Nocturnal 
Vicky McClure has revealed she received “heartbreaking” news about a friend before it triggered a major realisation about how she wants to live her life.
The Trigger Point star, 43, opened up about the moment while speaking ahead of a guest appearance on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen this morning, as reported by WalesOnline. The news concerned a member of the Our Dementia Choir, the group she formed in her hometown of Nottingham back in 2018 for a documentary exploring music’s power to help people living with dementia.
McClure explained that while on holiday with her husband, Welsh director Jonny Owen, she learned that another choir member had died.
What Vicky McClure said
“That is a regular occurrence because that is the nature of dementia,” she said. “It’s the UK’s biggest killer. Worldwide everybody’s facing it and it’s heartbreaking, but it does make me feel like I should grab life.”
She went on to describe the wider realisation the loss brought about, saying: “I think we all have that sense – whenever somebody around you becomes ill or you know, you become ill yourself or you just realise just how fragile life is and just how grateful we should always try to be.”
McClure added that people don’t need elaborate rituals to appreciate what they have. “You don’t need to be a guru. You don’t need to sit and bathe in a forest or do all these things to feel that you can do that wherever you are right now, wherever you live in the world,” she said.
The actress also used the interview to speak more broadly about opportunity in her industry, having got her big break as a working-class actress in Shane Meadows’ This Is England. Referencing 2024 research showing 35% of BAFTA-nominated actors had been privately educated, she told the Independent: “Working-class actors are struggling for work because there isn’t enough work. There’s not enough stories that are being told about working-class people where you can hire working-class people.”
Who is Jonny Owen?
Jonny Owen, 55, is a Welsh actor, writer and director from Merthyr Tydfil, whose credits include Channel 4’s Shameless and the acclaimed ITV Wales drama Nuts and Bolts. He and McClure met on the set of the 2013 film Svengali, which Owen wrote and in which the pair played an on-screen couple.
Speaking previously on the How to Fail podcast, McClure recalled: “We literally lived together from a week of meeting. We’ve never lived apart. I couldn’t see my life without him.” Owen proposed on Christmas Day 2017, and the couple married in Nottingham in August 2023, with Line of Duty co-stars Adrian Dunbar and Martin Compston among the guests, and the Our Dementia Choir performing at the reception.
Where things stand now
McClure remains busy with the fourth series of Trigger Point on ITV, in which she plays bomb disposal expert Lana Washington, and made her Saturday Kitchen appearance alongside Owen this weekend. Her comments about the choir member’s death have not been accompanied by further details about the individual, in keeping with McClure’s approach to discussing the group’s members. Our Dementia Choir first aired in 2018 and highlighted the impact of music on people living with the condition, which the actress notes remains the UK’s biggest killer.
