{"id":696769,"date":"2026-07-17T14:37:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T14:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/696769\/"},"modified":"2026-07-17T14:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T14:37:10","slug":"i-thought-thered-never-be-enough-work-ruth-madeley-on-sex-success-and-becoming-a-star-out-of-sheer-nosiness-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/696769\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I thought there\u2019d never be enough work!\u2019 Ruth Madeley on sex, success and becoming a star out of sheer nosiness | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0Rapture, the BBC\u2019s new adaptation of Liz Jensen\u2019s 2009 bestseller<\/a>. It\u2019s set in a children\u2019s 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 \u2013 a\u00a0surly, biting performance from India Amarteifio<\/a> \u2013 who has been convicted of killing her own mother. Gabs is hard-boiled, as far from gullible as you could imagine, and Bethany\u2019s \u201cvisions\u201d, which pour out of her in frenetic drawings of faces, disasters, landscapes, don\u2019t fall on fertile ground. Yet Gabs cannot\u00a0help\u00a0but notice when they start to come true.<\/p>\n

In the background, the heat is stultifying and climate crisis activists are begging the world to take notice. \u201cYes, it\u2019s feeling very timely,\u201d she says wryly. This is on-brand; her first major role was in\u00a0Russell T Davies\u2019s Years and Years<\/a>, the apocalyptic smash hit that ends with a monkey flu pandemic (sorry, spoiler), \u201cand then a year later we were in lockdown. I told Russell: \u2018You\u2019re not allowed to write anything else, my nerves can\u2019t take it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the first time Madeley has led a series, her first go at executive producing, and she\u2019s a grafter. \u201cI don\u2019t want the credit if I\u2019m not going to do the work. The only thing I didn\u2019t want in my exec producer role was to see the rushes at the end of the day. I\u2019ll just overthink my performance.\u201d 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\u2019s peopled with thoughtful colleagues and affectionate repartee. The rhythms of normality are so insistent that the eerie fringes \u2013 not just Bethany\u2019s visions, but the extreme weather, climate hackers and sinister religiosity \u2013 create a tension\u00a0that\u2019s almost subconscious\u00a0before it explodes.<\/p>\n

\u2018Where are the disabled directors, producers, heads of departments? I don\u2019t think we\u2019re there yet\u2019, says Ruth Madeley. Photograph: Sarah Lee\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

In the show, Gabs has an acquired disability. She\u2019s only been using a wheelchair for two years and she\u2019s grieving doubly, for her husband and for the life she used to live. The character has moved from Manchester to Wales partly because it\u2019s easier to be around people who didn\u2019t know her in the before-times. The nature of her disability is different to Madeley\u2019s own \u2013 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 \u2013 but \u201cthere\u2019s 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\u2019t on the page, because I\u00a0know what it\u2019s like.\u201d<\/p>\n

TV has miles to go on ableism and inclusivity \u2013 \u201cwhere are the disabled directors, producers, heads of department?\u201d she says \u2013 but in the 12 years Madeley has been in the business, some things have changed. \u201cHiring disabled actors rather than just playing disability; I feel like the representation of visible and non-visible disabilities has gotten better, though I don\u2019t think we\u2019re there yet.\u201d Productions don\u2019t just \u201csee disability in a plot and think: \u2018We told a disabled story last year\u2019\u201d, she says. And her first starring role in the short film Don\u2019t Take My Baby<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019d been to Downing Street to talk to Cherie Blair about how the world could do better than the NHS\u2019s 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. \u201cI auditioned purely to be nosy and extend my network, and I got the role. I\u00a0remember being terrified in the audition, thinking: \u2018Why do people do this? This is awful.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In coming \u2026 Madeley as Dr Gabriele \u2018Gabs\u2019 Fox with India Amarteifio as Bethany Krall in The Rapture. Photograph: BBC\/Mammoth Screen<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t Take My Baby was written by Jack Thorne<\/a>, who would later find international acclaim with Adolescence<\/a> and has been a career-long advocate for diversity on screen, going on to make Then Barbara Met Alan<\/a>, about two disability activists, in which Madeley also starred. Thorne and Madeley\u2019s creative pairing has been double-edged: on the one hand, \u201cHe\u2019s been one of my biggest champions and supports throughout my whole career,\u201d she says; on the other, \u201cWhen I first read his work, my God, I didn\u2019t write in ages. I thought: \u2018I\u2019m never going to be as good as that. I can\u2019t show anyone my work. They\u2019d think, \u2018What\u2019s this garbage?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 Anne Reid, Emma Thompson, Rory Kinnear, Russell Tovey, Jessica Hynes \u2013 \u201call these people I\u2019ve watched and admired for years\u201d, she says. That role \u2013 Rosie, the youngest sibling, single mother of two, a dinner lady \u2013 wasn\u2019t written as a disabled character, and shaped itself organically around the casting. \u201cWe went into it saying: \u2018How much do we include of a disability? How much do we not talk about it?\u2019 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 \u2013 let\u2019s not dwell on the premonitory content]. Me being a wheelchair user was probably the least interesting bit.\u201d That\u2019s 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\u2019d never seen that on screen before \u2013 a character with a disability getting laid. \u201cThat was one of my favourite parts of the whole thing,\u201d she told Italian Vogue at the time, \u201chow sexually active she was and about how flirty she was, in spite of having a disability. That\u2019s what needs to be seen on screen because that\u2019s real life.\u201d Gabs\u2019s 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\u2019t a date to thinking she has to figure out how to live alone for ever, just her and a\u00a0ready meal and a vibrator.<\/p>\n

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Close encounter \u2026 Madeley with Jack Farthing as Frasier Melville in The Rapture. Photograph: BBC\/Mammoth Screen<\/p>\n

When she got the role of Rosie, Madeley still had a full-time job with Whizz Kids. \u201cI just thought, obviously, acting on its own, it\u2019s 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.\u201d 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\u2019t\u00a0stop coming, her CEO said: \u201cI\u00a0think you might be an actor now.\u201d<\/p>\n

You know you\u2019re in the British acting establishment, trained or not, when Doctor Who arrives. For a 60th-anniversary special in 2023<\/a>, 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<\/a>, which aired last year, but in the meantime, Madeley had started writing and has several ideas in development. \u201cWith writing, I can be up till 3 o\u2019clock in the morning; it drives my husband mad, because I then want to come to bed and tell him about it.\u201d She and Joe Lawrence married in 2024 after 12 years together; they\u2019ve actually known each other since they were five. \u201cI\u00a0wanted 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\u2019m doing for a living is absolutely hysterical. He\u2019s not an actor, he\u2019s very grounded, it\u2019s nice to be able to go home and not talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThat\u00a0claustrophobia 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,\u201d she says. Bethany is scathing, calls her \u201cwheels\u201d, prods her constantly about her car accident. It\u2019s 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\u00a0a\u00a0mysterious world on the cusp of dystopia. \u201cI remember filming that scene, it was the first, and thinking: \u2018Look at us, we\u2019re doing it, and the world\u2019s gonna see it.\u2019 I\u2019m\u00a0very, very proud.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rapture starts on 26 July at 9pm\u00a0on BBC One.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The day I met Ruth Madeley in a hotel in central London was the peak of the last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":696770,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-696769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=696769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696769\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/696770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=696769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=696769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=696769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}