Hannah Walters on Boiling Point and filming with her husband Stephen Graham: ‘Behind every little Scouser, there’s a strong Midlander’

Hannah Walters is striding towards me, her coiffed blonde head cocked to the side and arms wide open. “I’m a hugger!” she declares. “Is that alright?” Before I can respond, I’m pulled into an embrace. The hug is good. She’s definitely had a lot of practice.

I meet the This Is England and Time star – and wife of world-famous Scouser Stephen Graham – in a crowded room at the British Film Institute. The place is full of her co-stars in Boiling Point, BBC One’s TV spinoff of the Bafta-nominated one-shot film, which takes viewers inside the pressure-cooker kitchen of a swanky Dalston restaurant. Everyone looks a lot glossier than they do in the chef’s whites of the show. It’s a few hours before the Boiling Point premiere, and Walters is wearing a silky red dress and a blue shirt with tropical flowers all over it. She’s enjoying the glamour of it all. “We’re going to go a little bit smoky here tonight,” the 49-year-old says in her warm Midlands accent, gesturing at her eyes. “I’m making the most of it. I’m milking it for what I can. Give me the attention!”

The attention hasn’t always been on Walters. Over the past two decades, she has acted consistently. She played bolshy, promiscuous Trudy in the This Is England film and TV series, had parts in the dramas Whitechapel, Malpractice and Time, and even appeared in two Pirates of the Caribbean movies – but much of the limelight has been reserved for her husband, whom she lovingly refers to as “Mr G” and who has starred in many of the same projects, including Boiling Point.

The 2021 Boiling Point movie – which was filmed in one, pulverising, 92-minute continuous shot – closed with Graham’s head chef Andy collapsed on the restaurant floor. The TV series picks up six months later, with Andy recovering from his cocaine-induced heart attack and his team working at a new venue run by Vinette Robinson’s Carly. Walters reprises her role as Emily, the pastry chef whose blink-and-you’ll-miss-it exchange with a self-harming colleague was one of the most tender, affecting moments in British cinema in recent years. This storyline rears its head again in the four-part series, a move Walters describes as a “no-brainer” given how strongly viewers responded to it after the film. “We had such an amazing reaction from lots of people who self-harm, or from the family members of people who do,” she says. “I would get messages saying, ‘Thank you so much for just that moment, it’s really helped my son open up.’ It felt almost like a duty of care to explore it again.”

Emily is the mother hen of the kitchen – all darlings and quick cuddles and speaking up for the underdog. Walters is the same. She looks at me sort of like she wants to adopt me. “I’m a cuddler straight away, you saw that,” she says. “We’ve just met and I cuddled ya. I have got that natural maternal instinct and I think I’ve always had it.” She tells me that when she was a drama teacher, years ago, she formed such a bond with her teenage students that they painted the words “Walters is a legend” in her office.

“If they were having issues at home, I always had that ability to be open with people and make people feel they can be open with me,” she says. “I like to take care. And that’s why it feels so natural to play Emily, because that instinct is there. When the cameras cut, I’m still cuddling people and sitting with the people that are upset. I’m the little motherly anchor that is there. And I’m consistent.”

Walters credits her late mum with her caring nature. “I had such a strong relationship with her,” she says. “She unfortunately passed away when I was 33, and she lost my father when I was five. So I’d seen her care for him, then lose him, then care for me and my brother, and be that strong person and have to deal with all of that heartbreak, and yet carry on.”

One of the characters Emily is looking after as we go back into the Boiling Point kitchen is Graham’s Andy. Emily convinces Andy to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and the real-life couple’s onscreen chemistry crackles as they share a hushed conversation at the end of a session. Boiling Point is the latest in a long line of TV shows and films that Walters and Graham have starred in together, but with this project, they’re finally sharing some proper screen time. “It’s always gorgeous working with Mr G,” Walters says. “We’re just a bit silly, me and Stephen. There’s lots of banter and we’re a bit daft and a bit cuddly and, you know, we’re best friends.”

Graham, who is dyslexic, has spoken in interviews about how Walters has helped him to learn his lines and choose projects. “Behind every little Scouser, there’s a strong Midlander,” Walters says, erupting into a laugh. “Ha-ha-haaa!” She says that after Graham played Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire, he kept receiving more scripts for gangster characters. “When that happens, I kind of go, ‘We’re done,’” says Walters. “It’s about keeping it fresh. There’s been the odd occasion where I’ve read something and liked it, and he’s read it and gone back to me, saying, ‘Are you sure?’ And I’ve gone, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be really good for you.’ And he just trusts me implicitly. We’ve been together for 30 years. It just works, I can’t explain it. Matilda was the one that me and our daughter Grace had to convince him to do. [Graham plays Matilda’s neglectful father and all-round dodgy geezer, Mr Wormwood.] As soon as that came through, he was like, ‘I can’t.’ We were like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s happening. There’s no way in the world that’s not happening.’”

