There’s a phenomenon on the internet that Annabel Scholey can’t seem to shake. Whenever a clip of her is posted online (particularly if it’s an American broadcaster doing the posting), the comment section is flooded with fans agreeing that Scholey looks “so much” like Kate Middleton.
“Oh, I am aware,” the actor says, an eyebrow raised, when I mention these comments to her. “Even my mum goes, ‘Definitely can see it.’” Scholey actually auditioned to play the Princess of Wales once. It was in 2014 for Mike Bartlett’s speculative play King Charles III – she didn’t get the part. “Obviously, somebody looked more like her,” she says with a playful smirk.
Scholey is speaking to me from her home in the southwest of England, a recently renovated Georgian country house where she lives with her husband Jim (her wedding photo is on the wall behind her), her seven-year-old daughter Marnie and miniature schnauzer, Betty.
Scholey’s dark hair is bobbed with a blunt fringe while pearls cling to her ears, somehow reflecting both her English rose beauty (although I think she looks less like Middleton in real life) and the edgier roles this chameleon performer has chosen instead.
When it comes to character, Scholey loves a challenge. This autumn alone, she can be found as a spiky police detective in ITV procedural Winter and returning to Jilly Cooper’s Rivals as the bouffant-haired newshound Beattie Johnson. Yes, her forties might have ushered in an “era of playing surgeons, detectives, lawyers” and “a mother of teenagers”, but Scholey is not easily typecast.
Born in Wakefield to a firefighter father and nurse mother, she took to acting from a young age, playing a Von Trapp in the Sheffield Crucible’s production of The Sound of Music and sparking a love for theatre that dominated her post-drama school career in the mid-noughties, too.
There were TV roles: a vampire in supernatural drama Being Human, a bride-to-be in Mamma Mia pastiche Walking On Sunshine, an Italian noblewoman opposite Dustin Hoffman in Netflix’s Medici. Still, none made people sit up and take notice quite like that of powerful divorce lawyer and sneaky middle child Nina in BBC drama The Split.
The series has had a “slow burn” impact on Scholey’s career. Nina was the kind of role where “people went, ‘Oh right, OK, who’s that?’ – it only took 15 years,” she says with sarcasm. She has just finished filming the Netflix adaptation of The Lord’s Day with Damson Idris, “and I now know in hindsight that they wanted me because they’re big fans of The Split”. It means a lot, knowing that such a “special” show has been watched so widely, Scholey explains. It’s been eight years since the programme, and “I get people every day still coming up saying, ‘Oh my God, The Split!’,” she says.
Written by playwright Abi Morgan, The Split set an incredibly high standard for Scholey when it came to nuanced, “intricate” female characters. I’m interested to know what percentage of the scripts she’s sent today meet that criteria. Scholey considers: “I’ll go the other way. I would say the percentage of bad scripts is very small. It now is less common to find: ‘30, beautiful, size 10’… which, thank God, is brilliant.”
What Scholey does still observe is stories where the women are “brushed over”, less filled in. “You have to look for the treasure in the script yourself, which is also a skill… but it is still quite rare to get really, really complicated, flawed women with the full gamut of emotion,” she says.
It was that complexity that drew Scholey to Winter, a crime drama with an oddly offbeat sense of humour pinched from its origin material, the French thriller Balthazar. Richard Armitage stars as the eponymous Winter, a forensic pathologist with unorthodox methods who Scholey’s DI Lauren Bell is forced to work with.
Scholey knew the show’s success would hinge on the relationship between the two leads. She remembers her first time performing with Armitage: “You always make the best of a screen test, but it’s not always natural chemistry. But we did have that and I came out and rang my husband and said, ‘I think we work the same.’”
Winter’s two leads both arrive with their guards up. Winter is snobbish and secretly grieving, while Bell is judgmental and reserved, living in the shadow of her late father, a powerful man at the Met. As “a woman in what is still largely a male job”, Lauren has no time for being told what to do. The mansplaining Winter, as a result, “repels” her.
“And then as she starts to see him at work, they gel so well together and she respects him,” Scholey says. “The show really follows their relationship and how they warm to each other, and then how they work together and how they both break rules in different ways.”
Like Rivals, Winter is set in the southwest of England (Bristol, to be precise). It must have been nice remaining near home while filming, I say to Scholey, only to be informed that the ITV drama is actually shot in Antwerp. Being away from her daughter was “tricky”, Scholey says. She and Marnie’s father, the actor Ciarán McMenamin, divorced in 2023. The former couple split custody, with Scholey finding goodbyes harder now that Marnie is “more aware of me leaving her”.
“She’s so good at telling me how she’s feeling,” Scholey says. “She’s very expressive about that, and she’s quite grown up about it… We can have a great chat on FaceTime if I’m away, and we’ve got these little affirmation cards, and we split the deck when I go away, and we both pick one every morning for each other… That’s obviously made it easier. But when she was a little one, she just didn’t really understand what was happening.”
Rivals, in comparison, is the “home job” that grounds Scholey. The cast is undeniably starry – David Tennant! Aidan Turner! Danny Dyer! – yet it was Scholey and Alex Hassell who accurately set the OTT tone for what was to come by joining the mile-high club in the show’s very first scene.
With sex at the centre of Rivals, the show’s decision to use “every intimacy coach in the land” (as quipped by the show’s reluctant heartthrob Danny Dyer) has been widely publicised. The late Cooper, however, was dismissive of the whole thing. “No one has any fun any more,” she told The Times, theorising that she’d find the experience of choreographing sex scenes more “embarrassing” were she an actor.
Scholey has seen both sides. The first half of her career was spent without intimacy co-ordinators, and while she alludes to one situation where she “felt really uncomfortable”, she “muddled through”. “I got used to it without,” she says, “so then when they arrived, I have to be honest, I was a bit like, ‘Ugh, what? No, you’re making it more embarrassing!’”
It took meeting Vanessa Coffey, a former dancer who worked as an intimacy co-ordinator on erotic thriller The Couple Next Door, to change her mind. “She just made the whole process fun and relaxed. I suddenly thought, ‘You know what? I wouldn’t have wanted to do that without her,’” she says. “I would never now wish that they would disappear.”
With her lurid power suits and that oh-so-80s hair, Beattie is a gloriously camp creation. Scholey has had endless fun playing her, latching onto the events of episode one (when Beattie finds out Hassell’s Tory MP Rupert Campbell-Black has been sleeping with another woman and slaps him in the face before promising to “ruin” him) as the motivator for the endless double-crossing and scheming on her path to get ahead in journalism.
Following the dramatic (and surprisingly devastating) cliffhanger death that preceded the series two hiatus, Rivals returns in November with Beattie and the recently widowed Tony Baddingham (Tennant) on the war path. “She gets hold of a piece of information that is a grenade, and she decides to stir the pot first, and then throw it,” says Scholey.
While the second part has “big party scenes, more levity and lots more drama” (“I mean, the funeral’s obviously a bit of a downer,” Scholey clarifies), the actor made sure to slip in the “odd flash” of Beattie’s back story as she and Tony “try to out-evil each other”.
“Nobody behaves like that for no reason,” says Scholey. “There has to be a driving force, otherwise what’s the point of her?”
All episodes of ‘Winter’ are now available to stream on ITVX. ‘Rivals’ returns to Disney+ on 11 November