Sophie Chapman

Sophie works alongside Mark at JLB Credit, pleasant, unremarkable, entirely unaware that she has become the object of his consuming, awkward fixation. She is warm to colleagues, a bit scattered, fond of a drink and a laugh — a normal woman who has no idea she's been cast as the great romantic hope of someone else's stunted inner monologue.

Olivia Colman plays Sophie as recognisably real amid the show's parade of grotesques, which is the joke and the ache of it: Mark's internal voice mythologises her while the camera just shows an ordinary, flawed person. Colman finds comedy in Sophie's small vanities and confusions without ever letting her become a punchline herself.