Patience star: 'It's common for dramas to infantilise autistic women'

The first thing anyone will tell you upon meeting Purvis is that nothing holds her back. She knows she's amazing and, in the most charming way, will tell you so in no uncertain terms.

Unsurprising then, that at just 20 years old she bagged her first lead role playing Patience Evans, a precise and socially uncomfortable young woman working in Yorkshire Police’s criminal records department, who ends up helping Detective Bea Metcalf, played by Laura Fraser, with her investigations.

From the OCD traits of Ben Miller's Professor T and Ralf Little's DI Neville Parker in Death in Paradise, to Saga Noren in The Bridge and David Mitchell's awkward puzzle setter John Taylor in Ludwig, it's not unheard of for TV's crime solvers to display neurodivergent tendencies, even when it’s not made explicit.

But compared to those shows, this drama (which is based on the French series Astrid et Raphaëlle, itself available on Channel 4 streaming as Astrid: Murder in Paris) breaks new ground in casting Purvis, who says she was struck by how sensitively the part was written.

"Not to speak badly of other shows, but it's common for dramas to infantilise disabled people, especially autistic women. As much as Patience gets things wrong, misses social cues and finds it a hard world to navigate, she has a lot of agency. She’s incredibly determined, and has a strong sense of justice. She's also pretty cool, not weak in any way. She struggles, but it's shown with great empathy and care. And she wears a lot of great turtlenecks!"

Purvis initially trained as a classical ballet dancer but felt a switch flip in her brain at the age of 17, telling her, "with absolute confidence", to give up ballet and pursue acting. Though undiagnosed at the time, she attributes this sudden decisiveness to her autism. Well, that, and her absolute inability to keep quiet for the duration of her dance lessons.

She studied acting at Lamda, the renowned London drama school that has trained everyone from Jim Broadbent to Ruth Wilson and Benedict Cumberbatch, soon landing a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part in Netflix's Heartstopper – "Girl number one, episode four, one minute and 12 seconds in". She then got a small role in CBBC drama A Kind of Spark, which featured several neurodivergent actors, some of whom remain close friends of hers. Naturally, she talked producers into casting her in a second, more substantial part in series two.

Now, in her first lead role, Purvis has been trusted to bring her own experiences to the part, despite the fact she's the polar opposite of Patience. "She is very internal and I’m more external. I don’t necessarily have a filter on what I say," she laughs, with some understatement. "I was encouraged to be myself in creating Patience – her costume, her likes, what she doesn’t like – it was very open and trusting," she says. She even got the final say on the casting of Patience's cat.

Nevertheless, there are parallels between actor and character. A scene in which we see Patience making a phone call, having mapped out every variable of conversation in a notebook, only to be thwarted when she’s confronted by a reaction she hadn’t factored in, drew laughs at a press screening.

"When I read it, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I do that,’" she laughs. "I’ll have a conversation in my head – ‘I’ll say hello, then I’ll say this, then they’ll say that’. I used to practise in the mirror, then would go to the person, ‘Oh, hey, yeah, super chill, not thinking about this at all, but just wondering…’"

At this point Laura Fraser, who’s sitting alongside her, interjects: "So when the audience laughs, do you feel affronted?"

Purvis’s reaction is firm. "No! Patience is never the butt of the joke, nothing’s at her expense. She makes a lot of the jokes, even though she doesn’t always realise that’s what she’s doing."

Throughout our conversation, 49-year-old Fraser takes a back seat and allows her co-star to shine. Their relationship blossomed over the week prior to filming, when Fraser noticed Purvis discreetly sticking Post-it notes on her.

"She wrote nice things, like ‘I like you’," Fraser recalls. "That developed into writing longer letters to each other that we’d put under each other’s hotel door, pretending to be companions in Victorian times."

Purvis recites one such message: "'I’ve travelled many winters, and your face is the only thing that keeps me warm…'" Explaining, "I was on a ship and the passage was bumpy."

"Is this usual?" she asks. Fraser smiles. "No! But I loved it, it was so nice."

The on-screen relationship between Fraser’s Bea Metcalf and Patience is similarly compassionate; rather than the conflict that some might expect, there’s a maternal quality.

"Bea’s not the most balanced emotionally,” explains Fraser, “but she’s open to Patience’s strength and skills, and by the end of episode one, there’s a friendship forming – almost like a love story – that enables her to make all these changes in her own life."

Purvis observes: "Bea is the first person who treats Patience like a person."

Touchingly, Fraser also says she could really relate to Patience and felt seen – like the fact that she always carries two umbrellas, just in case one breaks. "I always have two of each thing in my bag – I’m very prepared," says Fraser. "I lost my umbrella for the first time in ten years and fell apart. I should have taken two – what is wrong with me?"

Beyond the procedural cases – a two-part opener, then four further cases – the drama digs deeper into Patience’s world with childhood flashbacks, and visits to a support group for autistic people, all played by neurodivergent actors.

Fraser has several family members with autism and says she found a scene she shot with these actors particularly moving. Then, noting how perfectly Patience is suited to her role as a detective’s aide, she posits: "I wonder how many detectives are autistic in real life…"

While Fraser takes a break from acting to write a novel (not a crime one, she emphasises), we’ll next see Purvis in UKTV’s Bergerac reboot. Is she working her way through the cop-show canon? Has she got a favourite?

"Line of Duty," she says in a heartbeat, repeating the three words with punctuation and singing the praises of Vicky McClure. She issues a personal plea for Jed Mercurio to get back to his keyboard.

"I want to know who H really is! I want Adrian Dunbar to get all flustered and Anna Maxwell Martin to tell him to sit down." Or perhaps, if Maxwell Martin’s too busy with Ludwig, Mercurio could get on the phone to Ella Maisy Purvis…

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Patience premieres on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesday 8th January 2025.

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