Shalom Brune-Franklin on her thrilling new series The Tourist

Shalom Brune-Franklin didn’t know what she was auditioning for when she received a script headed ‘LOD6’. “When I found out it was Line of Duty, I was so excited and sort of in disbelief that it was all happening,” she tells me. Joining the hit BBC crime drama series for its sixth season as DC Chloe Bishop, Shalom brought the tenacious, refreshingly straight-talking heroine to life in increasingly arduous investigations and high-octane action sequences, quickly becoming many viewers’ favourite character and prompting headlines such as ‘Why DC Chloe Bishop is AC-12’s Secret Weapon’.

“It’s a strange experience being such a huge fan of a show, and then to feel like you’ve stepped inside the TV,” she says from her home in Sydney. “I don’t think I ever got over being two feet away from Adrian Dunbar [who plays the series’ linchpin Superintendent Hastings], thinking: ‘Oh my God, that’s Ted!’”

Born in Hertfordshire to a Mauritian mother and British-Thai father, the 27-year-old actress moved to Perth when she was 14, before returning to the UK in 2017, so naturally she was delighted to be back in Australia to film her most recent project, the gripping mystery-thriller series The Tourist, alongside Jamie Dornan. “I’m always away from my family and my friends, so it was really exciting to be so close to them,” she says, smiling.

She stars as Luci, a waitress “with a lot of secrets”, says Shalom (whose own past ambitions of becoming an 800-metre runner served her well when shooting the show’s fast-paced scenes). “This character was so different to anything I’d ever taken on before. She plays with fire without having to deal with the consequences,” she reveals. “It felt really far away from myself, and that piqued my interest instantly.”

Indeed, there’s a lot more to Luci’s story than meets the eye – throughout the series, we see her narrative thread unravel to reveal something far more complex than we could have anticipated. “I was dying to know what happened at the end of episode one!” she says. “I didn’t understand why she was making the choices she was making, so I thought it would be a fun challenge.”

Not one to shy away from a challenge, her past jobs have encompassed Netflix’s Arthurian fantasy series Cursed to the political drama Roadkill with Hugh Laurie and Helen McCrory. Her principal motivation, she says, is learning as much as she can from the team around her. “If it’s a director I’ve really wanted to work with, or another actor whose work I’m obsessed with, I’ll take the smallest part if it means I get to be in that person’s presence for a bit.”

Shalom Brune-Franklin as Luci in The Tourist

At the top of her career wishlist is to be in a period drama – a goal she credits to her adoration of the original film of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, and because she sees it as a personal test. “At school, I didn’t think I’d ever be cast in a period drama; I couldn’t really see my face in one,” she says, adding wholeheartedly, “– and I would just love to prove myself wrong.”

‘The Tourist’ is available now on BBC One and iPlayer.