Sarah Kameela Impey plays wanting without saying so. As Saira in We Are Lady Parts she is the still point in a loud band, and television has not yet found her another part as good.
Fi1m perspective
The band in We Are Lady Parts (2021) is loud, and Saira, who wants it more than anyone, is the quiet one. Sarah Kameela Impey plays her a little apart from the others, listening, not yet sure what she would say if anyone asked. We wrote at the time that she gives Saira a stillness the others lack, and that is the whole performance: Anjana Vasan does the fretting and the sudden competence, Lucie Shorthouse gets the jokes, and Impey waits. We kept watching her in scenes that belonged to other people, which is not something we say of many second leads.
The singing is the other half of it. Before acting took over she spent six years fronting a soul indie band, A Blossom Fell, and Saira is a punk singer, which is a different instrument altogether. She has said that learning to sing punk "was like trying to shed all that stuff and it was so raw", and you can hear the shedding: the voice is untidy on purpose. Nida Manzoor, who wrote and directed the series and brought her back for the second run in 2024, understood that the rawness and the stillness were the same quality seen from two sides.
Before Saira there was very little that anyone outside a theatre would have seen. She trained at Arts Educational Schools in London, worked in short films and on stage from 2013, and played a Spirit in the RSC's The Tempest (2017). Since Saira the work has been steadier and smaller. She joined Vera in 2023 as Dr Paula Bennett, the pathologist, a job that consists largely of standing over a body and telling Brenda Blethyn what she already suspects; our review of the series did not mention her, and that is a fair measure of how much the part allows. There have been turns in Maternal (2023) and Silent Witness (2025), and a voice in The Archers (2023).
None of that is wasted, and a pathologist on a long-running crime series is honest work. But the thing Impey does best, the withheld want, needs a writer who will build a whole character around it and then make her speak. Manzoor did that once. Somebody else should try.
Biography
Sarah Kameela Impey is a British actress and singer. Born in Ipswich, Suffolk, she trained at the Arts Educational Schools in London.
She is known for playing Saira in the Channel 4 series We Are Lady Parts (2021–2024) and Dr Paula Bennett in the ITV series Vera (2023–). Other television credits include Silent Witness (2025) as Tina Steadman and Maternal (2023).
Impey has an extensive stage career, with credits including productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Northern Broadsides. She previously sang with the soul indie band A Blossom Fell.
