Getting To Know… Emilia Fox

The stylish star of Silent Witness is actually a homebody who loves baking and playing board games…

◆ This is my 13th series of Silent Witness, and I still feel the same about the show as the day that I started. I love the luxury of really getting to know my character, forensic pathologist Dr Nikki Alexander. I love the science side of conducting post-mortems, and the fans of Silent Witness are amazing – thanks to the rise of social media, you have a very immediate contact with people who love the show.

◆ We’ll actually see Nikki smiling this series! Nikki has not had a relationship for many, many years, which many fans comment on. After the trauma of the last series, when she survived being buried alive, I was very concerned that Nikki find a way to love and appreciate life. She meets a nice man at last.

◆ The post-mortems I attended as research for Silent Witness were eye-opening. One was of an old man who’d died of natural causes, so it felt like more of a natural thing than the other one, of a young man in the prime of life who’d had an untimely death. If you had said to him a few days earlier that this is what would happen, he wouldn’t have believed that. I came away thinking, ‘Wow, you have to make the most of every second, because you just never know.’ Life is short when you see it like that.