“I thought there wouldn’t be enough work!” Ruth Madeley talks sex, success and becoming a star out of sheer curiosity | television

TIt was the day I met Ruth Madeley in a hotel in central London, at the height of the recent heatwave, and the traffic light buttons were too hot to touch. Oddly enough, that’s the central theme of The Rapture, a new BBC adaptation of Liz Jensen’s 2009 best-selling book. Set in a secure children’s psychiatric unit, the 38-year-old actress plays Gabs, a psychiatrist recently paralyzed in a car crash that kills her husband. She becomes distraught by prisoner Bethany – a searing, ruthless performance from India Amartifico – who has been convicted of her mother’s murder. Gabs is a hard-boiled film, as far from vulgar as you can imagine, and Bethany’s “visions,” which pour out of her in feverish sketches of faces, disasters, and landscapes, don’t sit on fertile ground. However, Gabs couldn’t help but notice when it started to materialize.

In the background, the heat is stifling and climate crisis activists are begging the world to take notice. “Yes, it seems like a very good time,” she says sarcastically. This is on brand. Her first major role was in Russell T Davies’ Years and Years, the apocalyptic hit that ended with a monkey flu epidemic (sorry, spoiler). “Then a year later we were in lockdown. ‘You’re not allowed to write anything else,’ she told Russell, ‘my nerves can’t handle it.'”

This is Madeley’s first time leading a series, her first foray into executive producing, and she’s a grafter. “I don’t want praise if I don’t do the job. The one thing I didn’t want in my role as executive producer was to see the rush at the end of the day. I would overthink my performance.” The pace of The Rapture is on the cusp of classic apocalypse; Very realistic daily life in a psychiatric unit full of dangerous teenage criminals. But it is populated by thoughtful colleagues and compassionate listeners. The normal rhythms of life are so insistent that frightening extremes—not just visions of Bethany, but also extreme weather, climate hackers, and sinister religiosity—create an almost subliminal tension before it explodes.

In the show, Gabs has an acquired disability. She has only been using a wheelchair for two years and feels doubly sad for her husband and the life she was living. The character moved from Manchester to Wales partly because it is easier to be around people who did not know her in earlier times. The nature of her disability is different from Madeley’s – she was born with spina bifida and has been a disability activist since she was a little girl through the charity Whiz Kids, which gave her a wheelchair when she was five – but “there are a lot of similarities. I was more mobile when I was younger. I use a wheelchair 90% of the time now, so the change in my own circumstances really helps me when playing Gabs. And there were things as a wheelchair user I can point out Until maybe it wasn’t on the page, because I know what that looks like.

Television has miles to go when it comes to affordability and inclusivity – “Where are the directors, producers and department heads with disabilities?” But in the 12 years Madeley has been in the business, some things have changed, she says. “Hiring actors with special needs rather than just disability representation; I feel like the representation of visible and invisible disabilities has improved, although I don’t think we’re there yet.” She says the production doesn’t “see disability in the plot and think: ‘We told a disabled story last year.’ Her first starring role in the short film “Don’t Take My Baby” in 2015, for which she was nominated for a BAFTA Award, was as much a part of this cultural carrier’s change as it was a turning point for her as an actress.

Madeley grew up in Bolton, where her father worked in customer service and her mother, a nurse, was an activist before becoming an actress. By the time she was thirteen, she had gone to Downing Street to talk to Cherie Blair about how the world could do better than the very basic wheelchairs in the NHS. She studied screenwriting at Edge Hill University, achieving a first, and was doing work experience in the script department at the BBC when the CBBC drama Half Moon Investigation needed a wheelchair user for one episode. “I auditioned just to be curious and to expand my network, and I got the role. I remember being terrified at the audition, and thinking: ‘Why do people do this?’ “This is terrible.”

