People Are Talking About
EDITOR: VALERIE STEIKER
Television
i
Killer Instinct
In a 1970s-set reboot of Prime Suspect, Stefanie Martini
brings Jane Tennison’s early years to life.
’m a country girl, from North Somerset,” admits
Stefanie Martini. “When I was seventeen, I went
to the National Youth Theatre in London and it
was like in The Hobbit—the first time I’d been out
of the shire. I realized there was this whole other
world I could be a part of.”
So she jumped in: Two years ago she was an unknown
drama student at RADA; a year later, she was starring as the
immaculately virtuous heroine of Julian Fellowes’s Doctor
Thorne (“She was too nice and had no flaws; I struggled with
that”). From there, she went on to play the vengeful Lady Ev
in Emerald City. Now the 26-year-old is enjoying her highest-
profile role yet as the lead in Prime Suspect: Tennison (PBS’s
Masterpiece), the prequel to the landmark 1990s show about
Jane Tennison, a flinty London police inspector played by
Helen Mirren who battled crooks, sexist colleagues, and her
own demons. In this new series, set in 1973, Martini is an
eager uniformed rookie cop from a well-to-do family who
starts off wide-eyed but, while investigating murder, discov-
ers her own inner steel. “It was scary,” she says of filling
Dame Helen’s shoes, “but I wasn’t really playing the same
character. The point of the show is how my Tennison gets
to where Helen Mirren’s is.”
A North Londoner these days, Martini spends her off-
hours doing “lots of yoga” and hitting coffeehouses with
her friends. She recently finished shooting a fifties-style
Agatha Christie mystery alongside Glenn Close and
Christina Hendricks—“I had to keep from fan-girling
too hard”—and, she tells me, looks forward to playing
characters with some dark edges. This would come as no
surprise to Prime Suspect: Tennison’s director, David Caf-
frey. “Stefanie has that level of innocence and that level of
ambition,” he says. “She looks delicate, but she’s as tough
P ATA > 8 2
as a pair of old boots.”— JOHN POWERS
THE ACTRESS IN AN EMILIO PUCCI TRENCH COAT AND A SEE BY CHLOÉ TOP.
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VOGUE JUNE 2017
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