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.
Last year, he took on a radically different role, as Barrington (below) in the BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman, a closeted Windrush-generation Caribbean man in a secret relationship with his best friend. Quietly moving, it is a drastic shift in tone for James, and has earned him his first solo Bafta TV nomination.
