The BBC’s latest show, Reunion, has all the elements of a really good thriller. There’s a troubled protagonist: Daniel Brennan (Matthew Gurney), who has spent time in prison for murder. There’s a shadowy crime. And, even more intriguingly, it’s bilingual: in both English and British Sign Language.
It feels like a first for the BBC, and in it, Lara Peake plays Carly, Daniel’s estranged daughter. She has a massive chip on her shoulder and owes a lot of people money.
“I had to learn sign language,” she tells me on Zoom. “I had to do it six hours every day.”
The job comes with its perks, though: Peake has a sign name. She makes a gesture for “sloth” on screen, “because I signed a bit like a sloth. That’s the sign for sloth but also adidas and I was wearing adidas most days to set. So they merged the two.”
Carly is a CODA — a Child Of Deaf Adults — who was brought up signing but who stopped when her father went to prison.
Now, several years later, her sign language skills have faded, which impairs their ability to reconnect. It’s a challenging role, but nothing Peake can’t handle. Raised in Nottingham, she fell in love with theatre after seeing a West End production when she was 10: “I was just completely blown away by it.”
From there, she joined the Inspire Academy in her hometown, run by “Luke Gell, who was in Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps”, and broke through shortly after, appearing opposite George MacKay aged 15 in Duane Hopkins’s independent film Bypass.
That got her a spot on the 2015 longlist for most promising newcomer at the British Independent Film Awards, and she’s been working ever since — though the past few years have been especially good ones.
Not only did Peake appear in the hit 2023 film How to Have Sex, but she also made an appearance in the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hit novel Rivals.
“That was honestly one of the most fun jobs I’ve ever been on,” she says. “It’s very nostalgic. It’s all big Eighties hairdos and clothing and I think that energy sometimes just does feed into the project.”
With Reunion under her belt, she’s looking to the future — though there’ll be no treading over old ground for her. “[I like] anything that challenges a set image or perception people might have,” she says. “I like to always change it up. Anything that takes me out of my comfort zone.”
Reunion is streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer
