It’s a shocking moment. In this series of the pacey conspiracy thriller The Capture, a man marches into a press conference and kills the home secretary. The gunman’s face is plastered all over the footage picked up by the TV news cameras in the room, but the talented young police officer Rachel Carey is the only person to have seen him up close. She is convinced that the man in the videos is not the man she saw, and the situation is compounded when the real gunman turns up at her office and announces himself as her new boss. Last night the final episode was shown, revealing a conspiracy that goes to the heart of the British state.
Written down like that, the plot seems rather silly. But within the uncanny, paranoid parallel of modern Britain that the writer Ben Chanan has created, it feels entirely plausible. Carey’s Britain is one where agents of the deep state engage in an illicit process called “correction”, seamlessly editing CCTV footage to frame their suspects, and in doing so securing prosecutions with ease.
“Back when The Capture started, we [in the real world] were so far behind in terms of deepfakes and AI that people just didn’t believe it, but the world has caught up so much and so now, by series three, people are believing it,” says Holliday Grainger, who plays Carey.
The 38-year-old is speaking from Devon, where she is on holiday with her partner and soon-to-be five-year-old twins. “It started off feeling quite Black Mirror-y and now it just feels like another version of the news.”
This show is science fiction, but only just. “Everything that was in series one felt like it was happening somewhere,” Grainger says, “and I don’t think that’s too far from the truth of series three.” Working on The Capture “reframed the way I was thinking about world events. I can’t unsee it.”
Grainger, make-up free and with her reddish-brown hair pulled back in a messy bun, is playful and funny, wholly different from the intensely professional and work-obsessed Carey. Still, both share a serious work ethic. Grainger has been acting since she was a child growing up in Didsbury, south Manchester. As a teenager, she was in Waterloo Road, and since then has played everyone from Lucrezia Borgia in The Borgias to the private detective Cormoran Strike’s business partner, Robin Ellacott, in Strike.
The role of Carey is an interesting one. The female detective inspector is different to the stereotypical officer in a police procedural. We don’t get to see a tragic backstory, an addiction or a wife and family at home playing sad second fiddle to the job. Grainger laughs when I put this to her.
“That’s not too far from Carey, it’s just that she doesn’t have a wife at home, which makes it even sadder.” The reason we don’t see much of Carey’s life is that she doesn’t really have one. “She’s all about the work and therefore the show is all about the plot. She’s not a people pleaser and I feel like she’s like that with the audience too: I’m not giving you all my backstory, just follow me along.”The Capture has already been critically acclaimed, but the fact that the third series has come out at a time of deep anxiety about AI has added a particular edge to the audience’s appreciation of the show. “There are some very scary elements of it,” Grainger says. “Like anything, if we used it in the right way and there wasn’t the kind of puppetry of the money behind it all then it would be such a great thing for humanity. But there are always going to be people who put it to bad use.”
She herself is something of a Luddite. “I’m so analogue in terms of my internet usage. I haven’t used an AI, ChatGTP… I don’t know the names of them. I kind of shy away from tech.”
To make sure that The Capture felt real, Grainger and the rest of the team received advice from real-life counterterror and military officials. I’ve heard that there is nobody as gossipy as an ex-spy. Is this correct? Grainger laughs. “Oh yep! You just need to tap the right question and you’ll be there for hours.”She spent time shadowing real police officers before beginning filming on series one. “I really enjoyed it while I was there,” she says. “A couple of cases I was privy to, I wanted to solve before I left.” She laughs again. “Obviously I didn’t. I did not solve those murders.” What she did notice was that for senior police officers there is rather more in the way of meetings and management than chasing after bad guys with a gun.
Grainger came to appreciate the oddly symbiotic relationship between police procedurals and real-life coppers. Once, when she was out on patrol with two female officers, “they started talking about Gillian Anderson’s outfits in The Fall. Another one of the cops I shadowed had a picture of Luther on his desk. I realised that, while I was trying to get to who they really were, they were copying the outfits they were seeing on television.”Grainger was brought up by her mother, a graphic designer. By the age of six, she was already acting, after being scouted for the BBC series All Quiet on the Preston Front. “I loved it,” she says. “I had quite a special experience because my mum worked from home so she could chaperone me and work in my trailer, so I had a quite free and grounded experience. I never had a tutor. Now you go on set and you have tutors, chaperones, child psychologists — which is great, I’m sure, for ongoing safety or whatever, but I just loved being part of the group. My mum would make friends with all the other actors and crew, so I got to hang out at the hotel bar at night.”
Grainger was able to continue attending mainstream school, and spent her teens at Parrs Wood High School in East Didsbury. “I only did two or three acting jobs a year,” she says. “It was the occasional episode, three weeks here and there. The only series I did was in the holidays and I got my best mate a job as an extra. There’s a massive difference between being a child actor and being famous as a kid and I was never famous as a kid. All of that negative aspect of it I never saw.”Grainger’s partner, Harry Treadaway, is also an actor, and has featured in shows such as The Crown and Deceit (he is also a twin; his brother is the actor Luke Treadaway). What would Grainger say if their twins came to her and said they wanted to act too? She laughs. “I hope we are years away from them knowing what they want to do.” That said, “if I’m not working, I don’t want to be on a set — and I’m not having anyone else chaperoning them either”.
The family live in north London and there is just the smallest trace of the Manchester accent left in Grainger’s voice. “I love Manchester,” she says. “There’s always a bit of me that has that slight regional guilt about bringing up southern children… They are definitely going to be very London, but I can’t help but feel very proud when their favourite songs are Oasis songs. It’s a typical thing to say, but northen people are just friendlier. I might have lost the accent but I hope I’ve kept that.”
For the first time in a long while, Grainger is not sure what is next. A new series of Strike is due out this year, but filming has just finished. “I’ve had the same shows ticking along for a few years so it’s quite freeing to have a blank slate,” she says. “I think I’m kind of done with my procedural years… I like the idea of doing something a bit lighter and a bit real. I’d love to just play myself in rom-coms.”
Will there be another series of The Capture? “I guess that depends on Ben’s [Chanan] brain,” she says. “It was always kind of meant to be a trilogy. But it’s certainly very open-ended. Ben’s brain will always be working away at ‘what if’, and there will always be so many ‘what ifs’.”
written by admin on April 15, 2026
