‘I thought there’d never be enough work!’ Ruth Madeley on sex, success and becoming a star out of sheer nosiness
The day I met Ruth Madeley in a hotel in central London was the peak of the last heatwave, the buttons on traffic lights almost too hot to touch. Eerily, this is a major theme of The Rapture, the BBC’s new adaptation of Liz Jensen’s 2009 bestseller. It’s set in a children’s secure psychiatric unit, and the 38-year-old actor plays Gabs, a clinical psychologist recently paralysed in a car accident that killed her husband. She becomes transfixed by the inmate Bethany – a surly, biting performance from India Amarteifio – who has been convicted of killing her own mother. Gabs is hard-boiled, as far from gullible as you could imagine, and Bethany’s “visions”, which pour out of her in frenetic drawings of faces, disasters, landscapes, don’t fall on fertile ground. Yet Gabs cannot help but notice when they start to come true.
In the background, the heat is stultifying and climate crisis activists are begging the world to take notice. “Yes, it’s feeling very timely,” she says wryly. This is on-brand; her first major role was in Russell T Davies’s Years and Years, the apocalyptic smash hit that ends with a monkey flu pandemic (sorry, spoiler), “and then a year later we were in lockdown. I told Russell: ‘You’re not allowed to write anything else, my nerves can’t take it.’”
This is the first time Madeley has led a series, her first go at executive producing, and she’s a grafter. “I don’t want the credit if I’m not going to do the work. The only thing I didn’t want in my exec producer role was to see the rushes at the end of the day. I’ll just overthink my performance.” The pace of The Rapture is classic cusp-of-the-apocalypse; hyperrealistic daily life in a psychiatric unit full of dangerous teenage criminals. But it’s peopled with thoughtful colleagues and affectionate repartee. The rhythms of normality are so insistent that the eerie fringes – not just Bethany’s visions, but the extreme weather, climate hackers and sinister religiosity – create a tension that’s almost subconscious before it explodes.
In the show, Gabs has an acquired disability. She’s only been using a wheelchair for two years and she’s grieving doubly, for her husband and for the life she used to live. The character has moved from Manchester to Wales partly because it’s easier to be around people who didn’t know her in the before-times. The nature of her disability is different to Madeley’s own – she was born with spina bifida and has been a disability campaigner since she was a small child through the charity Whizz Kids, which gave her a wheelchair when she was five – but “there’s a lot of similarities. I was a lot more mobile when I was younger. I use my wheelchair 90% of the time now, so that change in my own circumstance really helps when playing Gabs. And there were things as a wheelchair user that I could bring to it that perhaps weren’t on the page, because I know what it’s like.”
TV has miles to go on ableism and inclusivity – “where are the disabled directors, producers, heads of department?” she says – but in the 12 years Madeley has been in the business, some things have changed. “Hiring disabled actors rather than just playing disability; I feel like the representation of visible and non-visible disabilities has gotten better, though I don’t think we’re there yet.” Productions don’t just “see disability in a plot and think: ‘We told a disabled story last year’”, she says. And her first starring role in the short film Don’t Take My Baby in 2015, for which she was Bafta-nominated, was part of turning this cultural tanker round as much as it was a turning point for her as an actor.
Madeley was brought up in Bolton, her dad a customer services operator, her mother a nurse, and she was a campaigner before she was a performer. By the age of 13, she’d been to Downing Street to talk to Cherie Blair about how the world could do better than the NHS’s very basic wheelchairs. She studied scriptwriting at Edge Hill University, got a first, and was doing work experience in the script department at the BBC when a CBBC drama called Half Moon Investigation needed a wheelchair user for one episode. “I auditioned purely to be nosy and extend my network, and I got the role. I remember being terrified in the audition, thinking: ‘Why do people do this? This is awful.’”
Don’t Take My Baby was written by Jack Thorne, who would later find international acclaim with Adolescence and has been a career-long advocate for diversity on screen, going on to make Then Barbara Met Alan, about two disability activists, in which Madeley also starred. Thorne and Madeley’s creative pairing has been double-edged: on the one hand, “He’s been one of my biggest champions and supports throughout my whole career,” she says; on the other, “When I first read his work, my God, I didn’t write in ages. I thought: ‘I’m never going to be as good as that. I can’t show anyone my work. They’d think, ‘What’s this garbage?’”
Years and Years was her mainstream breakthrough, water-cooler watching in a post-water-cooler age, an intricately drawn saga of a family in extreme 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. That role – Rosie, the youngest sibling, single mother of two, a dinner lady – wasn’t written as a disabled character, and shaped itself organically around the casting. “We went into it saying: ‘How much do we include of a disability? How much do we not talk about it?’ There was a lot going on in 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]. Me being a wheelchair user was probably the least interesting bit.” That’s true, up to a point; but it was a radical departure in visibility terms, because Rosie is looking for a boyfriend, sexually active, and Madeley had countless messages from friends saying they’d never seen that on screen before – a character with a disability getting laid. “That was one of my favourite parts of the whole thing,” she told Italian Vogue at the time, “how sexually active she was and about how flirty she was, in spite of having a disability. That’s what needs to be seen on screen because that’s real life.” Gabs’s story also has a sexual arc, the story of being newly disabled and all the catastrophising that goes with that, from being unable to figure out whether a date is or isn’t a date to thinking she has to figure out how to live alone for ever, just her and a ready meal and a vibrator.
When she got the role of Rosie, Madeley still had a full-time job with Whizz Kids. “I just thought, obviously, acting on its own, it’s not an easy industry to pay your mortgage with. As a disabled person, I thought there was never going to be enough work for me to do this and only this.” She made acting work during her annual leave and taking time off in lieu, a six-month sabbatical to do 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. For a 60th-anniversary special in 2023, Madeley played Shirley Anne Bingham, a Mancunian scientist of awesome prowess, intellectual and physical, her wheelchair tooled up to ward off aggressors, like a James Bond with additional qualifications. That had a spin-off Whoniverse five-parter, The War Between the Land and the Sea, which aired last year, but in the meantime, Madeley had started writing and has several ideas in development. “With writing, I can be up till 3 o’clock in the morning; it drives my husband mad, because I then want to come to bed and tell him about it.” She and Joe Lawrence married in 2024 after 12 years together; they’ve actually known each other since they were five. “I wanted to get married; it took Joe a little longer to decide that that was going to happen. We were friends forever, we were always going to end up together, and obviously now he thinks that what I’m doing for a living is absolutely hysterical. He’s not an actor, he’s very grounded, it’s nice to be able to go home and not talk about it.”
One early scene in The Rapture is Gabs moving through a crowd of protesters, trying to navigate that oppressive sense of the bodies closing in round her. “That claustrophobia is a common thing for any wheelchair user to feel, the actual physicality is very uncomfortable; Gabs is just getting used to it, but I still feel that now,” she says. Bethany is scathing, calls her “wheels”, prods her constantly about her car accident. It’s a very unvarnished portrait of a character whose disability is both a defining new reality and a brutal insight into the carelessness of others. At the same time, the central relationship between Madeley and Amarteifio unfolds as different strengths, different rebellions, ultimately fusing with each other in a mysterious world on the cusp of dystopia. “I remember filming that scene, it was the first, and thinking: ‘Look at us, we’re doing it, and the world’s gonna see it.’ I’m very, very proud.”
The Rapture starts on 26 July at 9pm on BBC One.