Sarah Solemani's best trick is a laugh that arrives halfway through being annoyed. It made Becky in Him & Her half of a sitcom couple who like each other, and most of the parts since have asked for less of her.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Becky in Him & Her being cross with Steve. She starts on him, he says something idiotic, and she laughs before she has finished the telling-off, then carries on with it anyway. Russell Tovey gets the lines; Sarah Solemani gets the reactions, and across 25 episodes she makes them look like nothing at all. It is the hardest kind of acting to notice and the easiest to undervalue.
That series (2010 to 2013), created and written by Stefan Golaszewski, is still the reason to know her name. Two people in a one-room flat, under the duvet, while the relatives they cannot get rid of sit on the end of the bed. Most sitcom couples score points off each other. Steve and Becky share crisps and take each other's side against everyone, and Solemani plays her half so lightly that you stop noticing she is acting. We expected to tire of them and found instead that we missed them between episodes, which is a strange thing to feel about a woman whose main ambition is to be left alone in bed.
Before it there was theatre, the National Youth Theatre and West End parts including The Graduate, and Footlights at Cambridge. After it came the recurring friend and colleague: Rosie Gulliver in Bad Education (2012 to 2014), The Wrong Mans (2013 to 2014), Miranda in Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) and again in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025), where she and Josette Simon exist to prod a Bridget who has stopped going out back into the world. She does it well. The parts are straight-talking friends in ensembles, and they ask her to be exactly the size the lead needs, which is not large.
That is the honest complaint about the acting career: it has run along the edges of things. The precise, low-key delivery that carried a whole sitcom is used, in the films, for a line or two a scene before the camera goes back to Zellweger. We do not blame her for taking the work, and she is never the weak part of any of it. But there is a gap between what Him & Her proved she could do and what she has since been asked to.
She has answered that by writing. She adapted Ridley Road (2021), a drama about 1960s anti-fascism, wrote for Barry (2018), and co-created Chivalry (2022) with Steve Coogan, playing Bobby opposite him. "I used to think, I don’t want to frighten them off with “female stuff”. Not any more," she said in 2022. On this evidence the best parts she gets from here will be the ones she writes herself, and we would rather that than another friend on the end of the bed.
Biography
Sarah Solemani is an English actress, writer and playwright. Born on 4 September 1982 in Camden, London, she began acting in theatre at the age of sixteen and studied Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where she was involved with the Footlights.
She is best known for playing Becky in the BAFTA-winning sitcom Him & Her (2010–2013), for which she won a Royal Television Society award, and Miranda in Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025). Other credits include Rosie Gulliver in Bad Education (2012–2022) and its 2015 film spin-off, Celia Champion in Skins (2012), and roles in Inside No. 9 (2014) and Greed (2019). She has also written for series including Barry (2018) and Chivalry (2022).
Solemani has appeared in films such as Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and The Borgias (2011). She was nominated for an Evening Standard Best Actress Award for her work in Bridget Jones's Baby.
