Keeley Hawes: ‘We can’t all relate to being a nun. But love is the most relatable thing of all’

If you didn’t have ‘a nun and a priest fall in love in a new drama by Adolescence writer Jack Thorne’ on your 2026 TV bingo card, you are not alone. But Falling is that drama. What’s more, it’s a beautiful, fragile love story with a social conscience and deep humanity, told with supreme skill and maximum empathy by a cast led by Keeley Hawes and Paapa Essiedu.

Both lead actors agree that they didn’t need to read beyond the title page, and the words ‘written by Jack Thorne’, to sign on the dotted line for Channel 4’s new six-parter – which rewrites the rules of love and modern TV drama. 

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“I’ve been such an admirer of him as a writer, but also as a man, for a long time,” says Essiedu, who returns to screens in the wake of an acclaimed performance in BBC One’s Babies. 

“With this story, he created something so delicate and vulnerable – which is maybe partly seen in your Adolescence or your This Is England, but to me, it felt like a voice that comes from Jack, which is very him, and that he doesn’t often allow out or put into his characters.”

“It’s a no-brainer when something comes through the door from Jack,” adds Hawes. “This is unlike anything I’d seen for such a long time. It’s a thing of beauty about love in all its forms. Maybe we can’t all relate to it being about a nun and a priest. But actually, love is the most relatable thing of all.” 

It begins with Hawes as Anna and Essiedu as Father David, living parallel lives. Both stories are already compelling before their worlds collide and sparks fly. She is a happy, spirited nun living a quietly fulfilling life tending to the convent vegetable garden and supporting the local foodbank, while he is a Catholic priest in a busy Bristol parish, campaigning for a new needle exchange and basketball court – equal parts community champion and spiritual leader.

“It’s wonderful to look behind the curtain of a world that we don’t see very often,” says Hawes.

“There’s an awful lot of social work. Particularly for Anna, it was important for that character who has had less of a life outside of the church than David to be out in the world, so that when she falls so hard for David, it is not because he’s the first man she’s seen in a while.” 

Read more:

• From The Assassin to new Netflix thriller Hostage: Is TV getting more preposterous?
• Paapa Essiedu: ‘It’s hard for me not to be political in the work that I do’
• Adolescence writer Jack Thorne: ‘Lord of the Flies looks populism in the eye’

“Whether you’re within a religious community or not, you can imbue these figures with a kind of other-worldly quality,” adds Essiedu. “But they are just people. They’re people with compassion – David is the guy who wants basketball courts for the community, he wants to be having conversations with people, doing youth work, and making real world change. 

“Another thing Jack does so brilliantly is write scenes which appear domestic and ordinary. You find yourself talking about cauliflowers or scrambled eggs. But there is something extraordinary about the people he creates and imagines, and that he entrusts us to breathe life into.”

“And his take on love,” chips in Hawes. “We spoke to him before we started shooting. And hearing him talk about love for his son, for his parents, the way he met his wife – it was magical.

The resulting love story is as quietly, defiantly radical as its protagonists. Thorne’s script leaves space for so much unspoken emotion, the pace of storytelling going against the grain in an era of high-octane drama fuelled by a desire to keep us from glancing at a second screen, with cliffhangers compelling us to binge watch. By contrast, Falling is something to savour. 

Both main characters appear content. Thorne took great pains to understand their devotion and faith. Neither is looking for love. But then, suddenly, whether they like it or not, there it is. At the recent Bafta screening, Thorne spelled out his own Damascene conversion to a belief in love at first sight, as his wife Rachel Mason watched on from the audience.

“I thought I’d always be alone, I’d always be writing and I was very happy with the sense of what my life would be,” he said. “Then I met a woman on the train, who was sitting just there, and suddenly, my life was completely different. I would never have believed in love at first sight. But then something came along that hit me over the head with a brick.” 

“From one perspective, it is the last thing Anna and David need in their lives,” Essiedu explains. “It’s not just a bit disruptive, it’s like a nuclear bomb going off in the centre of both of their lives. 

“Jack never thought it was going to happen to him. And then it did. I feel like that is the fundamental of what it means to fall in love. When it hits you, it’s like something you’ve never felt before. And it’s something you don’t have an instruction manual for. That’s what you’re seeing in these six episodes, two people trying to navigate something incredibly complex without having any precedent or any training.”

The other relationships in their lives are similarly well drawn. There’s Anna and the older nuns, including Niamh Cusack as their abbess, while David’s colleague Francis (Adrian Scarborough) is a delight. 

David and his sister Susan (Sophie Stone) have a particularly important bond, which also showcases Thorne’s willingness to put his money where his mouth is – or maybe his words where his ideology is – when it comes to representing disability on screen, something he has campaigned for over many years.

“I really enjoyed, and I’m really proud of, working with my sister in the show, played by Sophie Stone, who’s this fucking incredible actor,” says Essiedu, who worked on his British Sign Language (BSL) skills for months ahead of filming. 

“She’s profoundly deaf, and the way we communicate is using BSL. That’s written in the script. I’ve got to thank Jack for giving us the opportunity to create this relationship – which I feel is not shown on mainstream TV anywhere near regularly enough.

“It was about finding an intimacy between two people, between siblings, in the way that they use language.”

“He embraced it. He enjoyed it. And it mattered to him,” is Stone’s verdict. “He wanted it not just to look good but to be clear, for our relationship to be authentic. And because it mattered to him, our relationship outside of work was deeper.”

“Sophie is wonderful,” says Hawes. “And for those scenes, you really have to lean in when you’re watching. There’s no second screen with that. You’re entirely with the characters.”

Hawes has worked on every conceivable type of TV drama over her career, from the groundbreaking early romance of Tipping the Velvet in 2002 to her career-changing star turn as Lindsay Denton in Line of Duty, via retro cop show Ashes to Ashes, Russell T Davies’s masterpiece It’s a Sin and rollicking recent Netflix hitwoman drama The Assassin. 

But this was a swerve no one saw coming, and it’s all the more rewarding for it.

“I’d been looking to do a midlife love story,” she says. “But I couldn’t have imagined for a second it would have come from Jack Thorne and be starring alongside Paapa. So that was beyond anything I’d hoped for. 

“The older people get, the more interesting these stories become. There are so few love stories about people at this point in their lives, when their lives are more complicated.”

Amen to that.

Falling is on Channel 4 and available to watch as a box set from 19 May at 9pm

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