress, playing Suzanne Ross in Grange Hill and Michelle Fowler in EastEnders from the soap's first episode in 1985 until 1995.
Tully transitioned to directing in the late 1990s. She has directed episodes of numerous British television series, including EastEnders, Silent Witness, The Musketeers, Britannia, Tin Star, The A Word and Strike. She directed two episodes of Line of Duty series five in 2019, including the 90-minute finale.
