‘I’m fearless. I was in a boys’ rugby team’: Slow Horses’ Aimee-Ffion Edwards on playing a cocaine-snorting spy

There was a moment, just before Aimee-Ffion Edwards jumped off a nightclub balcony in Slow Horses, when she had to lie to herself about what she was about to do. “It was quite hard,” says the actor. “You basically tell yourself, ‘You’re not jumping.’ Obviously, you know you’re harnessed in, but you’re also going, ‘This is mad! This is mad! This is mad!’”

She laughs. “I couldn’t feel my fingers for a second. I was like, ‘Huwwaah!’” She sucks in her breath, then says: “But there were 200 people stood there watching. You’re like, ‘Well, I gotta do it.’”

In the scene that we see, though, Shirley Dander – the tough, traumatised, cocaine-snorting MI5 agent Edwards plays – does not hesitate, leaping from the balcony to land on a suspect. That collision (on a stuntman) was no soft landing either and, at 38, Edwards knew she’d feel it the next day. And yet she jumped off the balcony “five or six times” during filming. “I played rugby in a boys’ team,” she explains, “and I think I have a fearlessness that comes from that. It’s quite instinctive.”

Edwards is wearing an elegant sleeveless blouse, smart navy trousers and gold hoop earrings. She does not, as she sits there sipping a flat white in London’s Soho Hotel, look much like a rugby player. Yet, with some pride, she reveals that her childhood dream was to play rugby for Wales, where she was born and raised. “That was all I cared about. And I did! I played one match for Wales. Then I was like, ‘I’ve done that. I think I’m going to do some acting.’”

Edwards, a fluent Welsh speaker, still lives in Newport. She had a paper round there until she was 19 and grew up the middle child of five. “I have a strong sense of being part of a pack,” she says. The actor regularly commutes to London (“it’s so close – an hour and 35 minutes on a good train”) and finds it refreshing to be able to play a British spy with her authentic Welsh accent, pleased Shirley’s Welshness is not a talking point in the hit show.

“Nobody ever mentions it,” she says. “And I think that’s really important. It’s good to normalise it. We hear northern and other accents all the time, but Welsh accents have been underrepresented.” Except, she adds, in comedy roles. “Like there’s a novelty aspect to being Welsh – like it’s some sort of kooky thing. It’s really not.”

Before Slow Horses, which follows a ragtag bunch of reject MI5 agents who are presumed to be inept despite usually saving the day, Edwards had to fake a Brummie accent as the opportunistic criminal Esme Shelby in Peaky Blinders, and adopt a southern one as manipulative Elizabeth Barton, the “Holy Maid of Kent” in Wolf Hall.

But as Shirley, and especially as Richard Burton’s older sister Cis in the 2025 film Mr Burton, she has increasingly been able to lean into her Welsh identity. And now she is voicing Princess Leia in the first-ever Welsh language-dub of 1977 blockbuster Star Wars, due to be broadcast in Wales on Christmas Day. Is she a fan? “Oh my God, I was pinching myself. That was so surreal, being in a booth, watching the film and lip-syncing I was going, ‘I don’t know how I got here, but I’m here – and I’m here for it.’ It was amazing. And it’s brilliant the Welsh language dub is happening. I’d be excited even if I wasn’t in it.”

In season six of Slow Horses, about to launch on Apple TV, Shirley’s anger and grief about the death of her colleague Marcus, played by Kadiff Kirwan, keeps bubbling to the surface. This grief is, to some extent, genuine: “I found it really hard when Marcus died, especially coming in for season five, because it was quite a lonely experience.”

She and Kirwan were “partners in crime”, she says. “That unique relationship between Shirley and Marcus – it was purely platonic, but with a lot of love, a lot of frustration, a lot of projecting each other’s nonsense back at each other.” At the same time, his death has helped her to develop Shirley’s character emotionally. “There’s so much to play.”

As a strong, dangerous woman whose physical bravery and moral courage is undermined by her emotional cowardice, explosive temper and penchant for violence, Shirley is “liberating” to play. “I love that she’s scrappy,” says Edwards. “There’s so much negative energy in her and she doesn’t know what to do with it. She can’t communicate it properly.”

Edwards – whose first major role was as Sketch, the stalker in teen drama Skins – looks for contradictions in the women she plays, which may explain why she is so good at humanising liars, criminals and sneaks. “I’m fascinated by people’s strengths,” she says, “and the mechanisms we have to protect ourselves when we feel vulnerable.” Shirley, she says, gives off a “stench” of “Try it – come and get it” when she walks into a room. “But I understand why she is like she is. I keep trying to pick at those threads, to expose them a little bit.”

Gary Oldman, who plays the chain-smoking, whisky-drinking, rarely washing boss Jackson Lamb, is the joker of the cast. “He loves making people laugh. He’s always got an anecdote, a tale to tell. He’s very silly and funny – a fun father figure.”

In her spare time, Edwards exercises a lot, mainly swimming and running, because team sports are a problem. “The nature of this work means you can’t commit,” she says, adding that she also enjoys making furniture in her garage. If she ever gave up acting and working far from home, she’d like to get a dog and become a carpenter. “I love making things with wood.”

Social media doesn’t interest her much. “I’m here for YouTube videos about carpentry, but I don’t know why anyone would ever be interested in what I had for breakfast.” She prefers to keep her personal life private, to protect her family and those she loves. And perhaps as a result, even though strangers often smile at her like they know her, they rarely identify who she is, even in Newport. “They think we went to school together or I work in the corner shop, rather than know me off the telly.”

This suits her. No actor, she says, ever regrets someone appreciating their work. “If they do, they should quit.” But she feels lucky she gets to live “a normal life” in her home town, where no one bothers her. “I’ll tell you what my biggest achievement is: so many people messaged me one day, because I was once an answer on Pointless.”

The question on the TV quizshow was: name a famous Edwards. “Which is ironic, because nobody knew who I was.” She beams. “What a contradiction.”