Rivals star Annabel Scholey, 40, reveals how her roles have gotten steamier and ‘sexier’ with age

Annabel Scholey kicks off her cameo in Jilly Cooper’s Rivals with a bang.

Within just nine seconds of the Disney+ adaptation, the 40-year-old actress is seen wearing a perfectly 80s candy pink skirt suit, sunglasses and red stilettos in Concorde’s compact loo with the sex-obsessed protagonist Rupert Campbell-Black.

As her red nails plunge into her lover’s skin, a champagne cork pops to mark the plane’s ascent to a mile high, and moments later the cabin crew begin to wonder why the occupied sign is still on.

‘I thought that by my late thirties, I’d be doing less of these sexy roles but I’m getting more,’ Scholey told The Independent.

‘And even if that’s terrifying, it’s also amazing because I feel like the industry is starting to shift.’

Born in Wakefield, west Yorkshire in 1984, Scholey is the daughter of a nurse and a firefighter. Although she did not have a performing background, she attended Oxford School of Drama with the help of a scholarship.

After graduating in 2005, Scholey landed her first on-screen role as a minor character in an Agatha Christie series on ITV. In the same year, she played Diana Rivers in a BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre, while also appearing in Doctors and Holby City.

While these roles were demanding, they were all relatively PG. But when Scholey landed the role of Nina DeFoe in legal drama The Split at the age of 34, the dial finally began to change.

Scholey said that she adored playing Nina, a high-flying lawyer from London with a troubled relationship with alcohol – and men.

‘[The Split] showed us stories of women in their forties and fifties talking about things like menopause and showing us to be sexy and getting sexier because we know ourselves better,’ Scholey told The Independent.

She has previously revealed that portraying a multifaceted character such as Nina truly helped her career truly ‘explode’.

She told Metro: ‘The Split was groundbreaking when we began filming. Female characters were so often two-dimensional.

‘I’m thrilled that now people are writing interesting material for older women and they’re getting better.’

But it wasn’t all fun and games. While filming season two, Scholey was getting a divorce from her husband of six years Ciarán McMenamin.

She admitted that it was overwhelming to be involved in a series about divorce law when going through her own, but said that the cast rallied around her and helped her through.

The Split returns to the BBC on December 29 at 9pm as a two-part special set in Barcelona. It is believed to be the last we will hear from the DeFoe family.

While no further episodes of The Split are in the works, it was confirmed that Rivals would be getting a second season.

Scholey plays Fleet Street journalist Beattie Johnson and although her cameo is brief, she sets the tone for the X-rated series that critics hailed as a ‘bonkbuster’.

Within the very first moments of the first episode, Scholey is seen having a romantic liaison with a polo-loving lothario, played by Alex Hassell, in an aeroplane toilet.

She told the Metro: ‘I’ve done a lot of those kinds of scenes so I wasn’t nervous in that aspect, but it was scary doing the very first scene.

‘Alex was a gentleman. He’d been filming for a while, so it wasn’t his first rodeo.’ she added.

There is no doubt that the cast of Rivals is star-studded – with both David Tennant and Danny Dyer in leading roles.

But Scholey is no stranger to playing opposite acting behemoths on stage and on screen having played Hernia alongside Dame Judi Dench in Midsummer’s Night Dream at The Rose Theatre in Kingston in 2010.

Keeping up her Shakespearean streak, she starred as Lady Anne in a 2011 adaptation of Richard III alongside Kevin Spacey. 

Although she originally auditioned to be Matt Smith’s companion, the actress was granted the recurring role of Claire Brown alongside fellow northerner, and 13th doctor, Jodie Whittaker.

More recently, she took on the role of Beth Fairchild in the 2023 series The Serial Killer’s Wife.

Scholer told YOU Magazine that it was ‘scary’ portraying Beth due to the sexual nature of the character.’ 

She said: ‘It was a scary part and I always think that when you’re reading a script, if it scares you then you should probably do it.

‘It’s quite a physically challenging part as there were a few fight scenes as well as sex scenes, and because it had such a sexual side to it I had to do a lot of work to mentally prepare.’

Scholey has made it clear that she could not have bagged these jobs – raunchy or otherwise – without the unwavering support of her parents. 

In 2018, she told Fabric Magazine that it was her father who suggested she consider drama school after spending her childhood dancing around the house and attending dance classes.

She added, in an interview with The Big Issue, that her parents had worked ‘tirelessly’ to save money in case their daughter didn’t manage to obtain a scholarship, so they could afford to send her there and pay for her fees as a plan B.

‘I tried so hard to get into drama school and got turned down so many times. It was gutting. I knew what I wanted to do – I didn’t want to take a year out, I didn’t want to wait,’ she said.

‘I tried so hard to get into drama school and got turned down so many times. It was gutting. I knew what I wanted to do – I didn’t want to take a year out, I didn’t want to wait,’ she said.

When she first jumped into her acting career and offers of roles flooded in, Scholey joked that she said yes to everything offered to her as she couldn’t bear to turn roles down.

Now, she is able to be more discerning in her jobs and told the magazine she looks for ‘tricky’ parts.

As such, Scholey is currently in the Netherlands filming for the second season of The Couple Next Door – Channel 4’s steamy suburban thriller.

The show’s first season was watched by more than 1.1million people and quickly became known for its raunchy scenes which left viewers hot under the collar.

Despite turning 41 on January 8, this is not the last we will see of Scholey’s sultry side.