Emilia Fox has spent 20 years digging into cold corpses on the British crime series Silent Witness.
For 21 years and 206 episodes, Emilia Fox has put on a hazmat suit, pulled on blue rubber gloves and determinedly probed hundreds of dead bodies to play Dr Nikki Alexander on British drama Silent Witness.
She regularly scrapes debris from beneath a cadaver’s finger nail, scrutinises stomach matter or gently digs into fake brain tissue. Fox, however, is undeterred. And that’s partly because she has seen the real thing, watching two real-life autopsies in preparation for the show – one of an older man who had died naturally, and the other a man in his early 20s who had been murdered.
She said witnessing them felt sad, compelling and profound.
“Death is the unknown, and getting to grips with that as a subject matter, I find endlessly fascinating,” she says. “We’re all trying to come to terms with what death means and I felt that so strongly at the autopsies.
Emilia Fox has played Dr Nikki Alexander on Silent Witness for 21 years.
“With the second autopsy, I came out of that going, ‘We just never know when it’s going to happen, and we may as well make the most of it.’”
At 31 years old, Silent Witness is Britain’s longest-running crime series, even beating US stalwart Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Over the years, the series has covered serial killers, human trafficking, drug cartels and biological weapons, and faced criticism that some episodes were too violent. In 2013, it was even censured by the BBC over an episode the trust ruled was “in breach of the guidelines over harm and offence” as one bloody scene “exceeded audience expectations”.
Fox says the show, which employs several real-life pathologists as medical advisers, has never felt pressured to keep up with the more gruesome deaths offered up by true crime or the endless series based on the real-life exploits of serial killers.
DS Blake (Gloria Obianyo), Dr Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox) and Jack Hodgson (David Caves) are suited up for season 28 of Silent Witness.
“We are very definitely in the hands of our fantastic writers,” she says. “They continue to find these amazing stories. I think the show is about life as much as it is about death. The advance of forensic science will never stop being fascinating. Crime changes in different locations with different people for different reasons, so there are always stories to tell.
“But really it’s about the characters in those stories themselves. The writers write really good thrillers. That’s what keeps it fresh.”
Fox, wearing a thick woollen jumper while talking over Zoom on a cold February evening in Birmingham, joined Silent Witness in 2004, after the departure of Amanda Burton, who had played Dr Sam Ryan for the first seven seasons.
Emilia Fox took over from Amanda Burton, who played Dr Sam Ryan, for Silent Witness’ first seven seasons.
A BBC staple that is broadcast around the world, the show follows a team of forensic pathology experts from the fictional Lyell Centre in London. It’s renowned for its interweaving character arcs, mystery plotlines and, most distinctly, up-close homicide post-mortems on meticulously made prop corpses. Occasionally, real actors are on the autopsy slab – pre-forensic investigation.
Dr Nikki Alexander, who is partly inspired by the work of British forensic scientists such as Angela Gallop, Dame Sue Black and Professor Patricia Wiltshire, has been part of nearly half of Fox’s adult life.
“She wants to do good and do right and she’s passionate about her work,” Fox says. “But her evolution has been with the different people who have come into her life and her personal life.
The Silent Witness team in 2007: William Gaminara as Professor Leo Dalton, Emilia Fox as Dr Nikki Alexander, and Tom Ward as Dr Harry Cunningham.
“She did not have a good relationship with her dad many, many years ago, who was a bit of a con man, and her mum had died. So she was a bit of a lone woman who didn’t really trust people.
“She had this moonlighting relationship with Harry [Cunningham, played by Tom Ward], and the first evolution with the Leo [Dalton] and Harry characters, where they were the three pathologists together. And then ultimately with Jack.”
Played by David Caves, Jack Hodgson, as fans of Silent Witness will recall, capped the series 27 finale by proffering a small mystery box in a forensics evidence bag to Nikki.
Yes, the episode focused on the Lyell team’s grim investigation of eight bodies entombed below King’s Cross Station in London. But, fans rejoice, it culminated in the couple’s surprise engagement, an event that flooded social media with fan-made, emotional music-backed, slow-motion clips.
“After 12 years of building it, we consciously wanted to portray a good relationship on screen,” says Fox, an executive producer on the show, who was part of extensive show production discussions about the couple’s changing status.
Emilia Fox and David Caves in a 2015 episode of Silent Witness. Their characters have now become engaged.
“Ultimately, we felt that there was a real maturity to them, and that it had taken them this long to find their love for each other, and that they were at a particular stage of their lives together where you make a choice about being with someone and what they mean to you.
“But, we also wanted to convey in series 28 how interesting it is for two scientists who are fact and evidence-based [to be in love].
“Nikki knows every detail of anatomy, all the organs in the body and really all about the heart. And yet, you can explain the heart with science but you can’t explain the heart with emotion. So, you’ve got these two forensic scientists feeling this, but not being able to explain it, and what that means to them.”
This angle was inspired by Fox listening to forensic ecologist Patricia Wiltshire on BBC radio show Desert Island Discs. “I heard her love for her husband, who is also a scientist, through her talking about him and through the music that she chose,” she says. “I wanted to get hold of that as an idea for this series.”
The daughter of actors Edward Fox and Joanna David, who raised their daughter with a love for Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes mysteries, Fox’s passion for the forensic extends to co-presenting British true-crime TV series In the Footsteps of Killers.
When she is not wielding a scalpel in the Silent Witness lab, Fox continues with other projects, including the cosy crime series Signora Volpe and upcoming fantasy adventure comedy Legend Has It with Rupert Everett and Tamsin Greig.
But, after 21 years surrounded by Silent Witness’ riddles of death, she remains beholden to the series.
“Silent Witness doesn’t feel like work because I love it and I am fascinated by it,” she says. “I really appreciate having had that time to play Nikki, live with her, explore her, enjoy her, and enjoy all the other people that work on the show. It’s something that I will never, ever take for granted.”
The new season of Silent Witness streams on BritBox from March 20.
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