Jessica Gunning, the role that turned every previous performance into rehearsal

She had been working steadily in British television for nearly two decades when Martha Scott arrived. Then the awards came in a sequence that has almost no precedent. And the rooms started rewriting the past.

Look at the trophies first, because they explain the strangeness of where Jessica Gunning now stands. Emmy. Golden Globe. SAG Award. BAFTA. Critics’ Choice. Independent Spirit. One performance, one calendar year, all four of the major industry awards taken — a clean sweep that even Helen Mirren and Kate Winslet failed to assemble for their celebrated supporting turns. The character is Martha Scott in Baby Reindeer, Richard Gadd’s Netflix miniseries about the stalking he survived in his twenties. The role is what a casting director would once have called impossible: a woman whose menace is inseparable from her tenderness, whose violence reads as a wound she is trying to dress with someone else’s body. Gunning made her unanswerable and somehow loveable, and the industry replied by handing her every prize available.

What the trophies do not explain is the seventeen years that came before them. Gunning grew up in Holmfirth, a market town in the West Yorkshire hills, and made her way to Rose Bruford College in south London, graduating in 2007. Her first professional credits were on the Royal National Theatre stages — Much Ado About Nothing, Major Barbara — and then a long, unflashy run of British television: Law and Order: UK, White Heat, Fortitude, a leading role as the misremembered daughter in the BBC’s What Remains. None of it was the kind of work that announces a star. Most of it was the kind of work that British supporting actresses do to keep eating between auditions.

The film that should have changed her trajectory, and didn’t, was Pride. She played Siân James, the young Welsh miner’s wife who in real life became a Labour MP, in Matthew Warchus’s 2014 ensemble comedy about the gay and lesbian Londoners who fundraised for striking pit villages during the Thatcher dispute. The film took the Queer Palm at Cannes and was nominated at the BAFTAs and Golden Globes; Gunning was singled out by several reviewers as the soul of it. Then nothing. She returned to British comedy, to Back with David Mitchell and Robert Webb on Channel 4, to The Outlaws with Stephen Merchant on the BBC, to the patient construction of a character actor’s resume. Anyone reading those credits in 2023 would have placed her firmly in the category that British television treats as essential and rarely promotes: the dependable supporting woman, in her late thirties, unflashy, unmistakably good.

Then Gadd’s seven-episode autobiographical miniseries arrived on Netflix in April 2024, and Martha did to Gunning’s career what Martha does to Donny Dunn inside the show — installed herself, refused to leave, and turned everything that had been quiet into a public emergency. The performance walks a line that almost no other working actor has been asked to walk. Martha is funny, then terrifying, then funny again, then heartbreaking, and the transitions are so fluid that the viewer is implicated in her loneliness before the show makes them confront her crimes. By the time the awards bodies caught up, Gunning had already entered the small and strange category of actors whose previous filmography is being rewatched, looking for the signs that had been there all along.

The lawsuit has refused to disappear. Fiona Harvey, who identified herself publicly as the woman Gadd’s writing was drawn from, sued Netflix in 2024 for more than a hundred and seventy million dollars in damages, alleging that the show defamed her by depicting Martha as a convicted stalker who sexually assaulted Gadd, both of which Harvey denies in court. A federal judge ruled in September of that year that the case can proceed; the show, the judge wrote, “appears to present itself as fact” despite using fictional names. The litigation is still active. Gunning’s public position throughout has been steady and disarming: she has said repeatedly, in awards interviews and on the Variety podcast, that she does not consider Martha a villain. The line reads differently depending on whether the listener is thinking about the writing or the lawsuit. It is the kind of distinction that turns an actor’s craft into something close to ethical position-taking, and Gunning has not stepped away from it.

She turned forty in January, and has been startlingly direct in profile pieces about a private life she has chosen to leave private — she has said, casually, that she has never been in a romantic relationship and has not found this a particular problem. The candour reads in the same key as the work: nothing oversold, nothing pleading. The slate now in front of her is unrecognisable from the one she had two years ago. She plays Dame Washalot in The Magic Faraway Tree, Andy Serkis’s family adaptation of Enid Blyton, opposite Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy and Nicola Coughlan. She has joined Bertha Herzner in Apple TV+’s Berlin Noir series, drawn from Philip Kerr’s novels. She is shooting Sunny Dancer with James Norton and Bella Ramsey, and is attached to Marc Forster’s Anxious People with Angelina Jolie, and to Frank and Percy with Ian McKellen. The piece that interests Gunning most, she has said, is My Mama Cass, the long-developing biopic of Cass Elliot adapted by Emma Forrest from Owen Elliot-Kugell’s memoir, with the producers of A Complete Unknown behind it. She is the lead. The slate is the slate of an actor whose previous decade has, retroactively, become the rehearsal for a part nobody knew she had been preparing.

Tags: actresses, Baby Reindeer, British cinema, Jessica Gunning, Pride, Richard Gadd, Stephen Merchant, The Outlaws