“I was raised in the Church of England so I’ve always known God and the Bible,” says Ruth Madeley. “But I still get a lot of messages from people saying I’m disabled because I’m not praying hard enough.” The 38-year-old actor rolls her eyes. “Clearly I am a terrible Christian.”
“Fiercely ambitious” and “pushing back against pity” from childhood, Madeley has taken on a series of spiky, challenging roles since her early twenties. A Bafta nomination for her star turn as a disabled mum in BBC Three’s factual drama Don’t Take My Baby led her to audition for the part of an able-bodied character in Russell T Davies’ 2019 dystopian sci-fi series Years & Years. She impressed him so much he reshaped the role around her experience of living with spina bifida. Four years later, a ramp was installed in The Doctor’s Tardis so she could cock a sarcastic eyebrow at David Tennant: “You’ve got weapons in your wheelchair?!” he asked. “We all have,” came the sardonic reply.
The deadpan Bolton accent that brought Tennant back to Earth with a jolt brings a no-nonsense warmth to Madeley’s head-girl vibe. On video call from the home she shares with her husband Joe, her beloved English bull terrier snoozing on the landing behind her, Madeley circles subjects of faith, judgement and some folks’ weird, warped belief that disability is “a kind of punishment for something you’ve done”. Because these are not just themes in her own life – they hang like storm clouds over her new, five-part BBC thriller, The Rapture.
Based on Liz Jensen’s 2009 novel of the same name, The Rapture is Madeley’s first experience of leading a whole series (“a huge responsibility,” she says) as a forensic psychiatrist working with a teenage girl who’s been convicted of murdering her mother. Bethany (India Amarteifio) has dark visions of the future. Madeley’s character, Dr Gabrielle Fox, is still processing the trauma of a car crash that killed her husband and made her a wheelchair user, while trying to make sense of Bethany’s menacing artwork and its links to Bethany’s dad’s role as the charismatic leader of a Christian cult with millions of online followers.
Throw in climate change and social unrest and “it’s a lot to navigate in one series,” says Madeley. “Just one of those topics would been dramatic enough but throw them all in together and pffttt” – she uses her hands to slo-mo mime an explosion – “It’s an actor’s dream.”
Madeley plays Dr Gabrielle Fox in ‘The Rapture’ (Photo: Simon Ridgway/BBC/Mammoth Screen)Not that Madeley had planned to be an actor. Born in 1986 in Westhoughton, the second daughter of a nurse mum and a dad who worked in customer services, she was diagnosed with spina bifida six weeks before she was born. It’s a condition in which the spine and spinal cord do not form properly. In her 2018 documentary Spina Bifida and Me she interviewed her mum, Jackie, who became tearful as she recalled the moment a consultant came along to a scan to diagnose her unborn baby.
“He wasn’t gentle about the news at all. He was saying that you most likely wouldn’t walk. You would have a variety of problems. You would practically do nothing in life. It was a shock to both of us. We’re quiet people – quiet shock,” she said. There followed operations on her back, her hip, foot and knees. Then she developed scoliosis, requiring many more surgeries on her spine.
Today, Madeley laughs fondly about being nicknamed “Barbie on wheels” after getting her first chair from the charity Whizz Kidz aged five. “I was very small – this scrawny little thing!” She says she missed a lot of school for those spinal surgeries, including the one that left her with sepsis when she was 12. “It nearly took me,” she says.
But her time in hospital gave her lots of opportunities for people-watching, observing patients and staff of all demographics while her peers at school were mostly only interested in other teenagers. “Sit me in a coffee shop and I’ll be happy watching people all day,” she grins. “I got a lot of life experience in those hospital years, and I became an avid reader. I knew I would do something in storytelling.”
Madeley studied literature and scriptwriting at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, and thought she’d probably become a writer. Acting didn’t seem a possibility, she says, “because I didn’t see anyone who looked like me on TV”. She gives a weary shrug. “If there was any kind of mention of disability then it was in a medical sense…” Or somebody getting a badge on Blue Peter? Or pleading for money on Children in Need? “Yeah, yeah. It was all sympathy and pity and and righteous and worthy and I just didn’t see myself like that.”
