‘LIFE CAN BE DARK'

Vicky McClure explains the lure of playing a woman on the edge of psychosis in new drama Insomnia

- LAUREN MORRIS

For Vicky McClure, catching Line Of Duty’s bent coppers and defusing bombs as Trigger Point’s Lana Washington is all in a day’s work. So for her latest role, she is stepping outside of her comfort zone – by playing an office worker.

“I wanted to wear five-inch heels,” she laughs. “I said, ‘Give me nails!’ Although it was a pain in the a**e when they said, ‘You’ve got to get your infills done.’ What? I’ve got to keep this up?”

But Bafta winner Vicky, 41, doesn’t play your average office worker in Insomnia. In the Paramount+ psychological thriller, she stars as Emma, a high-flying lawyer with a stay-at-home husband and two children who is tormented by sleep deprivation as her 40th birthday nears.

Terrified that she is becoming her estranged mother, who suffered a violent psychotic breakdown at the same age, Emma tries to hold her life together while confronting her traumatic past.

“There are a lot of complications that come back to haunt Emma,” Vicky says. “There’s a massive story there and you see as the series unravels, it just gets worse.”

Vicky was drawn to the role after hitting the same milestone. “I turned 40 last year so I thought, ‘This is for me.’ I like anything that feels relatable and real,” she says. “It goes into ultra-realism at times, but I could just tell that it was something I haven’t delved into a lot before.”