Tonight, Channel 4 launches Falling, the new drama from Adolescence creator Jack Thorne about a devoted nun and a priest whose lives collide in ways neither of them expects. Keeley Hawes plays Anna, a woman who has spent her entire adult life in a convent and is now looking for a new life outside its walls.
Hawes said Anna is not going into the story looking for romance. “She’s not expecting to fall in love!” she said. “When we meet her, she’s very content.” She added that Anna has spent more of her life inside the convent than outside it, so “she doesn’t know anything else,” and described her bond with the other nuns and the abbess, played by Niamh Cusack, as family.
The series is built around that upheaval. Anna’s new life begins to open up when she makes Muriel, played by Rakie Ayola, a hospital worker whose husband has left her and who quickly becomes a steady, unjudgmental presence. Ayola said Muriel is “a beautiful person” and the kind of human she aspires to be. She said Muriel understands that people fall in love and that no one should want to be alone, “even alone with their God.”
Opposite Anna is David, a priest with radical ideas, played by Paapa Essiedu. At the start of the series, he has been living with his sister in Bristol for three years. 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 David struggled with alcohol in the past before getting his path back on track through God.
The setup gives Falling its central push and pull: a woman raised inside the certainty of the convent stepping toward an unknown future, and a priest whose own life has already been marked by failure, discipline and recovery. The drama is less about instant rebellion than the slow shock of finding that the life you thought was fixed may no longer fit.
There is also a strong web around them. Susan, David’s sister, has been living with him for the past few years and is now engaged to a new man after an unhappy first marriage. She also has a daughter. Sophie Stone plays Susan. Francesca, played by Niamh Cusack, is the abbess when the series begins, and Francis, David’s fellow priest, shares a strong friendship with him.
That cast gives the story a wider emotional field, but the focus stays on Anna and David. Hawes, known for Bodyguard, The Assassin, Miss Austen, Scoop, Orphan Black: Echoes and It’s a Sin, has been cast in a role that depends on restraint as much as feeling. Essiedu, whose credits include I May Destroy You, Black Mirror, The Capture, Gangs of London, The Lazarus Project and ’s Babies, brings the kind of restless energy that fits a priest with radical ideas and unfinished business.
Ayola is best known for Kaos, The Pact, Grace, Shetland and more than 100 episodes of Holby City, while Stone is familiar to viewers from The Chelsea Detective, Shetland and The Crown. Cusack’s work spans theatre and television, including Heartbeat, Big Mood, Always and Everyone, Midsomer Murders, Death in Paradise and Father Brown. But tonight, the question is simpler: whether Thorne can make a story about faith, loneliness and desire feel immediate. On the evidence of its cast and premise, Falling is aiming to do exactly that.
