Can you tell us about your character, Kate Ashby?

Kate is a woman in her late 20s who was rescued in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and taken to England to live with Eve Ashby. It’s about her journey to finding resolution and remembering her past.

What drew you to the project and the character?

First of all, like anybody else auditioning, I only received one or two pages - but the writing! I had also seen Shadowline, which was Hugo’s previous show and it was one of the first dramas that I had really seen as an actor. I saw the quality of that and saw the few pages I had, and knew immediately that I wanted to try my best to be involved.

Then I got all of the scripts and was so embarrassed by my lack of knowledge that I wanted to connect and feel what happened so recently, and what has been happening as a consequence of that. That’s what spurred me on through the process. And identifying with what it is to want resolution in your own life.

How did you research the role?

Firstly a lot of reading, but then I realised the more I tried to read, the more complicated everything became and the more complicated law became, so I connected to Kate. I connected to her personal life, her repression - her accidental repression - and finding common themes in my own life, being brought up in the West with parents not born here. That was my research. And in the story, just in the relationships between people.

In what ways is it different preparing for a dramatic role like this, compared with comedy? And as this is a character that you haven’t created?

In terms of comedy, there isn’t a difference to me. One of the things that I learned very early on in drama school is that for the comedy to work, the stakes have to be high. What may allow you to laugh has to move me, while I’m playing it, to tears. It has to be so serious. That’s what’s funny in comedy. There’s almost a weird transference of the same skill - the stakes are very high, this is important to you and this is true.

In that way it’s the same. In terms of being an actor, not having written something… it’s amazing. It means that I’m not wearing ten hats. When the writing is good, which it is, I can relax and just focus on Kate. That’s all I have to do on this. That was amazing.