The Scottish actor and one-time Kiwi on drug addiction, risk taking and female rage.
In the opening scenes of twisted psychological thriller The Ridge, a man with multiple stab wounds wakes up on the operating table when a knife is pulled out of his belly.
A drug lord targeted in a prison hit, he’s definitely not one of the good guys. But when the big fella flatlines, it’s the anaesthetist Mia Beaton who comes under scrutiny.
Was his death avoidable? Did she make a mistake and administer the wrong dose? Or were there other, more sinister forces at play?
You won’t know what to make of Mia in this spiky six-parter, which was shot on location in New Zealand and Scotland, and premieres here next week.
An opiate addict still haunted by childhood trauma, she’s a right piece of work. For Scottish actor Lauren Lyle, that was the appeal.
“What drew me to the part was how strange and sort of an antihero Mia is,” she says, on a video call from her home in London.
“Around episode four, there’s a huge shift, and it becomes something quite mad. I knew I’d be pushed as an actor to go further, rather than tone it down, which is always a fun thing to do.”
The 32-year-old, who broke through with a recurring role on the historical fantasy series Outlander, has been all over the place lately.
In 2023, she won Best TV Actress and the Audience Award for Favourite Scot on Screen at the Bafta Scotland Awards, for her lead role in the British crime drama Karen Pirie.
Season two of the show, based on novels by the “Queen of Tartan Noir”, Val McDermid, has just been released on Acorn TV.
She played a peace protester in the first series of Vigil (set on a nuclear-powered submarine), a lawyer in Netflix’s excellent Toxic Town alongside Jodie Whittaker, Saoirse Ronan’s sidekick in the 2024 film The Outrun, and has a pivotal role in the BBC’s new Lockerbie drama, The Bombing of Pan Am 103.
Another novelist, Edinburgh author and scriptwriter Nora Chassler, heads the creative team behind The Ridge, a co-production between New Zealand’s Great Southern Studios and Glasgow-based Sinner Films. Kiwi director Robyn Grace and writers Jess Sayer (Mary: The Birth of Frankenstein) and Kate McDermott (Westside, My Life is Murder) feature among the credits.
After making a rapid exit from Scotland, where she’s the subject of a hospital inquiry, Mia flies to New Zealand for the wedding of her estranged sister. She’s met off the plane by police officers who inform her that Cassy is missing.
A prickly outsider in more ways than one, Mia is thrown off-kilter as soon as she arrives in the incestuous South Island town, where the funeral director is married to the senior police officer, who’s also the half-sister of Cassy’s fiance, Ewan (played with brooding intensity by Creamerie’s Jay Ryan).
Caught in the middle of a turf war between Māori farmers and a group of environmental activists, Mia becomes increasingly paranoid as her drug addiction spirals out of control.
“She’s a fish out of water,” says Lyle. “But what jars with her more is the fact that she’s come to this really strange small town with very warped values and a lot of secrets.
“All she cares about is finding out what’s happened to her sister, because she doesn’t trust anyone.”
Filming in New Zealand was a homecoming of sorts for Lyle, who spent several years living in Auckland as a teenager after her father took a job here, settling the family near Mission Bay. He’d won over the initially horrified 14-year-old by promising they’d live near the beach.
Back in Scotland, teachers had found this pint-sized kid too loud, too easily distracted and too quick to clash with authority.
It might be stretching it to say she found her tribe in Aotearoa, where she was known as “Scottish Lauren”, but somehow Lyle slotted right in.
“Kiwis have a chill vibe that I related to,” she says. “And they were into the fact that I was into British bands because New Zealanders – the ones I was hanging out with – were quite influenced by British music.
“Yeah, it was hugely formative. It was a strange thing to uproot your whole life to somewhere that far away in the world, but I think it really made me who I am. I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did.”
Auckland turned out to be far more multicultural than her siloed, middle-class upbringing on Glasgow’s southside. Her closest friends (at an “artsy school” she prefers not to name) were Fiji-Indian, Turkish and Vietnamese.
The influence of Asian culture blew her away, too. “The Japanese food was amazing. I’d never had sushi before. Never touched an avocado. Feijoas? I’d never even heard of them. I still don’t like them.”
Sigh. Just when the conversation had been going so well…
It’s 7.30am in London when I call. Lyle is huddled on the couch, hair scraped back from her face, and sounding as though she’s just rolled out of bed.
