Anjana Vasan

In her bedroom, Amina Hussain plays the guitar beautifully. Put anyone in the doorway and she is sick. That is the whole of Anjana Vasan's method in We Are Lady Parts (2021), and it is the thing she does that most actors do not: she plays the competence as the surprise. The tics, the apologies and the flinching are the performance we are shown; the ability is kept back until it is needed, and then it arrives all at once. When Amina finally plays a solo, the band sits up. So did we, and we felt slightly foolish for having been as surprised as they were, since the point of the character is that the talent was there all along.

She had been doing it for some years before anyone was watching. There were small television parts from 2011, among them Fresh Meat, and stage work after drama school, then a run at the National Theatre and the RSC through the 2010s, and a part in Riz Ahmed's Mogul Mowgli (2020). The turn came with Nida Manzoor, who created, wrote and directed We Are Lady Parts and put Vasan at the centre of its six episodes. Since then the parts have got larger and darker: Nida Huq in Black Mirror: Demon 79 (2023), Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire on stage the same year, and Gladys Moss in Wicked Little Letters (2024). The shape is plain enough, and Vasan has named it herself: "I’ve been underestimated because I’m small, brown and foreign – I take relish in proving people wrong."

Manzoor gets the best out of her because Manzoor surrounds her with people louder than she is and then waits. Wicked Little Letters does half of that. Gladys is a Woman Police Officer, a title her colleagues say as though it were a diagnosis, and Vasan gives her a stiff back and the face of someone doing the arithmetic while everyone else shouts. She walks off with the middle of the film. But Thea Sharrock has Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley to attend to, and having established that Gladys is the only competent person in the station, the film never finds her anything harder to be than right. The surprise comes early and nothing follows it.

That is the risk in the method. Competence arriving late is a trick that works once a film, and it needs a script willing to leave her in the corner for an hour first. We would like to see someone cast her as the person who walks in already in charge, and find out what she does when there is nobody left to prove wrong.