Don’t Take My Baby was written by Jack Thorne, who later achieved international fame with Teenage and has been a career-long advocate for diversity on screen, and went on to make Then I Met Barbara Allan, about two disability activists, in which Madeley also starred. The creative pairing between Thorne and Madley was double-edged: on the one hand, “he’s been one of my biggest champions and supports throughout my entire career,” she says; On the other hand, “When I first read his work, ‘Oh my God, I haven’t written in a long time.’ I thought, ‘I’ll never be as good as this.’ I cannot show my work to anyone. They’ll think, ‘What rubbish is this?'”

“Years and Years” was her major accomplishment, watching Water Coolers in the post-water cooler era, an intricately drawn saga of a family in hard times with an epic cast — Anne Reid, Emma Thompson, Rory Kinnear, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes — “all these people I’ve watched and admired for years,” she says. This role—Rosie, younger sibling, single mother of two, and dinner lady—was not written as a disabled character, but shaped itself organically around the cast. “We went into it saying, ‘How much do we include disability? How much do we not talk about it?” There has been a lot going on in the years and years [the pandemic was almost a sidebar to the fascist takeover by a chillingly convincing Emma Thompson – let’s not dwell on the premonitory content]. Being a wheelchair user was probably the least interesting thing. This is true, to some extent. But it was a radical departure in terms of vision, because Rosie is looking for a friend, who is sexually active, and Madeley had countless letters from friends saying they had never seen that on screen before — a character with a disability being cast. “That was one of my favorite parts of the whole thing,” she told Italian Vogue at the time, “how sexually active she was and how flirty she was, despite having a disability. That’s what needs to be seen on screen because this is real life. Gabs’ story also has a sexual arc, the story of her getting a new disability and all the disaster that comes with it, from not being able to tell if a date is a date or not to thinking she’s going to have to figure out how to live on her own forever, just her and a takeout and a vibrator.”

When she got the role of Rosie, Madeley was still working full-time with Whiz Kids. “I thought, obviously working alone, it’s not easy to pay your mortgage. As a disabled person, I thought there wouldn’t be enough work for me to do this and that.” She did acting work during her annual leave and took a sabbatical instead, a six-month sabbatical to do for years and years. Finally, when the roles didn’t stop coming, her CEO said, “I think you might be an actor now.”

You know you’re in the British acting establishment, trained or not, when Doctor Who arrives. In a 60th anniversary special in 2023, Madeley plays Shirley Anne Bingham, a Mancunian scientist of remarkable intellectual and physical prowess, whose wheelchair is equipped to ward off assailants, like a James Bond with extra qualifications. That had a five-part Whoniverse spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea, which aired last year, but in the meantime, Madeley has started writing and has several ideas in development. “With writing, I can stay up until three in the morning; it drives my husband crazy, because then I want to go to bed and tell him about it.” She and Joe Lawrence married in 2024 after 12 years together; They have already known each other since they were together five. “I wanted to get married; it took Joe a little longer to decide that was going to happen. We’ve been friends forever, we were always going to end up together, and now obviously he thinks what I do for a living is completely hysterical. He’s not an actor, he’s very grounded, and it’s nice to be able to go home and not talk about it.”

An early scene in The Rapture has Gabs moving through a crowd of protesters, trying to overcome this oppressive feeling of bodies closing in around her. “Claustrophobia is a common thing any wheelchair user feels, and the actual physical condition is very uncomfortable; Gabs is just getting used to it, but I still feel it now,” she says. Bethany is snarky, calling her “wheels”, and constantly egging her on about her car accident. It’s a very clear portrait of a character whose disability represents a defining new reality and a brutal vision of the neglect of others. At the same time, the central relationship between Madeli and Amartifio unfolds as different strengths, different rebellions, that ultimately merge with each other in an ambiguous world on the cusp of dystopia. “I remember filming that scene, it was the first, and I thought: ‘Look at us, we’re doing this, and the world will see it.’ I’m very, very proud.”

The Rapture starts on July 26 at 9pm on BBC One.