The Split Up stars and creator talk bringing "gloriously messy" characters to life in spin-off to beloved Nicola Walker hit

Before Ritu Arya trained as an actor – before she starred in Netflix’s SFX spectacular The Umbrella Academy, or appeared in the billion-dollar blockbuster Barbie, or indeed took the lead in The Split Up, the new spin-off from Abi Morgan’s acclaimed legal drama The Split – she studied astrophysics at university. Such a detour invites invocation of astronomical phenomenon, enquiry as to whether Kepler’s laws have any secret bearing on her acting, an excuse to ask if her success was written in the stars. It hints at hinterland.

Not so much, Arya admits, framing her studies at Southampton University less as a grand intellectual plan and more as an instinct that she “wasn’t done learning” before drama school. “Like most kids, I was passionate about space, and I was quite academic at school,” she says. “I was very curious to know how things were the way they were. And I’d seen other actors do the same. Natalie Portman [who took fewer acting roles while attending Harvard University] was an inspiration.”

More prosaic than poetic, Arya says, “you could probably find some intellectual segue between astrophysics and acting”, but what her degree gave her was time “to grow into a person, to learn how to learn, to build a life and a community away from home. You’ve got to be a person before you’re an actor.”

By her own admission, she speaks to me in a strange state, covered in fake blood and scars. “I’m filming something I can’t talk about yet. I don’t think I’ve ever been interviewed covered in blood before,” she says, laughing at the incongruity of it. It’s a fittingly chaotic image for an actor who has built a career on characters who refuse to sit still, refuse to be tidy, and – most of all – refuse to be liked in any straightforward way.

And so to The Split Up’s Aria, who Arya describes, in a word, as “messy”. It’s her first time as the undisputed lead of a series and she describes being number one on the call sheet as “pretty surreal”. She is quick, however, to deflect any notion of her as the star of the show. “It really did feel like an ensemble,” she says, “like we were doing it all together”.

That instinct for collaboration over competition runs through how she talks about her career more broadly. She joined The Umbrella Academy already a devoted fan, arriving in its second season into a cast dynamic already “fully formed. Whereas when you’re starting a show, there can be a little bit of nervousness for sure, and you’re finding the tone, you’re finding the character dynamics sort of in real time as you’re doing it.”

Interestingly, she went into The Split Up having deliberately avoided its predecessor. “I purposefully didn’t watch The Split,” she explains, having seen only enough of the first episode during her audition process to understand its tone before consciously steering away. The goal wasn’t disrespect for the original, but self-preservation; she didn’t want to catch herself making comparisons.

The new series resounds with Abi Morgan’s preoccupations with familial and romantic relationships, the choices that women have to make in their lives, the vagaries of the law, but relocates them to Manchester and trades the well-to-do Defoes for the equally aspirational Kishans. In place of Nicola Walker’s Hannah, there’s Arya’s Aria. No pressure, then.

Arya says she’s trying not to think about that and is “striving to let go of the perfectionism” that she sees in her character, who is high-achieving but falling apart. “We share drive and ambition, but Aria suffers from keeping secrets and she ties herself in knots, whereas I try to walk with ease and have transparency.”

What Arya loves about acting, she says, is the immersion – “putting on someone else’s shoes” – and the way the craft can quietly chip away at societal norms by showing audiences unfamiliar walks of life. It’s a theme that connects two of her most contrasting roles: the maximalist, SFX-heavy world of The Umbrella Academy and the stripped-back intensity of Bait, her last TV series for Prime Video, which was shot in black and white on a vintage 16mm camera.

She singles out one particular episode of Bait, which was staged as a single continuous shot (in reality six separate shots stitched together), and filmed with creator and star Riz Ahmed, as a genuine turning point. “It felt scarier,” she says. “You had to surrender.”

Any preconceptions about being cool or charming went out the window in favour of simply being present, one moment at a time – a discipline which, she says, has unlocked a sense of freedom in her work. That surrender extends to how she thinks about failure itself, which she’s trying to stop treating as a verdict and start treating as data.

Playing Aria has, Arya says, reinforced the importance of stepping back from the constant go, go, go – of finding perspective through friends, family and nature. “I like playing chaotic characters, but then you have your own life to live.”

