Emma Loffhagen

As part of a Bafta TV special, the nominated actor on a whirlwind few years, why intimacy coordinators matter, and watching her not-so-guilty pleasure Real Housewives

When Marisa Abela landed the role of Yasmin, Industry’s traumatised heiress, she was still at drama school. Now, she’s a breakout star of the hit BBC/HBO series about the cut-throat world of finance. While the past couple of years have been stratospheric for the 28-year-old – she played Amy Winehouse in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s 2024 biopic Back to Black scoring a Bafta rising star nomination, and was hand-picked by Steven Soderbergh for his recent star-studded thriller Black Bag – she’s excited to be back for the next instalment of the show that made her name. In fact, when we speak she’s sitting in a Pret, all smiles and warmth despite waiting for a severely delayed train from London to Cardiff, where she is filming the fourth series.

As part of a Bafta TV special, the nominated actor and Walking Dead regular on bringing Bernardine Evaristo’s hit novel Mr Loverman to the small screen, and splitting his time between London and LA

He is almost 40 years into his career, but Lennie James is still keeping things fresh. The 59-year-old south Londoner has run the gauntlet of high-octane TV dramas, playing Morgan Jones for more than 10 years in the wildly successful apocalypse drama The Walking Dead and its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead; bent copper DCI Tony Gates in Line of Duty; and the down-and-out philanderer Nelly Rowe in Sky’s Save Me. In person, though, James is the polar opposite of the characters he is best known for – considered, introspective and disarmingly earnest.