‘Being Heumann’ Star Ruth Madeley: “I Had To Be Nominated For A Bafta To Get Work”

Ruth Madeley’s dog won’t stop barking. “Oh, sorry!” she says while greeting me – hair in a messy bun, wearing her husband’s red NFL jersey and cut-off denim shorts – while calming Buford, her beloved white British bulldog. It turns out that Buford’s excitement is due to the arrival of the window cleaner at Madeley’s red-brick home in Bolton, which to him is even more thrilling than British Vogue. “He can’t fathom anyone would come here other than to see him,” says Madeley with a smile.

He might have to get used to that. Fresh from fronting The Rapture, the BBC’s apocalyptic Sunday-night hit and Madeley’s first executive producer credit, this autumn the 40-year-old will be at the centre of international attention in her highest-profile role yet: the lead in Being Heumann, the much-anticipated Apple Original biopic about US disability rights activist Judy Heumann.

With Academy Award-winning director Siân Heder at the helm – last seen picking up the best picture award for Coda in 2022 – and Mark Ruffalo as co-star, the film has been surrounded by the whirr of Oscar chatter since inception. We speak weeks before Madeley is due to fly to Toronto, where Being Heumann will open the city’s film festival, and to embark on the unique whirlwind that is an awards-season campaign tour, bringing with it a whole new level of fame. Is it all sinking in yet?

“To even be a thought in that kind of conversation is incredible. I have a normal life. I went to Lidl this morning!” she says, breaking into a fit of laughter before composing herself. “You have to take all of this with a pinch of salt. It’s gorgeous but at the same time just that this film has been made is a game-changer in itself.”

“Game-changer” is definitely the word. Adapted from Heumann’s memoir, the film tells the story of a historic 1977 sit-in, in which a group of Disabled activists occupied a federal building in San Francisco for 28 days to lobby the government to enforce a foundational civil rights law. Led by Heumann – who went on to work in both the Clinton and Obama administrations before she died in 2023 – the protests won Disabled people in the US some of their first access to education, jobs and health services.

For Madeley, who has spina bifida and, like Heumann, uses a wheelchair, the chance to play the civil rights leader felt like a once-in-a-lifetime part. “This type of film doesn’t get made at the top of the tree, you know, Hollywood,” she says. “Then the fact that Judy is such an icon for so many people makes it feel even more special. You’re playing a real person with a legacy.”

The audition process was rigorous: recording a video of herself, then meeting Heder over Zoom (“We just clicked”), a virtual audition with producers across three time zones, and a final callback in New York. “I told myself, ‘Worst case scenario, I get to go to New York for four days.’ But anything with disability, you feel so invested on a personal level,” she says. “It was one of those things where I was like, ‘I’m going to be so devastated if I don’t get this.’”

“I had an incredible experience working with Ruth,” Siân Heder tells me in a voicenote. “She’s so present and hard-working and has such depth as an actress.”

“When I found out Judy had died, I remember sobbing, [thinking] ‘I can’t make this movie,’” she says. It was “a real challenge” to find an actor to do her justice. “But even from my first meeting with Ruth, she felt like Judy. I felt like I’d found a partner to tell this story.”

It is hard to imagine anyone else could have been cast. From the first scene, in which she stops traffic with her wheelchair, Madeley embodies Heumann, not only with the way she portrays the activist’s mix of courage, laughter and righteous rage, but in that she is almost unrecognisable. Her Bolton accent is swapped for Heumann’s Brooklyn staccato, her mid-length blonde highlights replaced with a retro brunette bob. I ask if it was a wig. “They cut my hair! Into full 1970s Judy!” she cries, as if having a flashback to the hairdresser’s chair. “My husband was like, ‘What. On. Earth.’ Luckily, my hair grows back fast.”

