Andrew Buchan was uncannily good at playing Matt Hancock in Covid drama This ... trends now
By her own description, growing up Leila Farzad was something of an ugly duckling. 'Mal-coordinated, over-sized features, very hairy, buck teeth,' is how she recently summarised her teenage appearance.
Now, of course, that couldn't be further from the truth.
The actress, currently starring in the latest BBC hit Monday-night drama, is beautiful, charismatic, not to mention fiercely intelligent — a champion of the sisterhood, railing against societal pressures on women and how they are expected to conduct themselves.
'As women we've been taught to behave and be a certain way,' the Oxford graduate said a few weeks ago. 'Sometimes that's impossible.
'There's a little gremlin inside you that says, "I don't want to behave like this. My stomach hurts, I feel horrific, I'm incredibly premenstrual and underslept and maybe grappling with the fact of whether I should have a child or not."
On-screen partnership: In Better, Buchan (right) plays a gangland boss to Farzad's (left) corrupt Detective Inspector and sexual electricity positively crackles between them on-screen (pictured for BBC drama Better)
Looking back: Did Andrew Buchan's earlier role hint at romance with Leila Farzad? (pair pictured in Better)
'And yet I'm expected to be this smiley, sweet, affable creature. The hell with that.' She added: 'I'm the queen of self-sabotage. I get angry and have a short fuse. I'm not very self-possessed.'
But could her talk of not conforming to expectations — and of 'self sabotage' — be interpreted differently in the light of recent revelations?
For, just a few months after setting up a film business with her wealthy and apparently doting husband who still wears his wedding ring, Leila Farzad, a mother of one, has moved on with co-star Andrew 'Andy' Buchan, whose nine-year marriage has simultaneously ended.
In Better, Buchan plays a gangland boss to Farzad's corrupt Detective Inspector and the sexual electricity positively crackles between them on-screen.
It's not known when Leila's marriage to businessman James Maizels finished, though a source who spent time with her on a different production last summer, when the affair with Buchan apparently took off, says that she 'gave every appearance of being single' by that time.
The source says: 'She never mentioned her husband and was always larking around with the cast and crew. I thought that she was single — I think a lot of people did.'
He adds: 'She came across as single and also as exactly the kind of person who it would be better not to leave alone with your husband.'
As for Buchan — the 'nice guy' from Bolton, known for his devotion to his former soap actress turned Downton star wife Amy Nuttall and their two children, his grey eyes and his kind smile — it is a turn of events that has left many astonished.
End of the road: It recently emerged Andrew Buchan and Amy Nuttall had split after nine years of marriage (pictured in 2017)
Fire on screen: Sexual electricity crackles between as they star in Leila and Andrew in BBC drama Better together
Buchan, 44, was Andrew Parker Bowles in The Crown, Mark Latimer in Broadchurch and unfaithful former Health Secretary Matt Hancock in the drama This England (where he inhabited the role to a disconcerting degree.)
His idol is the actor Jimmy Stewart, cinema's 'nice guy'. He has played him in a short film that he wrote and the company which he set up with his wife is named SlowTalkinJimmy in Stewart's honour. However just before Christmas, the marriage came to an abrupt end.
Buchan moved out, and reports this week suggest that his wife became suspicious after noticing that he had been staying in hotels close to their home.
A gift of lingerie not in her size was, it has been reported, the final devastating proof that he had strayed. She confronted him, and he left.
Amy posed solo in front of her Christmas tree, and on Valentine's day in a telling Instagram post, she wrote: 'I am not impressed by money, social status or job title.
'I'm impressed by the way someone treats other human beings.'
It was a heavy hint that all was not well. Since news of the split emerged Amy, 40, has been seen pink-eyed running errands in the Buckinghamshire town of Gerrards Cross where the couple shared a £1.2 million home.
Their circle of friends include Amy's fellow Downton Abbey actress, Joanne Froggatt, who lives nearby.
Her parents — Elaine, an artist and former model, and Andrew, a successful barrister — are said to be 'shocked and appalled'.
Andrew Nuttall was, incidentally, counsel to members of the South Yorkshire Police during the
