Jessica Raine is a persuasive, watchful actor whose reactions matter even when someone else is doing the talking. Call the Midwife puts that gift to good use, though its writing sometimes makes her too dutiful a guide.
Fi1m perspective
In Call the Midwife (2012), Jessica Raine lets us see Jenny Lee being affected by the people she attends to. She does not have to take charge of an encounter to remain important to it. That watchfulness suits a programme which treats caring for women as work deserving proper attention. We rate the restraint: another character can hold our interest while Jenny's response tells us that the encounter has mattered to her, too.
The difficulty comes when the writing in Heidi Thomas's programme makes Jenny a dutiful route into somebody else's story. Its eagerness to find a lesson can soften the harder material, and Raine cannot supply everything her character has been denied. Jenny Agutter, as Sister Julienne, provides much of the ensemble's steadiness. We found Agutter's calm unexpectedly moving because she makes listening to a worried woman feel as necessary as the medical work. Raine's willingness to attend to others helps make that shared respect for care persuasive.
Her breakthrough as Jenny, whom she played from 2012 to 2014, might have fixed her as television's reliable source of reassurance. Instead, she played Jane Rochford in Wolf Hall (2015) and Julia opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in Patrick Melrose (2018). The lead role of Lucy Chambers in the time-bending thriller The Devil's Hour (2022) takes her further from Jenny's duties. Her characters often suppress their emotions to cope, even when their behaviour is less reassuring than Jenny's.
We would like to see her given more characters whose wants inconvenience the people around them. Her attentiveness need not always be put to kindly use, and a script could make something uncomfortable of how much she notices. That is a reason to follow her beyond the reassuring parts. Start with Call the Midwife, but allow for writing that occasionally needs to trust its actors more.
Biography
Jessica Raine is an English actress. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 2008, after studying at the University of the West of England.
She is known for her role as Jenny Lee in the BBC series Call the Midwife (2012–2014), Verity Lambert in the television film An Adventure in Space and Time (2013), and Jane Rochford in the series Wolf Hall (2015). Other television credits include Line of Duty (2014), Fortitude (2015), Patrick Melrose (2018), Becoming Elizabeth (2022) and the lead role in The Devil's Hour (2022–).
Raine is married to actor Tom Goodman-Hill.
