27 Oct 2026
Pop quiz… Which actor links three of this season’s most high-profile movies: Digger, Ghosts: The Possession of Button House and Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint?
The answer is actually St Albans’ own Annette Holland, co-founder of Best Theatre Arts drama school and boasting a CV that includes Grange Hill, The Bill and Will Sharpe’s forthcoming TV series Prodigies.
She’s appeared on adverts and audio, promoting the likes of Netflix, Marks & Spencer and Tesco, and providing voice talent in Dirk Maggs’ The Sandman podcast and Big Finish’s Doctor Who spin-off UNIT.
We caught up for coffee in Nkora to discuss her varied career and how she ended up in a trio of big budget blockbusters – even though as of this writing Tom Cruise’s Digger is looking likely to be his first dud for decades.
Originally from Cornwall – although the accent has long since vanished – Annette studied law at Manchester and qualified as a solicitor in Bristol before moving to London with her husband David Bevan.
“South-West 20 wasn’t really an area we thought we’d like to settle and bring up children, so we moved to St Albans and we’ve been here ever since. It’s just lovely, and that was maybe 36 years ago.”
Although she worked on and off as a solicitor for several years, she had always wanted to become an actor: “I thought, I never wanted to be telling my grandchildren what Granny had always wanted to do, so stop making excuses and just go for it.”
At the time she was in her late 20s: “That’s considered very, very old to work for a female actor. One drama school in their interview said to me, ‘You know you’re going to be 31 when you finish here?’ I replied, ‘I hope I live that long!’”
While studying at Drama Studio London in Ealing, she was fortunate enough to be able to fall back on her legal training and work for St Albans solicitors Sherrards, before landing her first professional role back in her native Cornwall, appearing in Alan Ayckborn’s Confusions in Ives summer rep.
Trying to research Annette’s subsequent stage career proved a challenge, as there is no record of her many appearances, but when she engaged the services of an agent she landed her first TV roles in school drama Grange Hill, police series The Bill, and sitcom Surgical Spirit, which are recorded on IMDB (the Internet Movie Data Base).
She said making the transition from theatre to television was very exciting: “It seemed like the logical next step because it’s what you train for. With The Bill we were on location for a car crash, and just watching all the different people involved in the various roles was fascinating.”
Following a flurry of character parts, her last professional job before the birth of her son in 1993 was towards the very end of her pregnancy: “It was three weeks before he was born, and I got an advert for Tesco eating ice cream. Dirty work, you know?” she joked. “I just had to eat ice cream and be very proper!”
It soon became apparent that raising a family – her second son was born in 1995 – wasn’t going to work with the demands of casting calls and set appearances: “You already have no control over the hours or whether you’re going to get the roles, and then you’ve got that extra thing in the mix…”
Discussions with husband David about running a drama school, and what exactly it would be, resulted in them trying to offer something very different to similar facilities at the time, taking the industry out of the equation and just focusing on the students.
“We wanted to create something that we would want to send our kids to – and we did – and that’s where Best Theatre Arts was born. I was doing that for 20 odd years, and I didn’t do any professional work during that time.”
She took her first step back into acting with an appearance for OVO’s production of Colder Than Here at The Maltings Arts Theatre, before a rather unexpected return to audio work.
Back in 2016 she had appeared in Big Finish Productions’ UNIT: Assembled, a full-cast audio adventure featuring the military taskforce from Doctor Who, in which her character was horribly killed in a Cumbrian mall by a reptilian Silurian from the dawn of time.
“They’re just lovely people to work with, it was just a laugh to go into the studio, so I wrote to the producers and asked about any further work.
“They put me in touch with a producer-writer called Dirk Maggs [an award-winning radio drama creator], who phoned me and asked if I could do an American accent. I said, ‘Yeah sure’, and got my two parts in Alien: River of Pain [Audible Originals’ spin-offs from the movie franchise) and I felt like a bit of a competition winner! That also led to a bit in Sandman [an audio version of the DC Comic] as well, and that was just fantastic.
“I always research what I’m doing, and what a director has done previously, but audio is so easy in many ways. I did one while I was pregnant! Big Finish recently commissioned a series of comedies and I was lucky enough to be in one of those with Sacha Dhawan and Rachel Fenwick.”
These roles gradually led her back into more regular acting gigs, including Mosquitos by Lucy Kirkwood at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester, directed by OVO’s own Adam Nichols, and eventually she signed up with Capulet talent agency, co-owned by St Albans casting maestro Leoni Kibbey.
“She came to see me in Mosquitos and that really changed my career. The nice thing about Capulet is they don’t just throw you out there, they advise me.”
This led to a major role in an episode of John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, a horror true crime anthology series, which was filmed in Prague.
“It was very intense, but fun to do! All the prosthetics and amazing make-up and hair people.”
Things continued to snowball for Annette: “Capulet got me some adverts, and then some drama, which led to these three films coming out back-to-back. I’ve had three weeks of three showings, and I thought, this is brilliant.
“Somebody said to me the other week, ‘You’ve got a really good look’, now I don’t know what that means, but I’ll take it! Someone I met for Big Finish gave me some advice about finding different looks for my headshots, so it’s not just this is me smiling, this is me frowning, you want different looks to help the casting director imagine you in a role, for example, my look in Digger is definitely different, whereas Aubrey Flint is more quirky…”
Tom Cruise stars as the eponymous Digger in a satirical black comedy directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, telling the story of an aging oil magnate whose drilling sets off an ecological disaster.
“I’m on screen at the same time as him,” she reveals. “But it’s difficult to say more anything about it because it’s the sort of film you have to go and see. It’s just so different.
“Then there was [Brit romcom] Aubrey Flint with Richard E Grant and Celia Imrie. I think it’s a really magical film, it’s very, very fun, and I think it’s going to be a big Christmas favourite.
Celia Imrie is just amazing.
“Kiell Smith-Bynoe from Ghosts was also in Aubrey Flynn, so was Sophia Di Martino, Karl Pilkington… Just so many people. I’ve got a noticeable role in that one, but the names obviously have the main parts.”
Does she now think she’s on the precipice of major acting roles in the future? “I don’t think that’s the way it works, you can have a load of stuff and maybe not work for ages. I think you just have to keep working hard and going steadily, and keeping your fingers crossed, that’s all you can do.
“I’m just enjoying this moment because it’s nice to see myself on the big screen for the first time. I was a little shocked afterwards, but it’s all good! I’ve got a great agent, my family are super-supportive and I’m making sure that I enjoy every minute. How lucky am I?”
Are there any projects she’d particularly like to do? “Just anything with an interesting, lovely character, I don’t mind if I’m a sweet old lady or a sweet old psychopath!
“Last autumn I had an advert for Marks and Spencer’s with Dawn French on the bonnet of my car, banging my window down. How’s that for a day’s work? It was wonderful.
“I did an advert for Gordon Ramsay, he’s a lovely man. I was an Italian nonna, and the only time I got nervous was when he had to hand me some plates of food. I was all Mrs Overall [Julie Walters’ twitching tea lady in Victoria Wood’s Acorn Antiques]! The rest of it was great, he’s very polite and very nice!”
- Digger and Ghosts: The Possession of Button House are out now, and Merry Christmas Aubrey Flint opens on November 6.
