It may be after 1pm, but it’s not long since Vicky McClure woke up. When we meet she’s nursing the mother of all hangovers and to make matters worse I’ve brought her to east London’s healthiest café. We settle in a corner on a grey upholstered banquette, away from a loudspeaker blaring house music. After pondering the possible merits of the courgette sandwich, McClure orders a builder’s tea.  Last night she was in town to attend the Glamour women of the year awards, where she walked the red carpet with Sigourney Weaver and Davina McCall. Today she’s low maintenance in rolled-up jeans, a black T-shirt and Nikes, her short brown hair scraped back into a stub of a ponytail. She’s aware of the contrast – hours ago she was wearing a Vivienne Westwood gown. “Who was I kidding?” she laughs.  There’s something quite straightforward and reassuringly familiar about the 33-year-old actor. Like her best-known characters, Lol in This Is England and Kate Fleming in police corruption drama Line of Duty, she’s a tomboy with a broad Nottingham accent and the same turn of phrase (“It’s one of them,” she will often say when describing a situation). But there are other recognisable mannerisms: a resistance to sugarcoat things, a sharp logic, a sense that she doesn’t care too much what people think.  When I mention the similarities, McClure takes it as a compliment. “The point for me as an actor is to make a character seem as real as possible, so if they’re like me in some ways or in how they react to a situation… well, happy days.”  It’s a quality that hasn’t gone unnoticed by her directors. Onscreen, McClure is renowned for her ability to bring light and darkness to her characters with understated ease. “Whatever the part is, Vicky makes it authentic,” says Jed Mercurio, writer and creator of Line of Duty. “She’s the kind of actor who will challenge you if she doesn’t think something makes sense.”  McClure admits she can be a stickler for detail. “If I don’t think a line is written how people might really say it, I’ll ask to change it. So often you read a script where someone hangs up the phone with ‘I’m coming now’ or something really abrupt and I think, ‘Who actually says that?’ We’re not American! People bloody say ‘Bye.’”  When she’s at home, she’ll sit watching documentaries back to back, “because I’m obsessed with real-life stuff – police, crime, prison.” In fact, if there’s a common theme in her work, it’s injustice: she has just made a short film about a single mother being evicted from her home, “which was really important. I’m a working-class girl, so I get it.” She’s also “incredibly proud” of the recent series of Line of Duty because of its plot about paedophilia: “I love the fact that Jed was brutal enough to reference Jimmy Savile – especially because it’s the BBC.” She shudders. “I think there are things in this world that need more exposing.”  For someone who insists her own life is markedly “ordinary”, it’s perhaps an obvious preoccupation. McClure’s upbringing was “normal”, her celebrity profile is “intentionally pretty nonexistent”; in fact, fame couldn’t interest her less. “It’s why I live in Nottingham, in my little house around the corner from my mum and dad… I like that it’s normal. It’s what I know.”  The fact that she wanted to perform in the first place, even to her, seems the oddest part of her history. At school she was “hyperactive, daft, a real class clown. I enjoyed secondary school so much that I barely got any GCSEs.” By as early as 11 she had decided she wanted to train formally, first as a dancer: she auditioned for the Royal Ballet and got in, but failed the medical (“weak ankles, or at least that’s what they told me”), then at the London stage school Italia Conti. But she didn’t attend because her parents couldn’t afford the fees. In hindsight, McClure says, both turns of events were a good thing. Instead she joined the Television Workshop, an audition-entry after-school theatre club in Nottingham. “It sent me down a different path,” she recalls. “I started out as this little performer, all singing and dancing, but there we did proper kitchen sink stuff. It gave me a taste for the sort of actor I wanted to be.”  At the workshop the focus was improvisation. “It definitely wasn’t stage school: you’d be laughed at if you turned up wearing jazz shoes. But whatever else came out of you… People cried, did weird shit… It was a basement where magic happened.”  The point is to make a character seem as real as possible, so if they’re like me… happy days  Four years into her tenure there, when she was 15, a little-known Nottingham film director, Shane Meadows, asked to cast her in A Room for Romeo Brass, his third feature film. “I genuinely thought: ‘That’s it, I’m gonna be massive, I’m gonna be rich, my life is going to change…’” McClure remembers with a wry smile. So she wanted fame then? “Oh yeah! I was 15. I was naive. And then a few months later I realised the film was only shown at six cinemas around the country.”  Her rising star having stalled, at the age of 16 McClure went off to work. “H Samuel for two years, then Dorothy Perkins. Then a sunbed shop, where I lasted about a week because I got really annoyed when people came out and went, ‘Ooh, it’s hot in there,’” she says, rolling her eyes at the memory. Eventually she found a steady office job, where she worked for eight years while continuing to audition. She was still at the office when Meadows asked her to appear in This Is England, in which she played a supporting role. And she was still filing some years later, when Meadows developed the TV series for Channel 4. In fact, even during series two she continued in civil employment. “I was almost scared to stop. I remember doing data protection training one morning, there with my flip chart, and this guy said to me, ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you in This Is England? Why are you working here?’ And I was like: ‘Yeah, thanks very much. I’m here because it’s not like people think. You don’t earn loads of money.’”  When she eventually quit in 2011 McClure was just months shy of winning a Bafta for best actress. The accolade was enough to persuade her to pursue acting full time, so at 27 she moved to London, where she met her partner, the Welsh actor and writer Jonny Owen. When I ask where she lived she wrinkles her nose, trying to work it out – it turns out it was round the corner, in a flat in Shoreditch. How did she find living there? She rewrinkles the nose. “A bit barmy? Mental in the week and a ghost town at weekends. After nine months it had gotten to the point where I was waking up every Sunday saying: ‘I’m going back on the train for a roast, Jonny. Fancy it?’ Nottingham’s really nice…”  Six months ago the couple bought a house in her hometown. When we meet, her dad, a joiner, is fitting a new kitchen and she says there’s lots more work to be done. “Every time someone comes over, I’m like: ‘That’s changing. Don’t look at that – that’s going…’ You know, it’s been a real one to tick off the bucket list, buying a house… I love having a mortgage.” She does? I suggest most celebrities aim not to have one, or they want to run a mile from their old lives. But McClure says she adores Nottingham. “I’m so proud of it. And I know that world better than this,” she adds, not quite articulating. She’s talking about showbusiness? “Yeah. I’m 33. I’ve been acting properly for seven years. What about all my life before it?”  It’s a typically sensible argument and, besides, nothing can touch the work. In the past year McClure has had a phenomenal run: in September, the final series of This Is England bowed out to more Baftas and critical acclaim, then in April she took the hero’s turn in series three of Line of Duty, the most-watched drama on BBC2 for 15 years. This month she’ll return to the BBC for a three-part adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent, in which she plays the wife of a Soho sex shop owner and Russian spy (Toby Jones) who carries out a terrorist plot – but it’s McClure who has the most devastating, dramatic role.  After that, there’s surprisingly little on the horizon: a small play in Nottingham, and the fourth series of Line of Duty, filming in August. What happened to success bringing a deluge of new roles? McClure shrugs. “There aren’t always tons of scripts. But then I feel like I’m at a stage where I don’t have to do a job because it’s money and it fits in. I mean, I did a part in a Hollywood film once…” I ask if she’s talking about 2012’s Anna Karenina and she nods. “And I basically ended up carrying some twigs on my back. I was in it for two seconds and got cut – I went all the way to Siberia for that.”  In an interview earlier this year, her co-star in Line of Duty, Martin Compston, joked that McClure would never go to Hollywood because she “wouldn’t want to be more than 20 minutes away from a 24-hour Greggs”. The truth might not be so far removed; McClure says that though she’d go for the right role, she’s not champing at the bit. While some might dream of being the next Kate Winslet, she’s more from the school of Julie Walters: “Her career and lifestyle, that’s what appeals to me. She has a massive variety of work, but she’s not overexposed – the rest of the time she lives in the country. To me she’s nailed it.”  She may be years behind Walters, but you can see it happening. She has the talent, the popularity and well, in the latter respect, it sounds like she already has it made. “I have,” she says. “I’ve got my family and my mates and I’ve met Jonny – he’s a keeper. And I’ve already had the best bit of my career – I know nothing will ever top working on This Is England and with Shane.”  I’ve already had the best bit of my career. Nothing will ever top working with Shane Meadows  Does she really feel that? It seems a slightly depressing outlook. “Yeah I do. Whenever I meet other actors, they all want to know, ‘What’s it like working with Shane?’ Because his process is so unique – the way he works is complete improvisation – we sit in a café for an hour having a cup of tea and that’s working. I just know that nothing’s ever going to come close to that. It just won’t. But it’s good, and I’m lucky… He’s my mate.”  And then there’s the mortgage, I say. “There’s the mortgage!” she grins. “Sometimes Jonny laughs at me because I’ll sit there on the sofa ripping a bit of wallpaper off the wall and I’m like, ‘So what? It’s mine! I can! I own this place!’ Which is really juvenile, I know.”  But if it makes you happy…  “And if it’s what you want…”  But is it all she wants? I remind her that she once said in an interview that all she wants is “to get married and have children, cook and wash”. Call me a cynic, I say, but that seems a bit stupidly happy with your lot.  Now McClure cracks up. “Cook and wash! Cook and wash… I can’t believe I said that,” she cringes, picking up her backpack – we’re wrapping up and she’s soon heading back to Nottingham on the train. “But you know what?” I watch as she swings the bag containing two days’ worth of her dirty clothes worn in the capital on to her shoulders. “I stand by it! Absolutely,” she says.  The Secret Agent starts on Sunday 17 July at 9pm on BBC1. Vicky McClure was photographed at Lordship Park. Fashion editor Jo Jones Hair and make-up Martina Lattanzi at One Represents, using Dior Summer Look 16 and Capture Totale Dreamskin, and Kerastase
She is plain spoken, reluctantly glamorous and shaping up as Britain’s best screen actor. Vicky McClure talks to Megan Conner