Anna Maxwell Martin is TV's most underrated actor
October 30, 2024 6:00 am(Updated 6:01 am)
Arrested for murder after being found at the crime scene with the blood-spattered weapon in your hand. It’s a rare actress who can make this not just utterly sympathetic but actually quite funny. Yet that’s exactly what Anna Maxwell Martin manages in this week’s Ludwig finale. The compellingly low-key BBC gem has proved the best new home-grown cop drama in years – and Maxwell Martin is the best thing in it.
Nominally, of course, it’s David Mitchell who takes top billing as the bumbling puzzle-setter, posing as his police detective twin brother to investigate his mysterious disappearance. Cerebral but socially inept, fusty and fogeyish, prone to outraged rants about the modern world – the character is the perfect vehicle for Mitchell, but he’s playing to type. He’s essentially playing himself. Or at least a middle-aged remix of Mark from Peep Show.
Maxwell Martin, however, has the trickier role and she shines in it. As the missing man’s photographer wife, she prises her agoraphobic brother-in-law out of the house and persuades him to break the law by impersonating a police officer. While Mitchell accidentally solves murders and becomes an unlikely hero, Maxwell Martin juggles undercover sleuthing with raising her teen son and trying not to be overwhelmed with grief that her husband has vanished without trace.
Maxwell Martin’s ability to invest her part with nuance and tenderness helps us suspend disbelief for the Jonathan Creek-esque capers. She’s manic and mildly eccentric, fluttering on the verge of a breakdown. Her character becomes the key to the whole conspiracy plot. As she and her brother-in-law are drawn closer together, she’s torn between her feelings for the identical twins. While corduroy-clad Mitchell shambles and showboats, Maxwell Martin gives Ludwig its driving force and dramatic heart. She’s both a comic foil for Mitchell, and the show’s emotional centre.
Anna Maxwell Martin as Patricia Carmichael in Line of Duty (Photo: BBC/World Productions)This is a big week for the 47-year-old actor. Just four days after this cosy crime romp concludes on Wednesday, she swiftly returns to our screens in a starkly contrasting role. In ITV’s new true-crime drama Until I Kill You, Maxwell Martin plays a woman living with a serial killer. Portraying both the young and old Delia Balmer, the only known survivor of “scalp hunter” John Sweeney (played by Endeavour’s Shaun Evans), it shows how he tied her to a bed for four days, attacked her with an axe and left her for dead.
Based on Balmer’s memoir, it shows her as spiky, combative and not your typical victim. “I’ve never had any interest in the audience liking my character,” Maxwell Martin has said. “I think that’s shown in the work I’ve done.”
It has indeed. Remember when she became an online meme as the obnoxiously smug DCS Patricia Carmichael in Line of Duty? She was hailed as the living embodiment of “as per my last email” and “if Monday was a person”. Whether she’s playing a beloved heroine or a hated villain, Maxwell Martin is never less than excellent.
Anna Maxwell Martin as Julia in Motherland (Photo: BBC/Merman/Natalie Seery)Maxwell Martin’s ability to move seamlessly between daft comedy and dark drama, while often blurring the lines between the two, has quietly made her one of our top TV talents.
She made her name on TV by winning the Bafta for Best Actress twice in the Noughties, for Bleak House and Poppy Shakespeare. After becoming known for bonnet-clad period pieces and serious literary adaptations, she turned her hand to comedy as the frantic, frazzled Julia in school gates sitcom Motherland. She keeps her CV diverse with her refusal to be typecast. “I’m not drawn to doing the same thing twice,” she has insisted. Her huge versatility makes her difficult to pigeonhole. She brings a sharp intelligence and crackling energy to roles that means the viewing public still haven’t got a handle on her. Audiences never quite know what to expect.
Listen to Maxwell Martin in any interview and you’ll find she is a hoot – and winningly non-neurotic and down-to-earth about acting. Perhaps that is perspective: she is the single mother of two teenage girls; her husband Roger Michell died three years ago. She attributes her success to “a lot of luck and not being a dickhead”.
Maxwell Martin is a national treasure-in-waiting. Yet despite those two Baftas, the last of which of was 15 years ago, she remains underrated. Ludwig is a word-of-mouth hit which must deserve a second series; Until I Kill You will put her centre stage. Here’s hoping they will propel her into the league of Sarah Lancashire, Suranne Jones, Keeley Hawes and Olivia Colman, where she belongs.
The ‘Ludwig’ finale is on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC One. ‘Until I Kill You’ is on Sunday-Wednesday at 9pm on ITV1
