Checking in with RACHAEL STIRLING

Like a lot of people, British actress Rachael Stirling makes it a practice to never to bring her work home with her, something she learned from her mother, legendary thesp Diana Rigg.

But she found that impossible with her latest character, tightly-wound head teacher Helen in the twisty, dark U.K. thriller “Hollington Drive,” as she sustained a fractured rib while performing a stunt while filming the four-part Sundance Now/ AMC+ series.

“If you go home to a four-and-a-half-year-old, you just can’t do that ...,” the 41-year-old mother of one reasons. “I think it’s a bit self-indulgent to take it home but in some cases you just can’t help it and certainly when you’ve sustained some injury or something like that. You know, I had Helen on the mind for many months afterwards. She is insidious. She’s a creeper and she’s an uncomfortable character to play because you never quite know where you are with her . ... She’s a sort of slippery fish.”

In “Hollington Drive,” the storyline revolves around a missing child and the many secrets and lies that unravel among residents of a well-to-do neighborhood as the ensuing investigation progresses. Some involve Stirling’s character Helen and her younger sister Theresa (Anna Maxwell Martin), whose own young son may know something about the disappearance.

This, of course, leads to much tension between the educator and the mother and Stirling says her easy rapport with Martin, with whom she worked on the 2012-14 Brit crime thriller “The Bletchley Circle,” made playing those scenes easier.

“It sort of gave us a shorthand, both as actresses and as playing sisters, that sort of intimacy, that sort of second-guessing what the other person’s going to say, which we do quite a lot.” Stirling says with a laugh. “And we were born (20) days apart, Anna and I, so we’re quite similar in lots of ways.”

Full name: Rachael Atlanta Stirling

Birth date: May 30, 1977

Birthplace: London