Ruth Wilson Finds a Dead Woman in the Wall

What would you do if you found a corpse in your house? Ruth Wilson, the star of Showtime’s upcoming series The Woman in the Wall, loses her shit. The BAFTA Award winner plays Lorna Brady, the unfortunate soul who encounters an unknown dead woman in her home one morning in Ireland. In the first teaser, we see Lorna wandering the streets, eyes full of pain. Her double-pronged suffering is caused in part by the memory of her child, whom nuns snatched away from a teenage Lorna during childbirth. The scene is filled with the cold shadows of a cruel hospital delivery room. As an adult, she stares at a Jesus painting on the walls of her house, his eyes gouged by a kitchen knife. Later, she wakes in the middle of a country road surrounded by cows.

“That’s because Lorna has long suffered from extreme bouts of sleepwalking ever since she was ripped from her life at the age of 15 and incarcerated in (fictional) Kilkinure Convent,� the press release explains. “There, Lorna gave birth to her daughter Agnes, who was cruelly taken from her and whose fate Lorna has never known.� Detective Colman Akande, played by BAFTA Award nominee Daryl McCormack (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Peaky Blinders, Bad Sisters), arrives to investigate the dead body Lorna found. Now, to uncover the secrets of the woman in the wall and Lorna’s lost child.

Written and created by Joe Murtagh (Calm With Horses), the “sensitively crafted fictional drama� explores the traumatic history of the Magdalene Laundries. The institutions ran by the Catholic Church incarcerated “fallen women� in Ireland between the 18th and 20th centuries, with unmarked graves of 155 women found on the grounds of one of the laundries starting in 1993. Lorna’s sleeping problems make a lot of sense. The Woman in the Wall is coming soon to Paramount+ with Showtime and the BBC.