McGrillis plays women who say the wrong thing at volume and then, for a second, let you see they know it. In Mum that is enough to carry a whole house; elsewhere she has mostly been the dependable one in somebody else's story.
Fi1m perspective
Kelly, in Mum (2016–2019), is the girlfriend who never stops talking. She arrives in Cathy's kitchen, fills it, and is the only person in that house who speaks to the widow rather than past her, which is both the joke and the point. We laughed at her in the first episode, as we were meant to. A few episodes on, McGrillis lets Kelly's face go still for a moment while the others carry on, and you see that she knows exactly what they think of her, and we stopped laughing and felt like Pauline. That is the performance: the loud woman, then the ten seconds in which she is not, then the noise again.
She was a stage actor first. The Pitmen Painters (2007) took her to the National Theatre and to Broadway; there was Much Ado About Nothing at the Globe in 2011 and The Pass at the Royal Court in 2014, a part she repeated in the 2016 film. Television came with Hebburn (2012–2013) and then three series as DS Rachel Coles in Inspector George Gently (2014–2017), opposite Martin Shaw. Mum is what people know her for. Since then the work has split between comedy, King Gary and Avoidance, and drama, Deadwater Fell, Sex Education, Rivals, with a lead in Maternal (2023) and a small part as a detective in Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho (2021).
What she does well is the double layer, and she does it best when the writing leaves room for it. Stefan Golaszewski writes those small openings and she knows where they are; her own account of Kelly is that "it's easy to make her just silly, but actually she's just a bit sad and broken and wants to be loved," and that is what is on screen. Playing opposite Lesley Manville helps, because Manville's Cathy gives so little back that every one of Kelly's overtures lands in silence, and McGrillis has to show us Kelly noticing. The parts she is offered tend to be working-class women with a regional accent and more to say than anyone wants to hear. She is good at them. Nobody has yet found a fault in her that critics repeat, and we cannot either; the honest caveat is that we have only seen her carry weight in one show, and everywhere else she has been support.
By her own description, Maternal is the part closest to herself. We would like to see more of that, and less of the loud woman with a bruise underneath, before the trick she plays so well in Mum becomes the only one anybody asks for.
Biography
Lisa McGrillis is a British actress. She was born on 3 September 1982 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and studied performing arts at Northumbria University.
She began her career in theatre, appearing in The Pitmen Painters (2007), which transferred to the National Theatre and Broadway. Her television credits include Inspector George Gently (2008–2017) as Rachel Coles, Mum (2016–2019) as Kelly, No Offence (2015–2018), Deadwater Fell (2020), Last Night in Soho (2021), Sex Education (2019–2023) and Rivals (2024) as Valerie Jones.
McGrillis is married to actor Stuart Martin.
