‘I still think I will solve some of the murders I was privy to at Hendon’
cops at Hendon and I just loved it. At one point Ben Chanan, our writer and director, called me and I said, ‘I will have to call you back, I’m in the office.’ I’m not sure how he felt about that.
“I still think I will solve some of the murders I was privy to when I was in Hendon.
“Every time I walk through my local park I am looking for a body. I really didn’t want to leave.
“What I really wanted to do was spend some time with Counter-terrorism. The more people I met, the more people I was introduced to and the closer I got; it became a real mission.
“Finally, I got to speak to someone on the phone and she agreed to meet – but we had already started filming and I wasn’t able to go.
“I was gutted but realised that I need to concentrate on the actual script.The research had sort of become a personal ambition rather than anything useful for work.”
DI Carey is on the Fast Track team which, as the show looks at, means some of her older colleagues have their noses put out of joint by this young buck.
“The Fast Track scheme face of the police force.
“That image of the old middle-aged cigarette-smoking copper is shifting; now you have these young and academic graduates coming in. “Our director Ben, who was a documentary director before, was really interested in the dynamics of it. “Having this young buck entering and ordering more experienced people around is compelling – and it’s not just the effect on them but on her.
“If she doesn’t feel comfortable, she gets defensive – apparently this is quite typical.
“As the series continues, and Rachel isn’t sure who to trust, you really see her learning. She needs to figure out how to manage people and be inclusive.”
As the thrilling series unveils, the ground shifts beneath Rachel’s feet. “She thought is the changing this would be an easily wrapped up case but the more she unravels the more she has to question her own moral judgment and her own career ambitions,” adds Holliday.
“She has to desire to get to the truth and she pursues it a lot even though some quite scary people might not want her to.”
ALOT of the action in the show centres on surveillance; it reveals how much we can learn about other people’s lives but also how what you see on film might not always be the truth. “What’s been interesting is that even as we were making the show, stories were coming up about what was the truth of things and how the camera lies,” says Holliday.
“There was a story about a Trump press conference where one of his aides had a tussle with a journalist over a microphone.
“From one angle it looks like he pushed her, from another, she looks like the aggressor.
“None of it is being manipulated – but there are so many ways to interpret something depending on how you look at it.
“It’s the same as when people make a comment on Twitter and people take it in different ways. You can have two completely different versions of the truth.
“When I was first sent the script it all felt quite futuristic, Black Mirror-like, so it is quite surreal when you see it happening in front of your eyes.
“Real life is moving so fast that the show feels less like dystopian future and more like social commentary, so much less hypothetical than it did at first.
“It brings up so many moral questions of police, society and surveillance.”
Holliday, who shares a London home with her actor boyfriend Harry Treadaway, 35, and who also has a house in Manchester, says that she is eager to try and keep her own life away from surveillance society.
Unlike many of her contemporaries who share their lives on the net, she shies away from it; a wise idea for someone on the cusp of mega-stardom.
“I am not on social media and I can’t even bring myself to have an Alexa [virtual assistant] in the house,” she says.
“I am very aware of what people can do to pry into your life so I try to not let it in.”
● The Capture continues on BBC One, Tuesday at 9pm.