Jessica Gunning
Jessica Gunning is an actor, born 1986.
Jessica Faye Gunning is from Holmfirth in West Yorkshire and spent well over a decade doing the unglamorous, useful work of British television before anyone outside it knew her name: a supermarket sitcom, a police procedural, an episode of an anthology, a period piece. Her first film of note was Pride in 2014, where she plays Sian James in a comedy set during the miners' strike, and where her job is to be the person the audience quietly decides to trust.
What she does better than almost anyone currently working is hold two incompatible things in the same face. In Baby Reindeer she played Martha Scott, a stalker written as neither a joke nor a monster, and the performance succeeds because Gunning refuses to choose: Martha is funny, then frightening, then pitiable, sometimes inside a single line, and none of the shifts are signposted. It won her a Primetime Emmy and a Golden Globe, and a British Academy Television Award followed.
The comedy background is what makes any of that possible. She had already spent years on Back and The Outlaws, both ensembles that need actors who can land a joke without leaning on it, while Fortitude had dropped the same steadiness into a bleak Arctic thriller where it reads as dread instead. Since Baby Reindeer she has kept moving across registers rather than cashing in on one, with The Christophers in 2025 and two more films due in 2026, one of them a children's fantasy adaptation.
Movies (6)
TV (14)
Where to start with Jessica Gunning
Baby Reindeer is the obvious start and also the correct one. Martha is the reason the series became the thing it became, and the writing gives Gunning something most stalker parts never get, an interior life the show is willing to take seriously. Watch it, then watch the early scenes again knowing where the character is heading.
For the comic engine underneath that, The Outlaws and Back are the two to take next; in both she works by underplaying while everyone around her escalates. Pride is the warmest thing on the list and the best proof she can carry sincerity without sugar.
If you want the cold version, Fortitude puts the same presence in an Arctic thriller, and The State is the hardest watch here, a drama about British recruits travelling to Syria. Inside No. 9 and Prime Suspect 1973 are single servings, useful mainly for seeing how long she was quietly excellent before anyone noticed.