The night before, she’d been playing football in a social team of women and non-binary people in the film industry who have the flexibility to come and go as their schedule allows.
So, she’s not contractually obliged to avoid the risk of a twisted ankle or broken leg? She shrugs. Lyle, it seems, still doesn’t like being told what to do.
During filming in South Africa for the first series of Outlander, she did a tandem hang-gliding flight and went ziplining in the mountains. It was only later that a check of the fine print in her contract revealed extreme sports were specifically excluded.
Shooting The Ridge was Lyle’s first extended trip back to New Zealand in six years, although she still thinks of it as her second home. After leaving school in Auckland, she spent a summer working at Camp America and then headed straight to London.
Despite being turned down for drama school, she made her professional debut on the West End in The Crucible before being accepted into the National Youth Theatre’s rep programme.
Two years later, she landed a recurring role on Outlander, the hit time-travel series based on Diana Gabaldon’s bestselling books.
When Lyle stepped away from that show in 2021, it was in the middle of the Covid pandemic. Her recall audition for Karen Pirie, where she had to act out an interrogation scene, was done via Zoom.
Landing her first lead role on a primetime TV drama, as Val McDermid’s “refreshingly normal and charmingly unfashionable” young detective, particularly impressed her father, one of the Scottish author’s biggest fans.
The cold-case drama has deliberately set itself apart from the cosy murder genre currently in vogue, and there’s nothing glamorous about Lyle’s portrayal of the quick-witted, Doc Marten-wearing detective, who is decidedly plainclothes.
Lyle has spoken in the past about her discomfit with the way popular culture uses the death of women for entertainment.
In one interview during the first season of Karen Pirie, a comment she made about female rage, and how women are expected to keep a lid on their anger and frustration, triggered some negative comments on her Instagram feed.
“People were saying, ‘Oh, it’s absolute nonsense.’ And I don’t think it is,” she says. “At football last night, the men on the pitch next door were angry and screaming as though they were being beaten up the entire time.
“Men get to do that freely without anyone batting an eyelid; it’s part of their experience of how to let out their emotions. [Women] aren’t trained to do that. And where it comes from with us often has a lot more meaning.
“It’s not about the fact that you or your team has kicked the football in the wrong direction. It’s normally to do with the fact that we’re terrified of being killed or that our rights are being stripped from us. They’re real physical or mental threats.”
In the later episodes of The Ridge, Kiwi director Robyn Grace encouraged Lyle to let rip with some of that rage and “go a bit mad”. There’s something very freeing, the actor says, about screaming on screen.
During her preparation for the role, she discovered that anaesthetists have a particularly high incidence of substance abuse within the medical profession, linked to their easy access to drugs.
“I did a lot of research into how [addiction] really changes you as a person,” she says. “The only thing you care about is how you get the drugs and staying high.
“I think that’s a big driver for Mia as well. She needs to be able to stay high and she needs to be able to stay in control, even though she’s not in control at all. She’s a woman constantly on the edge.”
Speaking of control, Lyle enjoyed calling the shots recently when she directed her first short film. Called Run Club, it stars fellow Scot Ruaridh Mollica, who’s about to join the Marvel Universe in the American TV spinoff Vision Quest.
Next up, she goes into rehearsals for a new play, Most Favoured, a one-act dark comedy by David Ireland that opens at London’s Soho Theatre in December. After so many years away from the stage, the prospect of returning to the bones of her craft is exciting.
The week before we spoke, she’d been back home in Scotland, where the wild, untamed beauty reminded her of New Zealand.
“I was driving with my mum, not that far out of Glasgow, and the landscape is just unbelievable,” she says. “I thought how amazing it is that Scotland’s managed to not allow people to destroy that, and New Zealand’s the same.
“I don’t mind how stringent your rules are coming in at the airport for trying to keep the environmental impact low, and your nature generally healthy. There aren’t many places in the world still able to do that without getting overrun.”
The day she landed back in Auckland to begin filming for The Ridge, Lyle wandered around the city, letting the familiarity of it seep into her senses. She has history here – moments that have shaped her, memories that endure.
“There was this lovely moist kind of air; it smelled like I was 16 again,” she says. “I had this quite visceral experience of what it felt like to be there when I was young and now, years later, being at such a different place in my life.
“To be a very different adult coming back was quite surreal.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.