Nina Sosanya

Watch Nina Sosanya wait. In Teachers (2001) her Jenny shares a staffroom with Andrew Lincoln's Simon, a man who lies in the middle of his own sentences and gets away with it, and she does not shout at him. She stands there, exact and ambitious, unable to understand how he is still employed, and Sosanya plays the bafflement completely straight. That is the joke, and it is a better one than most of the pub scenes. She has been doing a version of it ever since: the head of inclusivity in W1A, an MI6 operative in Killing Eve, the professional who has read the memo, sitting slightly to one side of the people who have not.

She came to it from the stage. There was RSC work and a National Theatre Antony and Cleopatra in 1998 before Teachers (2001 to 2002) put her on television, and she has never quite left the theatre since; Screw in 2022 is the recent evidence. On screen the career has gone wherever it was sent. Film came early, with Love Actually and Code 46 in 2003. Then the long run of British series: Last Tango in Halifax from 2012 to 2015, W1A from 2014 to 2017, Good Omens from 2019, in which she takes several parts and the comedy is broader than she is usually allowed, Baby Reindeer in 2024. She has worked with David Tennant three times. Her own description is the honest one: "It's a bit of a pinball and so far it's been hugely rewarding."

What she has, and what most of those parts use, is stillness with something going on behind it. She trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, and it shows in how she holds herself: nothing wasted, no fidget, the body as composed as the face. It makes her a natural for the dry end of comedy, where the laugh comes from the person who refuses to react, and it makes her useful in drama, where the same quality reads as someone keeping her counsel. In Teachers it gives her scenes with Lincoln their snap; he slouches and improvises and she simply does not move. We found, going back to it, that we were on Jenny's side sooner than the series meant us to be, and that was Sosanya's doing. She makes ambition look like plain good sense, which on British television is rarer than it should be.

The caveat is the one everybody notices. She is liked in everything and she is the lead in almost nothing; the parts are ensemble, supporting, the second name in the scene. That is partly the shape of the work she is offered and partly the kind of actor she is, a player who anchors rather than carries. It still seems a waste. The woman who is right in every room deserves, at some point, a room of her own. Until somebody builds one, the first two series of Teachers remain the best place to see what she does, and the reason to stay when the staffroom starts to empty.