The Brooklyn accent took a little longer. Working with a dialect coach, Madeley “immersed” herself in the science, studying tongue placement, breathing and hours of old footage of Heumann. For the first month of filming in Toronto, Madeley’s jaw hurt from using muscles she hadn’t before. At Heder’s request, the actor only spoke in a New York pitch on set, even during lunch. “It was funny at the end of the shoot because a lot of the background actors didn’t know I was English,” says Madeley. “I start talking and Liam Gallagher just comes out my mouth. The fact that people didn’t know, I was so proud I’d managed to hide my Manchester!”

If, from the outside, Madeley’s ascent seems like a sudden rise to fame, behind the scenes it’s been a long and sometimes arduous journey. Shortly after graduating from Lancashire’s Edge Hill University with a first class degree in scriptwriting, Madeley got her break as an actor by chance. She was doing work experience in the script department at the BBC in 2009 when the producer of a CBBC show mentioned they needed a wheelchair user for one episode. Madeley insists she agreed “solely to be nosy” but she caught the acting bug.

Within a couple of years, Madeley was on prime time – a bit part in hit comedy Fresh Meat – before landing the lead in the 2015 BBC drama Don’t Take My Baby. That role bagged her a Bafta nomination and, after winning a Bafta breakthrough award the following year, Madeley spent the next decade making her name through seminal series, including Russell T Davies’s Years and Years and Doctor Who (on which she inspired the Tardis’s first ramp).

But what viewers didn’t know was that off-screen Madeley was still working full time as a charity fundraiser until 2019, saving up her annual leave to be able to film each hit show. While her non-Disabled peers on Years and Years were preparing for critical acclaim, she was planning to head straight back to the office (in the end, her boss encouraged her to quit). “I knew roles for Disabled people were the bottom of the pile in the industry,” she says. “I thought, ‘How am I going to get enough work to pay my mortgage?’”

The roles have certainly kept coming but it’s not been without what Madeley describes as “horror stories” of discrimination. She lists some for me. Sets with no accessible toilets. Auditions where she was asked, “Can you play more or less Disabled?” Every time a producer commented that she was “easy”, it discouraged her from asking for adjustments. A tongue-in-cheek print with “Dramatic Exit” in large capital letters framed on the wall behind her, Madeley is clearly done being “easy”.

“Before, if someone told me there wasn’t an accessible toilet, I’d be like, ‘Don’t worry about it, I just won’t drink!’ Now it’s: ‘I’m not working until I’ve got one,’” she says. “I feel I’ve got a responsibility to others coming up in the industry– ”

The living room door opens and it’s Madeley’s husband, Joe Lawrence, slipping in to drop off a coffee for her. The couple’s meet-cute is itself straight out of a Hollywood script: the two have known each other since they were five years old and their families lived in neighbouring streets. When they were 13, Lawrence bought flowers and asked her out (she said no) only to reunite in 2012 when Madeley was in hospital with life-threatening sepsis and her family told her friends to visit as she might not make it. Lawrence has been by her side ever since, going back and forth between his construction job in the UK and Canada for four months last summer while Madeley filmed Being Heumann. “He’s my biggest supporter,” she says, sipping from her mug.

Madeley repeatedly describes herself to me as naturally ambitious (“I have chronic fatigue. I don’t have ambition fatigue,” she says, joking) but it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest the trait is also a by-product of how hard she’s had to fight for her career. “Disabled people can’t just be good at their jobs – you have to be exceptional,” she says. “I had to be nominated for a Bafta to get work. You don’t get the grace of just turning up, saying your lines. You have to prove you can handle the long days on set. That you can play non-Disabled parts.”

“When I first met Ruth, I was very aware that I’m 6’6”, looming above her,” longtime collaborator Russell T Davies tells me over email. “So I looked up the etiquette of talking to a wheelchair user, and it told me to kneel beside her. She burst out laughing, gave me a clout and said ‘Get up, you idiot!’ And we’ve been like that ever since.”

He goes on: “I keep coming back to Ruth because she’s kind of limitless – she can play anything and yet always remain very much herself. Like a true star. And best of all, she’s such great company. She makes your life better. I suppose I’d paid lip service to casting Disabled actors before I met Ruth, but she won’t let you get away with that. She’s taught me, she’s bollocked me and she’s inspired me – I’m literally better for knowing her.”

