The talented Ms Ritchie
Ghosts star Charlotte Ritchie tells DQ about playing a detective for the first time in ITV drama Code of Silence, why leaving Ghosts was “a big loss” and the lessons she learned making Netflix thriller You.
From drama to comedy and roles in Fresh Meat, Call the Midwife, Feel Good, Ghosts and Grantchester and You, Charlotte Ritchie has enjoyed a career of variety. But the actor’s latest project, ITV’s Code of Silence, marks something of a first.
The series stars Rose Ayling-Ellis as Alison Brooks, a smart and determined deaf woman. Having spent years working in a police canteen and secretly observing conversations, her life takes an unexpected turn when her exceptional lip-reading skills result in her being recruited for a covert operation and tasked with surveilling a dangerous gang as they plot a high-stakes heist.
Ritchie plays DS Ashleigh Francis, who together with DI James Marsh (Andrew Buchan) introduces Alison to a world of crime, deception and risk – and must stop her from getting too involved when she forms a bond with one of the members of the gang.
“I’ve never done a crime drama before. I’ve not played anybody in that role,” Ritchie tells DQ, “and so it felt like a nice experience to just see what it’s like to be part of an investigations team.
“But what particularly drew me to this was not necessarily playing a police officer, but the relationship between my character and Rose’s character, and also the line-blurring that happens in the show. It feels like there’s a moral ambiguity around everybody’s decision-making, which feels quite true to life. That’s definitely what drew me to it, and I was really so grateful I did it.”
Looking for a lip-reader to help with their case, Ashleigh and James invite Alison to help them work out what the gang are saying in some video footage. It’s an opportunistic move on the part of the police officers, who are still overcoming their grief of losing a colleague in a previous case and are desperate to pin down the gang before they strike again.
By bringing in “naturally gifted” Alison, Ashleigh takes “a real risk because she’s putting a civilian into a fairly dangerous situation,” Ritchie says. “And she doesn’t know this yet, but Alison is really fearless, and that comes with its benefits and also its downfalls. There’s a real tension for Ashleigh in trying to manage the desire to get the results and also keep Alison safe – and those two things are not necessarily compatible. That’s the tricky conundrum Ashleigh finds herself in, but she’s really ambitious so she does push her to the limit.”
Code of Silence was created by Catherine Moulton (Baptiste, Hijack), who drew on her own experiences with lip-reading and hearing loss and partnered early on with Ayling-Ellis to make the series as authentic as possible. Jumbled subtitles emerge as Alison attempts to lip-read the video footage, and muffled sounds are used to replicate her hearing in busy environments such as pubs.
That attention to detail wasn’t just reserved for Alison, however. “There were some really lovely details that Cat [Moulton] put in about Ashleigh’s private life, which can be easily lost in a procedural drama,” Ritchie says. “What makes this particularly good is that there are these tiny details about everybody, and their relationships, that you learn. Good writing across the board does that, even if it’s procedural, and Cat’s great so it was just nice to see that and have that character fleshed out in the script.”
The actor continues: “The relationship between Alison and Ashleigh really blossomed partly through the moments Rose and I had with each other. That’s a natural thing that happens outside of the script as well. It’s all there but there’s a way of amplifying it, or playing on the real-life relationship you have can be helpful.”
Taking part in a crime drama with a unique perspective also drew Ritchie to the project, which is produced by Mammoth Screen and distributed by ITV Studios. “It was a gripping crime drama but we were also seeing something from the perspective of a deaf person, and that felt like something I hadn’t seen before,” she adds. “I wanted to learn about that experience and I knew Rose was really talented. She’s very inspiring. She’s very charismatic. She’s very inclusive. I felt really lucky to work with her and learn from her.”
Stepping into a police procedural, Ritchie was conscious of infusing her lines relating to the case with meaning and intention, to stop them coming off simply as reams of exposition to bring Alison – and the audience – up to speed with the police operation.
When it came to shooting, director Diarmuid Goggins (Kin) had already filmed a lot of the surveillance footage Alison is asked to look at, which made filming those scenes much more natural.
But with so many notable TV detectives on screen, was she conscious of playing Ashleigh in a certain way – or particularly differently from her previous characters? “The biggest lesson I’m learning as I get older is not to try to make a character specifically defined by how it’s not somebody else,” she says.