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She says that as her own career has started to pick up, Graham has gotten better at reading scripts without her. “And he’s pushed me a little bit, into more of the producing world,” she says. The couple founded Matriarch Productions in 2019, with the aim of giving a platform to under-represented voices and stories. Boiling Point, which is full of regional, working-class actors and crew, was their first project.

Walters and Graham met in the Nineties when they were both training at the Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in Sidcup. They fancied each other for years, but it took a long time before they went on a proper date. “We’d been friends with benefits for a long while,” says Walters, with a wink. “And you should always try a few more cakes in the shop before you go for the Victoria sponge. Just to make sure.” Her tone is light, but Graham has previously said that his twenties were a very difficult time. On Desert Island Discs in 2019, he said his relationship with Walters intensified after he attempted suicide. “This is kind of where Hannah came into my life properly,” he said. “She knew what had happened. She was always in close contact with my mum.” Walters was supposed to move to Spain, but Graham asked her not to. “We were waiting at New Cross train station and I said to her, ‘Please don’t go to Spain. I love you,’” he revealed. “She went, ‘I’ve been waiting for five years for you to say that.’ The next day, we moved in together.”

A few years later, the couple moved out of London to Leicestershire to be near Walters’s mum. Rent was cheaper there, so they could save up for a house. “He’d just done Snatch,” says Walters, “so we had a little bit to put away.” Around that time, Walters started working as a drama teacher, and they had their children Grace and Alfie, who are now 18 and 17. “Stephen’s work just started climbing and climbing,” she says, making a whooshing motion with her hand. “He got Boardwalk Empire, that was five years he did that for, and I was part-time teaching after Grace, but when I had Alfie, I said, ‘I can’t do the teaching, it’s too exhausting.’ I was on my own, two kids, Stephen was away, I just had to go, ‘No, I need to concentrate on these two souls I’ve brought into the world.’ Then as I got older, I’d dip my toes in. It was Shane Meadows that first got me in This Is England [in 2006].” She had a bit part as a shoe shop assistant in the film, but Meadows expanded the role for the TV series to take advantage of Walters’s ability to play comedy – her single mother character Trudy likes to dominate her younger lovers and has an obsession with Clark Gable.

“As Grace and Alfie have got older,” she says, “I’ve not felt so guilty about taking a job and going away for a week. You know, it’s a big thing leaving them when they’re young, so I didn’t want to do that.”

She feels like her time has come now. “Being Hannah the looker-after-er,” she says, “I tended, for a lot of years, to stand back slightly. And I was happy doing so.” She says her “first, most important” job has been being mum, but that now she feels “like it’s my time to be able to just step out of that role and try a different role”. “I feel like I’m ready for it now,” she says. “For me, motherhood served as a really good grounding to cope with anything. Especially after losing my mum when I had the kids. That’s my mum [coming through] in me, the survivor, like, ‘Right, I’m gonna show you, world. This is what I’m gonna do now.’”

Walters had always been told her career would take off in her forties. “I remember coming out of drama school,” she says, “and like three or four agents getting me in and they’d say, ‘I think you’re fabulous, you’re wonderful. But you’re just not the kind of 19-year-old that we would cast. I think you’re not going to work until you’re about 40.’ I’d be like, ‘I’m 19! What am I gonna do for the next 20 years? Because this is the fire in my belly. This is what I want to do.’ But they could see the old soul, the mother already, the carer. And so it just seems like now I’m getting the good parts, the parts that are right for me.”

Grace and Alfie have also tried out acting, playing her children in Pirates of the Caribbean, while Alfie put on a Liverpudlian accent to play a young version of his dad’s wrestler character in the Eighties-set British comedy Walk Like a Panther. (Walters says the children, who were raised in Leicester, have an “ey-up-me-duck accent, unfortunately”.) Would they ever consider acting as a career? “Grace is actually going to take a year out and work at Matriarch next year,” she says, “but Alfie, nah, he doesn’t want anything to do with it at all. Although he is a poser, he likes modelling, and he’s got a few shoots.”

She leans forward and places a hand on my knee. “He got the Walters gene for the height, which is good. We don’t want him getting the Graham gene! There’ll be no modelling there, mate, if that happens!”

‘Boiling Point’ premieres on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday 1 October