Did Andrew Buchan’s previous role hint at a real-life romance with Leila Farzad?

By HER own description, growing up Leila Farzad was something of an ugly duckling. “Miscoordinated features, oversized, very hairy, buck teeth,” is how she recently summed up her adolescent appearance.

Now, of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The actress, currently starring in the BBC’s latest Sunday night drama, is beautiful, charismatic, not to mention fiercely intelligent: a champion of sorority, railing against societal pressures on women and how they’re expected to behave. behave.

“As women, we have been taught to behave and be a certain way,” the Oxford graduate said a few weeks ago. Sometimes that is impossible.

‘There’s a little gremlin inside of you that says, ‘I don’t want to behave like this. My stomach hurts, I feel horrible, I’m incredibly premenstrual and haven’t slept well and maybe dealing with whether or not I should have a child.”

‘And yet it’s expected to be this smiling, sweet, affable creature. To 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 his talk of falling short of expectations, and ‘self-sabotage’, be interpreted differently in light of recent revelations?

Because, just months after setting up a movie business with her wealthy and seemingly doting husband who still wears his wedding ring, mother-of-one Leila Farzad has moved on with co-star Andrew ‘Andy’ Buchan, whose nine-year-old film is the same. year the marriage has ended simultaneously.

In Better, Buchan plays a gang 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 ended, although a source who spent time with her on a different production last summer, when her relationship with Buchan apparently took off, says she “gave the appearance of being single.” at that moment. .

The source says: “She never mentioned her husband and was always joking with the cast and crew. I thought she was single, I think a lot of people did.

She adds: “She seemed single and also exactly the type of person you’d better not leave alone with your husband.”

As for Bolton’s ‘nice boy’ Buchan, known for his devotion to his former soap actress turned Downton star wife Amy Nuttall and their two children, his gray eyes and gentle smile, it’s a turn of events. that has left many amazed.

Buchan, 44, was Andrew Parker Bowles in The Crown, Mark Latimer in Broadchurch and faithless former Health Secretary Matt Hancock in the drama This England (where he played the part to a bewildering degree).

His idol is the actor Jimmy Stewart, the ‘good boy’ of the cinema. He played Stewart in a short film he wrote and the company he created with his wife is called SlowTalkinJimmy after Stewart.

However, just before Christmas, the marriage came to an abrupt end. Buchan has moved on, and reports this week suggest his wife became suspicious after noticing she had been staying at hotels near her home.

A gift of lingerie that didn’t fit her was reportedly the latest devastating evidence that she had strayed. She confronted him and he left.

Amy posed alone in front of her Christmas tree, and on Valentine’s Day in a revealing Instagram post, she wrote: “I’m not impressed by money, social status or title.

“I’m impressed by the way someone treats other human beings.”

It was a strong indication that all was not well.

Since news of the split broke, Amy, 40, has been spotted running errands with pink eyes in the Buckinghamshire town of Gerrards Cross, where the couple shared a £1.2m home. sterling.

Her circle of friends includes Amy’s fellow Downton Abbey actress, Joanne Froggatt, who lives nearby.

Her parents, Elaine, an artist and former model, and Andrew, a successful lawyer, are said to be “shocked and horrified”.

And Andrew Nuttall was, by the way, a lawyer for members of the South Yorkshire Police during the Hillsborough inquiry.

Buchan’s father is similarly successful: he was head of customs at Manchester airport. Sadly, his wife died when Andrew was 20, though he says, “She lived to see my play Hamlet in college.” I still feel his presence in my life.’

It is not known where the actor is now, possibly in Yorkshire, or if he has moved in with Leila.

He has written a horror-comedy series for ITV called Passenger, and it is filming in Wigan and Calderdale.

What, one wonders, was it about Leila that drew him so strongly to his co-star that he fell apart from a long-standing marriage?

And similarly, it is not clear what precipitated the significant change in Leila’s personal circumstances.

Until recently, she shared a Chelsea home with her husband James Maizels, a successful businessman who runs the FB Taverns group of bars, among other ventures.

In an interview last year, she spoke about a home life where Sunday lunches were Persian feasts of buttered rice at local restaurants and where her husband made her daughter her favorite banana-oatmeal pancakes ‘because he’s a legend. ‘.

Indeed, the two women now in Buchan’s life appear to be polar opposites in career, attitudes, and education.

Leila is academically brilliant with a modern languages ​​degree from Oxford.

Her mother had stipulated that she could only be an actress if she entered Oxford or Cambridge.

While Amy went straight from her private art school to a job in Emmerdale, where she spent 11 years.

In contrast to Amy’s early success, career achievement has been more of a chore for Leila, who has described with delight how simple she was as a teenager and the challenges of fitting in at school. The only child of Iranian parents, who divorced, she says she always stood out.

“I had really buck teeth and eyebrow, and my mom didn’t know how to fix my hair, so it was really curly, and everyone at my school had this straight blonde hair.

‘They all seemed to have these very uniform features, and I was the ‘creature’ who felt very different and different.

‘Comedy was my way in. I was the class clown, that was my place among all those very pretty… Sophies and Arabellas, if you know what I mean.

‘I felt comfortable and happy being the one who could make everyone laugh. My best friend even talked about it in my wedding speech: the comedy meant that I felt like I belonged. That was the ability he was offering.

After graduating from university, Leila went to the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama. But years of rejection and doubt followed.

She said: “Drama school doesn’t prepare you for the level of rejection and pain, and the thickness of skin that you’ll need to have.”

Before landing her lead role in the Sky comedy series I Hate Suzie with Billie Piper, Leila was preparing to quit acting and starting training as an intimacy coordinator.

Her fight will be familiar to Andy Buchan, whose story has parallels to hers. Her father also insisted that he should get a degree and Andy studied modern languages ​​at Durham University.

He then went to Rada, where Tom Hiddleston and Andrea Riseborough were in his graduating class.

But jobs at a hotel, a call center and taking tours of Coronation Street followed, before landing somewhere in acting. He and Amy met in 2007, married in 2012, and moved back to the home counties soon after.

“Before that, we had a flat above the Carphone Warehouse in London. But now we are two Boltonians in Buckinghamshire, toning it down,” he joked in 2014.

She continued: ‘It definitely helps that Amy is an actress. Who else would be okay with being absent or with you doing theater on Christmas Eve?’

The couple have a seven-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son.

Amy is a home bird who seems happy to be a traditional mom, telling interviewers that she is “terribly boring” and that she is a “stay-at-home-instead-of-going-out girl.” When she was cast in Downton as the 29-year-old maid Ethel Parks, she worried that she might be “one of those women who leaves it too late; it would be devastating to miss out on children.”

Leila, once again, seems to feel the opposite, once telling an interviewer: “We’re meant to feel like we haven’t accomplished what we need to do if we don’t have a baby.”

Interestingly, in an article from December last year to promote the drama Better, there was no mention of a husband.

As Leila spoke gleefully of her eight-year-old daughter: ‘If I didn’t get a job, I had this other wonderful ball of happiness. That helped me put things in context’: there was no reference to James at all.

Perhaps the marriage was already on its last legs and she was simply trying to avoid bringing it up.

In an Instagram post on February 13, Leila again hinted that she was single when Better was filmed.

She wrote: ‘Big to the Better team who wiped away my tears, held me up, fed me scones and made me smile. I don’t have photos of everyone, but this gang helped me!

Given this week’s headlines, it seems that one member of the ‘gang’ was being rather more supportive than the rest.