Lolly Adefope

Kitty, the Georgian girl in Ghosts, gets nearly everything wrong and is delighted about all of it. Lolly Adefope plays her with the line first and the face second: the announcement goes out with complete confidence, then the eyes take in the other ghosts not laughing, and then, a beat later, she decides not to mind. That beat is the performance. Most of the show's jokes are reaction shots, six faces at once, and Mike Holliday's editing keeps finding hers because there is always something happening in it. We laughed harder at Kitty than at anything else in the series, and it was rarely the words; it was watching her be corrected by a whole room and carry on regardless.

She came to it from stand-up, with solo shows at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015 and 2016, and took acting parts from about the same time. Ghosts ran from 2019 to 2023 and made her a familiar face; in the same years she played Fran, best friend to Aidy Bryant, in Shrill (2019–2021), a quieter and more naturalistic part we have not reviewed. Around those came Ruth Duggan in This Time with Alan Partridge (2019), Lady Daphne in Saltburn (2023), Kate in Wicked Little Letters (2024) and The Franchise (2024). The pattern is easy to see: the friend, the eccentric, the person at the edge of the frame who says the odd thing.

It works when there is a room to react to. The Ghosts cast had been working together for years, nobody fights for the camera, and Adefope is best when she has five faces to play against and a director who will hold on hers. What she does with a slight widening of the eyes is worth more than most of the lines she is given, and it needs time on screen to land. Wicked Little Letters shows the limit. She, Joanna Scanlan and Eileen Atkins run an unofficial investigation over tea, and their scenes are the film's warmest and its most familiar, which is to say the part is a pleasant one and asks nothing of her that it could not have asked of anyone. She is not badly used; she is used for company.

That is the criticism her career has attracted, and she has said as much herself about how the industry casts: too many quirky friends, too many parts that need someone to be odd in the corner. It is fair, and it describes the offers more than the actor, since the one time a series built a whole character around her enthusiasm she was the find of the ensemble. What we would like next is a part in which she is wrong about something that matters, for ninety minutes, at the centre of the frame. Until then, notice where the camera goes when a joke lands. It goes to her more often than the billing suggests.