Ruth Wilson on Staying Weird—And True—to the End of ‘The Woman in the Wall’

This post contains spoilers about the finale of The Woman in the Wall.

Ruth Wilson likes to go weird. This much is evident of the award-winning Luther and The Affair star in her latest series, The Woman in the Wall, in which her character, Lorna, may or may not have killed a woman before hiding her inside of her home’s walls. The twisty limited series, created by Joe Murtagh, plays with genre conventions like horror and mystery, with Wilson dialed into its center as a sometimes quirky, sometimes devastating character piece. Beneath the surface of Lorna’s sleepwalking and idiosyncratic speech patterns, the actor was engaged in a canny game of whodunit, playing with perceptions of Lorna’s madness by way of teasing whether or not she really committed the crime—or even knows if she did it.

It’s a crafty, nimble, ultimately powerful performance that feels like another Wilson signature—and that grounds a story of notable social impact, particularly in the UK and Ireland where the show aired last year. The Woman in the Wall examines the traumatic legacy of the Irish Magdalene laundries, essentially a trafficking ring run by Catholic nuns who took in unmarried, pregnant, isolated women and separated them from their children. (The last of these laundries closed in 1996.) Lorna, we learn, is one such woman who’s been shaped by that horror ever since she was sent to a laundry at 15 years old. As the investigation into the murder of the dead woman in Lorna’s home—as well as the subsequent death of Father Percy, who helped run these laundries—heats up, Lorna realizes she and the detective on the case (played by Daryl McCormack) are connected by their history with the laundries and the pain they continue to inflict in the present day.

The finale, which aired Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime (the whole series is now streaming), reveals that Lorna did not in fact initially kill the woman, but hid her body after fearing she’d killed her in a sleepwalking daze, which ultimately led to her death. (In reality, the woman had suffered an episode due to her catalepsy.) Lorna is presented with a choice: claim she’s mad and potentially avoid charges, or admit in lucidity to what she did. She chooses the latter option—staking a claim for her agency, for one thing, but also paying off Wilson’s intricate balancing act. Then, in the series’ closing moments, Lorna learns the fate of the daughter from whom she was forcibly separated as a teenager: She’s alive, raised very far away, but with the potential for reconciliation.

In her first interview about the ending of the series, Wilson digs deep into just how tough it was to get Lorna and The Woman in the Wall right.

Vanity Fair: You only got the pilot to this show when you signed on. So you weren’t aware of your character’s arc before committing?

Ruth Wilson: Not really. Joe talked me through his plan, but as he was writing and as we were filming, some things changed. What happens to Lorna at the end, that was always in their plan. I didn’t always agree with the end—I wanted her to have full justice and I wanted her to be free and to be reunited with her daughter. But in some ways I felt the end was representative of the real experience. It’s not as easy as: Everything’s tied up in a neat bow and everything works out for the best. There are still questions unanswered by the end. What I liked about it in the end is that she is given a choice of: Do you want to claim you are mad and say you are mad and try to get away with this, or do you want to go down for something that you did? And in her mind she’s like, “If I say I’m not mad, they’ve claimed I’m mad my whole life.” She decided to own her voice despite the consequences.

It frames her in an interesting way too, this question of madness. This is both a genre piece and a character drama. To what extent did you want to signal this potential slipping grip of reality?