“You can get tempted as an actor to try not to be another part you’ve already played, but I want to be driven by what’s on the page and what is the most truthful way of saying that. I try not to worry too much about it being compared with other characters and other shows because, even if they’re doing the same exact procedural job, they’re a different person. They’re just innately different, so you have that in your favour. Even if you’re on an assembly line, you’re a different individual soul so you’d be doing the same job but be a different person.”
Ritchie is conscious of the fact that since long-running BBC comedy Ghosts ended in 2023, she has followed up the spooky series with two dramas – Code of Silence and Netflix thriller You, in which she appeared in season four and the recently released fifth and final season. But when it comes to choosing her next roles, she doesn’t switch genres just for the sake of it.
“It’s more that once I’ve done a certain feel of a show, I get a craving to mix it up a bit,” she says, “so having done two dramas in a row, now I have a hankering to do something light, or at least something that uses a different part of my brain. But again, as I get older, I am beginning to see how they’re all part of the same thing and it’s just different flavours. It’s only recently that I have felt like I have choice, or more choice, which is a nice thing. Then you have to start thinking, ‘What do I really like and what am I looking for?'”
Running for five seasons, Ghosts followed a group of ghosts from different historical periods who haunt the large manor house where they all died. When Alison (Ritchie) inherits Button House, she and husband Mike decide to move in, much to the annoyance of the ghosts, who make various attempts to scare them away. Then when one of the ghosts pushes Alison from an upstairs window, leaving her clinically dead for several minutes, she awakes from a coma to discover she can now see and hear the ghosts.
The show was written and created by the creative team behind Horrible Histories, who made the decision to end the series while it was still at its peak. It was a move understood by Ritchie, but no less mourned, and she admits she felt daunted by moving on from the show.
“Honestly, it’s just the most fun show so, to me, it was just the loss of something so great that I was worried about,” she says. “In terms of moving on to other things, it felt like a big loss because we have this guaranteed good time and great work with great writing in January [when the series would be filmed], which is the most depressing and worrying month of the year when the tax bills come in, and then it’s also after Christmas and everyone’s wondering what the year’s going to be. There was something so amazing about having something so wonderful in January. But it’s been good, in some ways. Everything ends, right? So you have to go through that and then find out what’s on the other side, which has been interesting.”
If it were up to Ritchie, “it would have been like, season 16, and everyone would be hating it, so they were definitely smart ending it when they did, but that doesn’t make it any easier. That’s always the fate of not being a writer. You’re just constantly at the whim of other people’s decision-making.”
Joining US drama You in its fourth season proved to be a “real departure” from Ritchie’s other roles, while the production was on a scale she hadn’t experienced before. In the series, she plays Kate, a London gallery manager who strikes up a relationship with serial killer Joe (Penn Badgley) in season four, before moving to New York with him in season five.
“The character was very different and kind of cold and quite intimidating. But of all the jobs, in some ways I’ve learned the most on that one because of the scale and how daunted I was and how much I’ve been able to grow through it.”
Jumping into the show mid-run felt like “a big ask,” if only because You had already built up a strong following. But the biggest thing she learned on the show was “you shouldn’t judge your character,” she says. “You should get inside the character rather than judge them.”
Another lesson was that “when something feels enormous and you have a big, juggernaut show, it can look like a massive block of scary power. But really, all those things are made up of individual people, and once you start talking to an individual writer or producer, once you break that apart, you can really just get into the good stuff.
“I was very intimidated by the scale and so felt unable to do that, and actually that was probably a mistake on my part. When I was not sure how to do something, I could’ve just asked a real person rather than think, ‘Well, it’s a big show and I’ve just got to get on with it.’ It’s been a big learning that no organisation is too big for you to just speak to somebody about something you’re worried about.”
Next up for Ritchie is a role in another Netflix series – and another crime drama. Created by Neil Forsyth (The Gold, Guilt) and inspired by a true story, Legends centres on a group of ordinary British Customs officers who are given a top-secret mission: to infiltrate the country’s most notorious drug gangs and help take them down from the inside. Ritchie is part of an ensemble cast that also includes Tom Burke, Steve Coogan, Hayley Squires, Aml Ameen, Jasmine Blackborrow, Douglas Hodge, Tom Hughes, Johnny Harris and Gerald Kyd.
Though she might harbour ambitions behind the camera – she collaborated on a 2017 podcast called Capital, set in a future UK that brings back the death penalty – for now, acting is her priority. “I still feel like I’ve got so much to learn about acting,” she says. “I’m just getting my teeth into that.”
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tagged in: Charlotte Ritchie, Code of Silence, Ghosts, ITV, ITV Studios, Mammoth Screen, Netflix, You