‘The Rapture’ is an ‘actor’s dream’ says Madeley (Photo: BBC/Mammoth Screen/Simon Ridgway)In the excellent 2022 film, Then Barbara Met Alan, Madeley played punk-spirited disability rights activist Barbara Lisicki, whose campaign against ITV’s pity party of a telethon in 1992 got the show pulled from the air. “Barbara was so right and so funny,” she says. “I went to mainstream school, so I wasn’t surrounded by a lot of disabled people. For me, it felt like a really alien existence to have this worthy narrative of ‘Oh, poor thing.'”
Now we’re onto the topic of Madeley’s steely ambition and she’s got the bit between her teeth. “I’m such a hard worker,” she says. “I always knew from being tiny that I was going to be successful in whatever I did, because I just wouldn’t settle for less. But I never saw disabled people on screen working. I didn’t see disabled people having children. I didn’t see disabled people getting into fights. Disabled people on TV weren’t wrong about stuff, flawed, three-dimensional.”
Historically, Madeley says, “disability has been seen as a punishment for something. So Bond villains or superhero villains like Joker get facial disfigurements or are disabled in some way. Disability is either worthy, or evil, or it means you’re going to die. There hasn’t been a lot of nuance or 360-degree personalities.”
After graduation, Madeley focused on her writing and worked in fundraising for Whizz Kidz until acting became a side hustle. She wrote and starred in 2012 TV film Scrims – about a young woman with spina bifida navigate the messier parts of being in her twenties – and had small parts in shows like Fresh Meat before Don’t Take My Baby made her realise acting could be her main gig. “I didn’t study drama,” she says. “I’ve got no formal technique. For me, acting is a gut thing. It’s a very raw thing. I feel it here, you know?” A thump of the chest. “Deep in me.”
In The Rapture, her character is falling for a new man and he’s keen for things to get physical. But Gabrielle pushes back and makes her situation clear. She tells him she has a catheter and she isn’t sure she’s ready. “I really pushed for the conversation and the use of the catheter because I really wanted to include something that I really felt was true to disabled life,” she says. “I know that would have been huge for me to see on screen as a teenager. I’m so privileged to be able to push these things forward, to open conversations about all those flaws and vulnerabilities.”
Madeley impressed Russell T Davies so much in her ‘Years & Years’ audition that he rewrote her part to make the character disabled (Photo: BBC/Red Productions/Guy Farrow)In the real world, Madeley finds that people are obsessed with her own sex life. “One of the questions disabled people still get asked all the time is, ‘Can you have sex?‘” She makes a face. “I’ve been asked that since I was very young.” How young? “Seventeen. I was going out to clubs and bars at that age. People would say, ’Oh, you’re very pretty for someone in a chair!” Another eyeroll. “I’d think, ‘That’s not the compliment you think it is.’”
These days, Madeley is happily married. She first met crane-operator trainer and former motorbike racer Joe Lawrence when she was five, and as adults they were friends for years before the relationship took a romantic turn. The couple married in 2024 after 12 years together. “He’s often told he’s wonderful for being with me,” she sighs. “Bless him.”
Joe is working in the other room as we chat and Madeley laments that – despite her entertaining appearances on shows such as Would I Lie to You? and Greg Davies’s sitcom The Cleaner – “he doesn’t think I’m funny. But I would love to do more comedy.”
She recently ticked off another goal: starring in a big glossy show in America. In Apple TV’s Being Heumann, she plays Judy Heumann – “mother of the American disability rights movement – opposite Mark Ruffalo. She loved the experience but says she’ll keep putting herself up for roles that weren’t written for disabled actors, too. “I always say disability is always going to give an extra layer to any story.” She says. “It will just make the spirit of anything richer.”
‘The Rapture‘ is streaming on BBC iPlayer now
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