Rose Leslie and her baby son have Covid. “Day three. It is fairly grim,” she says. You’d never guess: she’s perky and bright in a stripy T-shirt, endlessly patient and accommodating when our Zoom collapses, greeting my every trite observation with enthusiasm (“You’re so right, Emma”). It’s hard not to feel she has “trouper” stamped through her like a stick of seaside rock.
I wonder if that preternaturally cheery thoughtfulness is part of the reason Leslie accumulates plum roles in prestige TV franchises like Brownie badges. After winning a Scottish Bafta straight out of drama school for her portrayal of a naive Hebridean student in the dark comedy, New Town, she was cast in Downton Abbey as ambitious housemaid-with-notions, Gwen Dawson. In Game of Thrones – of which, inevitably, more later – she’s insolent, mocking, rabbit-skin-clad Ygritte, the wildling who captivates Jon Snow, played by Harington, her future real-life husband. She holds her own in the glitzy, ambitious legal drama The Good Fight, opposite the likes of Christine Baranski and a gleefully OTT Michael Sheen. Most recently, she played Suranne Jones’s quietly gritty colleague and love interest in 2021’s bonkers but enjoyable BBC submarine thriller, Vigil.