Sanjeev Bhaskar

Comedy, Sanjeev Bhaskar muses, is “actually way more difficult than drama” and points to the precision involved. “The funniest thing in a sentence may be the pause – and if the pause is a millisecond too short or too long, it ceases to be funny. That’s something you can’t teach.”

In a comedy scene, he explains, all the actors have to know and agree collectively where the comedy is, so no one is treading on it and everyone is setting it up. “It’s surprisingly technical”.

So it’s true? “That if you’re a really good comedy actor, you can do anything? I think so.”

To be clear, Bhaskar isn’t saying that he’s a great comedy actor. But his career – from Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at No42 to Unforgotten (a seventh series is in production), and now The Split Up – suggests that he might be. He demurs.

“I was associated with comedy – which is not a complaint, because I loved it – but the leap of imagination required by other people to see me in dramatic roles came a little bit later, and I’m super grateful for it.”

As the most experienced actor on The Split Up set, Bhaskar saw himself less as a mentor than a collaborator, relishing the “potential magic” of shared creative possibilities.

In Dhruv, recently widowed patriarch of the Kishan clan and formidable founder of the family law firm, Bhaskar found a character unlike anything he’s played before. “He’s carrying such a variety of weights around his neck – the weight of ageing, of his legacy, of being relevant or not, of trying to connect with his three children, who are very different from him and one another. And his grief, of course.”

Bhaskar traces some of that directly to his own life – an immigrant-poverty mentality passed down through his family, the instinct to hoard “a ball of rubber bands”. “My mum keeps everything. My sister keeps a lot. I keep a lot. It’s from the childhood experience of not having stuff,” he says. “That experience shapes you in a way that people who don’t have it maybe don’t always understand.”

The Split Up being a spin-off, it’s possible that The Split’s Hannah Stern might one day stride into Kishan Law – which would reunite Bhaskar with his former Unforgotten co-star, Nicola Walker. How would he feel about that? “Emotionally, it would be like some sort of cosmic miracle,” he beams. “I wouldn’t mind it at all.”

Ursula Rani Sarma

Ursula Rani Sarma is clear about why she created The Split Up, spun off Abi Morgan’s legal drama The Split: “I wanted to write a British-Asian heroine who my daughter can look at and think, ‘She’s so cool!’”

It’s an admirable endeavour given the dearth of British-Asian characters on TV who aren’t terror suspects (radicalised, male), relations of terror suspects (oppressed, female), retrograde community leaders (men again), or else definitely not Muslim (such as smiling Sikhs and happy Hindus).

It’s also a mission accomplished with the character of Aria, the rising star in the Kishan Law family firmament. Smart and immaculately dressed, Aria is also – says Ritu Arya, who plays her – “gloriously messy”. Torn between duty and desire, Aria is falling apart – but looks fabulous doing so.

“While dreaming up Aria,” Sarma says, “I had as a top line the question: ‘Who do you live your life for?’ That’s a recognisable dilemma for everyone. I had an opportunity to create a unique character that I wanted to move the audience.”

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As a jobbing writer, the chance to play in Morgan’s sandpit – a sandpit from which some of the most compelling dramas of the last 25 years have emerged, including Sex Traffic, Shame, The Hour, The Iron Lady and, of course, The Split – is an incredible opportunity. But then, golden tickets weigh heavy. Did Sarma find the prospect daunting?

“More liberating,” she says, firmly. “Abi’s been there to support, consult and advise. She’s been a brilliant executive producer, but these are stories and characters that I created. It’s a new city, a new family and a new window into British culture”.

Yet, for all the differences, the two dramas have a central preoccupation – the choice that women often have to make between pleasing other people and their own happiness.

With its sassy lawyers, love triangles and aspirational Manchester, The Split Up is also great fun. “They are characters that I’d love to go for a glass of wine with,” Sarma says. “It’s aspirational comfort viewing, with the power to move the audience too. I want to make them laugh and cry in the same hour of television – I think we manage it.”

The Split Up will premiere on Sunday 20 and Monday 21 September at 9pm on BBC One.

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