The last time I saw Annabel Scholey on screen, she was making a champagne-cork-popping entrance into the mile-high club in the raciest opening scene of the year – red stilettos wrapped around the waist of playboy showjumper Rupert Campbell-Black on Concorde in the hit Disney Plus series Rivals. By the episode’s end, she had delivered the mother of all public slaps before hightailing it in his vintage sports car. It was quite the cameo.
Today, I catch Scholey, 40, in a less compromising position: cocooned in a cosy grey sweater, speaking from a hotel room in Holland where she’s filming the second season of The Couple Next Door, Channel 4’s sultry suburban thriller. “I thought that by my late thirties, I’d be doing less of these sexy roles but I’m getting more,” she laughs. “And even if that’s terrifying, it’s also amazing because I feel like the industry is starting to shift.”
The Split, the much-loved BBC legal drama and arguably Scholey’s biggest role to date, played no small part in moving the needle. “It showed us stories of women in their forties and fifties talking about things like menopause and showing us to be sexy and getting sexier because we know ourselves better.”
Before it came to an end in 2022, The Split followed the trials and tribulations of the Defoe women at their top-flight family law firm where seemingly every office was a corner office. The series balanced zesty procedural elements (more than once, a client would enlist the Defoes’ services with the opening: “Someone said you’re the best”) with personal turmoil of the familial, marital, and extramarital kind.
At the heart of the show were the Defoe sisters: the ever-responsible Hannah (Nicola Walker), flighty Rose (Fiona Button) and chaotic, desperate-to-prove-herself middle child Nina who is always running late, a trail of legal papers wafting behind her high heels (black this time). There’s cause for her tardiness, though, namely the struggles with addiction, shoplifting, affairs, and motherhood that dog her across three delicious seasons – and not necessarily in that order.
Scholey was, at one point during the filming of season two, going through her own divorce. “That was very surreal,” she says now over Zoom. “Being surrounded at home by all the books about child custody while also filming it at work… There were a couple of moments where I thought, Oh God, I think this is a bit too much – a bit too close to home, but I had my Defoe ladies, and they genuinely really did pull me through it. They’re like family.”
It’s a good thing, too, Scholey adds, that she was able to keep herself busy working – and that her work involved playing someone like Nina. “She’s an adventurer and that kept me quite lighthearted,” says Scholey. “I needed that.”
While Hannah’s love triangle was the eye of the show’s storm, Nina proved herself more than capable of generating enough drama to create her own weather system. “I got this job at the beginning of my thirties, so I’ve grown up with Nina,” says Scholey. “I played her through the alcoholism and the stealing, the relationship breakdown, and the heartbreaks. And her becoming a mother; I also had a baby just before we did series two.”
Two years have passed since its third and final series aired, and the tears have just about dried – which means, of course, that now is the opportune moment for a new batch of happy-sad episodes. A two-part Christmas special, out on 29 December, sees the return of the Defoe ladies as they gather in Barcelona for a wedding – whose, I won’t say. As ever, it’s not all happy families, but Nina seems to have found her footing at last. “It’s nice to see her in a bit more of a stable position,” says Scholey with an air of relief.
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“I really have enjoyed pretending to be a lawyer,” she laughs. “I have a fantastic corner office.” In another life perhaps… Scholey muses. “There’s something very efficient about lawyers,” she says, explaining that she had been head girl at the Audrey Spencer School of Dance in Wakefield. Translation: she’s a huge control freak – her words not mine.
With roots in theatre, Scholey’s gathering TV acclaim goes beyond The Split. She played a vampire in the criminally underrated cult BBC drama Being Human and won over fans with her recurring role in Doctor Who opposite fellow northerner and good pal Jodie Whittaker. Scholey had, in fact, previously auditioned for the role of Matt Smith’s companion in 2010. Things, I suggest, might’ve panned out very differently had she landed the part instead of Karen Gillan. “It would have been helpful because it would have sped things up for me and got me to this place sooner,” she says. “But everyone is on their own journey, so it makes sense.”
Perhaps most indelible, though, was Scholey’s turn in last year’s harrowing true-crime tale The Sixth Commandment. If you were a betting man, you might wager she’s on her way to the sort of beloved British TV ubiquity of her co-stars in The Split.
Scholey grew up in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the daughter of a nurse and a fireman. Home wasn’t necessarily creative, she says, but her parents did everything possible to support her pursuits – including saving to send her to drama school. Scholey auditioned for Rada but didn’t get in. “They told me to come back in three years,” she says – three years too long for a headstrong teenager. Instead, Scholey went to Oxford School of Drama, a “great school” where she thrived under the tutelage of a brilliant method teacher.
Drama schools have, in recent years, come under fire as the stubborn preserve of the elite. I wonder if Scholey, with her working-class Yorkshire background, ever felt excluded in any way. “I didn’t feel penalised because I was Northern, but I would say when I was at drama school, the regions weren’t being embraced as they are now. I was told to learn to lose my accent – which I kind of have,” she says, sounding more than a little rueful. “It’s really good to keep your roots; Jodie [Whittaker] is from Huddersfield and she’s kept her accent.” Happily, the character she’s playing in The Couple Next Door is from Yorkshire; she’s also a surgeon.
It’s probably thanks to Scholey’s role as a high-powered lawyer with a heart on The Split that she is receiving a lot of professional parts. “It’s like you turn 40 and therefore you’re a professional,” she says. Not that she minds in this case.
As well as her divorce from actor Ciarán McMenamin last year, Scholey has been getting to grips with life as a working mother. “It was very hard,” Scholey says of the change. “I worked until I was seven and a half months pregnant, and then I went onto The Split season two, which is lucky, because obviously I was taken care of.” She chose not to bring her daughter, Marnie, to set very much during that time. “I just didn’t feel I could split my focus in that way,” she says. “So, I made that decision but then that meant I wasn’t breastfeeding for very long, so there was a lot of guilt with that. But I knew myself and that was my choice.”
It’s exactly the sort of knotty, politically gendered question that The Split deals with – and something that Scholey is still working out for herself, six years later. “In hindsight I’ve regretted that a little bit and put pressure on myself,” she says. “It’s awful being away from her, but I also love working and I’m lucky at the moment that I’ve been getting a lot of really great opportunities, so I’ve been away from my daughter a lot in the last year and it really, really hurts.”
Her current project allows Scholey every other Friday off, so she can spend a long weekend with Marnie. “When the production team did that for me, I nearly cried,” she says. “It’s making me feel that it’s possible to do both. Of course, it’s still hard, but it’s possible. And I’m really glad I can show my girl that she can have both.”
Becoming a mother has changed Scholey as an actor. “You lose a skin,” she explains, “which I’ve found very useful because I can access anything quickly; my nerve endings are up.” Such skill comes in handy when she finds herself acting with such titans of acting as Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffmann. Scholey starred opposite the latter in the historical drama series Medici: Masters of Florence. “I couldn’t quite get over it,” she says. “He was great fun, very naughty, very twinkly. When he wasn’t on camera, he’d be winking! How amazing, even to just be in the same production as someone like him.” And Scholey is right there in the middle of it, soaking it all in.
‘The Split: Barcelona’ will air on BBC One at 9pm on 29 and 30 December. Both episodes will be available on BBC iPlayer from 29 December
