Vicky McClure is done with one-dimensional women on screen
The Nottingham born actor on portraying real working-class women, and why authenticity on screen always matters.
When it comes to TV and film, women are often boxed into extremes.
Think of the ice-cool detectives, the unbreakable lawyers, or the struggling single mums - characters that reduce women into types rather than people.
Working-class women, in particular, remain among the most invisible, often reduced to caricatures. Rarely are they shown as leaders or as complex as their middle-class counterparts.
Vicky McClure has spent her career pushing against that. From This Is England to Line of Duty and now Trigger Point, the Nottingham-born actor has built a body of work defined by realism.
In ITV’s Trigger Point, she plays Lana Washington, an explosives officer in the Metropolitan Police’s bomb disposal unit - a woman trained to stay calm when every second counts. Yet the version we see on screen is far from invincible, haunted by her brother’s death in an explosion and carrying the psychological strain of her job, Lana’s resilience feels lived-in rather than cinematic.
“It’s important to see anyone on screen that’s imperfect because I believe we all kind of are. I don’t believe in perfection,” Vicky told The Female Lead.
Her words ring true in an industry still struggling with representation. A 2023 study of top-grossing films found that women in their forties, like Vicky, made up only 14% of female characters, down from 20% in 2015. The screen space for real, working-class women has always been smaller still.
“I’m always drawn to the working-class world because there’s so little of it really explored,” she said. “We’ve just got to get better at telling authentic stories from that world.”
She’s not alone in that view. Her This Is England co-star Stephen Graham has been critically outspoken on the issue.
“Too often, I’ll watch stuff and think they’re treating the working class like an art project. It’s very condescending,” he told The Sunday Times. “‘Ooh, look at the poor!’ But I’m proud to be this mixed-race working-class kid from a block of flats.”
This authenticity runs throughout Vicky’s catalogue of roles. Whether dismantling bombs on Trigger Point or chasing corrupt officers in Line of Duty.
If more stories looked like Lana’s, maybe the screen would start to look a little more like the world around us.
Series 3 of Trigger Point is available now on ITVX.