Actress Ruth Wilson stars in a brand new BBC drama, The Woman in the Wall, which is about a Magdalene Laundry survivor who is also caught up in a murder case
Ruth Wilson has spoken out on her latest role in new BBC drama The Woman in the Wall as viewers are divided by the first episode.
The actress, who also starred in Luther, Mrs Wilson and His Dark Materials, plays Lorna Brady, an Irish woman who wakes one morning to find a dead body in her house. The six-part series takes one of Ireland’s most shocking scandals â the Magdalene Laundries â and turns it into a murder mystery meets psychological horror.
Her character, Lorna, is a survivor of the laundries who has suffered from sleepwalking since being imprisoned in one of Ireland’s mother and baby homes at the age of 15. Her baby was taken away from her at birth, but she still believes her little girl is alive and is determined to find her.
But when a dead body turns up in her house â and she has no idea who the woman is or of her own culpability due to her extreme bouts of sleepwalking â she is investigated by Detective Colman Akande, played by Peaky Binders and Bad Sisters star Daryl McCormack, who is hiding a dark secret himself. At least 30,000 women were imprisoned in Magdalene institutions run by the Catholic Church across Ireland for being unmarried mothers between 1922 and 1996. Some were rape victims. All had their babies confiscated by nuns and most never saw them again.