Bio

Major roles on television :

Chalk

In 1996, Nicola was cast as one of the female leads in the TV sitcom, Chalk, which went on for two series. This was followed by guest starring parts in TV shows such as A Dance to the Music of Time, Pie in the Sky and Jonathan Creek.

Nicola caught her next big break when she was cast as the female lead in the detective drama, Touching Evil, opposite Robson Green and she was involved in all three series of that show.

Nicola : When I auditioned, I expected absolutely nothing to happen, especially as Robson Green was in it. I imagined they’d want a big name to star opposite him.

Robson Green was then, and still is, one of the biggest names in British TV. Nicola was very relieved when she got the part because just prior to this, she had a guest starring role in Moll Flanders, opposite Alex Kingston and spent weeks trussed up in hand made corsets which was incredibly tight. She was left feeling breathless the whole time and also found it impossible to eat. “I had to skip lunch for a month,” she recalls.

Touching Evil

In Touching Evil, Nicola played a gun carrying detective called Susan Taylor. “It’s nice to play a modern woman my own age in Touching Evil,” Nicola says. “My character’s not butch, nor is she too girlie.” But holding a gun was something Nicola loathed. She was shaking as she gripped a pistol for the first time on the police firing range. She says: “I don’t like guns but I thought I should look as if I knew what I was doing … I was still shaking when I got in my car to drive home.”

Nicola’s performance in Touching Evil caught the eye of writer, Matthew Graham.

Matthew Graham : I actually wrote Nicola’s character in The Last Train for her. I was seeing her in Touching Evil and I thought she was great and she had the right sort of tomboy, sort of hard edge quality to her performance that I wanted for that character. I was really pleased that Nicola wanted to [take the part].”

The Last Train

Matthew later became a writer on Spooks when Nicola joined the cast of that show in 2003. Nicola gained another important contact from Touching Evil. One of the producers of that show was Jane Featherstone, who subsequently formed Kudos Productions, the production house which produces Spooks.

Both Touching Evil and The Last Train were enormous successes, but when they ended, Nicola chose to go back to the theatre. Just prior to being invited to join the cast of Spooks in 2003, Nicola was in a David Mamet play, Edmond, at the National Theatre where her co-star was Kenneth Branagh.  “I didn’t see the first series (of Spooks), because I was doing a theatre show, and wasn’t in nights.” Nicola recalls. “But I did see the trailers constantly and just thought ‘that looks brilliant, I don’t want to be doing theatre, I want to be doing that!’

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