We catch up a week later after Madeley has had the first meeting with her team to brainstorm fashion for Being Heumann’s press tour. On the planning board are pieces from longstanding favourite Stella McCartney, a Jean Paul Gaultier spiral-print mesh dress and a high-neck sequinned Balenciaga gown. Plus, some archive Louis Vuitton, whose Paris Fashion Week show she has been invited to attend. She shows me a photo of herself excitedly trying on the Vuitton: an exquisite paisley metallic suit with black velvet cuffs and shoulder pads. Many outfits will have “a punk edge” in reference to the rebellious nature of the film, with some motifs – such as pearl earrings – a direct tribute to Judy’s look. At the helm is Madeley’s long-term stylist, Hope Lawrie. “I feel really lucky to have her in my corner,” says Madeley, who is wearing relaxed jeans and a blue and white striped shirt, Buford gently snoring at her feet.

Part of Lawrie’s brief is navigating the different tailoring Madeley needs sitting down (no stiff materials or low embellishments) and her 4’4” inch stature. If a dress is on loan from a designer, Madeley’s team meticulously hems it to reduce the length and lets it out afterwards for re-use. Spina bifida also means she has small feet – a children’s size 13 – and no sensation in her right foot, so the go-to heels typical of a press run are being replaced with a range of carefully chosen Converses. “I will rock trainers on the red carpet,” Madeley says, as if making a promise. Every detail is being planned, down to the colour of her wheelchair. Madeley’s just put in an order for a new chair (her old one needed replacing) and chose neutral fixtures – brushed titanium – so it will work next to any outfit.

The process would be fun for most actors – “I feel like dress-up Barbie!” she says, laughing – but it’s particularly meaningful for Madeley. Growing up in Bolton with her nurse mother and customer service executive dad, she watched her grandmother cut fabric as a dress fitter and dreamt of being a fashion designer. As a child, Madeley would sketch out her own collections on piles of notepads. But after having to wear a spinal brace for scoliosis from 18 months to 17 years old, and a surgery on her spine going wrong, Madeley increasingly struggled with her body image. “It was so hard to find clothes. I had to buy bigger sizes and it felt so bulky,” she says. “As my curve got worse, I became hugely body conscious... It’s taken a long time not to worry about what I look like on screen.”

With a large multicoloured canvas of a woman’s naked curved back hanging on the living room wall, Madeley says she’s proud to now be “free” of that shame. She’s being modest. Madeley isn’t only free of it herself – she’s planning on using her clothes for promoting Being Heumann to help others feel pride themselves. Lawrie is in talks with Victoria Jenkins, a leading British adapted-fashion designer, who made Madeley’s custom wedding dress in 2024, to create couture looks for the press run. Options on the table include tapering skirts so they won’t drag on her wheels. “I want to use my position to give exposure to Disabled-led fashion. That’s a massive privilege to be able to do,” Madeley tells me. “If a 13-year-old Ruth sees that, and if it makes a difference, then that’s job done.”

“Job done” is Madeley’s philosophy for the next few months. For the first time in her career, she’s been turning down roles – she wants to wait for the right one. “I don’t know what’s next,” she says. “That excites and terrifies me.” In the meantime, she’s making the most of being back home; having regular brunches with her tight-knit group of childhood friends and going to cheer on Bolton Wanderers with her dad. “This year is about enjoying the fruits of my labour and saving the spoons [energy] for whatever’s coming,” Madeley says, with excitement. “For someone who was written off when my mum was pregnant, that’s a privilege.” She smiles. “I’ve not even started.”

Being Heumann is on Apple TV from 13 November

Main look: Cotton cloqué trouser suit, satin scarf (worn as belt), and pearl brooch, Erdem. Hair: Kei Takano. Make-up: Phoebe Alana Brown. Nails: Sabrina Gayle. Tailor: Laima Lupeikiene