Paapa Essiedu is back on screen tonight as David, the priest at the center of Channel 4’s Falling, a romantic drama about a devoted nun and a man whose ideas push hard against the life he has chosen. The series, written by Jack Thorne, starts with David already living with his sister in Bristol, three years into a life that has not gone entirely to plan.
Essiedu described David as “very popular and charismatic and took his work very seriously but maybe got an inflated sense of his own ability and tried to take on everything.” He also said the character is “a priest with radical ideas,” which gives the new drama its spark and its risk from the opening scenes. That mix matters because Falling is not just about attraction; it is about what happens when belief, duty and desire collide in a setting built on restraint.
For Essiedu, the role adds another major credit to a run that already includes I May Destroy You, Black Mirror, The Capture, Gangs of London, The Lazarus Project, the series Babies and The Outrun. Here, he stars alongside Keeley Hawes, who plays the nun at the heart of the story and said her character is not looking for love when the series begins. “She’s not expecting to fall in love! When we meet her, she’s very content. She has spent more of her life in the convent than out of it, so she doesn’t know anything else. She has a great relationship with the nuns there and with the abbess (Niamh Cusack) – they are her family,” Hawes said.
The detail that makes David harder to read is his past. Essiedu revealed that the priest struggled with alcohol and later put his path back on track thanks to God, which suggests Falling is as much about recovery and discipline as it is about romance. That gives the series a built-in tension: David is presented as magnetic and capable, yet he is also a man with a history of excess, now trying to hold himself together while drawn into a relationship he may not be able to control.
That is the question Channel 4 is setting up tonight. Not whether the chemistry arrives — the premise makes clear it will — but whether David can be the kind of man he believes himself to be once his faith, his past and his feelings are all tested at once. With Thorne writing and a cast that includes Rakie Ayola, Sophie Stone, Niamh Cusack and Adrian Scarborough, Falling begins as a love story, but the pressure point is David himself.
