Ridley series 2 episode 3 cast guest stars from Virdee and Poldark

Ridley series 2 episode 3 cast: Guest stars from Poldark, Virdee and Hollyoaks are all linked to a murder at a rave

Dave Golder | 10:00am Sun 24 Aug | Updated 5:01pm Fri 22 Aug

Ridley series 2, episode 3, and the main cast is joined by guest stars who you’ll no doubt recognise from Poldark, Hollyoaks and 2025 BBC crime drama Virdee.

Family feuds, secret affairs, underground raves and county lines merge into an investigation with a very personal connection for DI Farman in the episode titled Fool For Love.

The victim in the opening scenes is a wealthy young man just about to get married and on the verge of taking over the family business. So why does he leave his engagement party to go to a rave?

Meanwhile, DI Farman and wife Geri are becoming more and more concerned by the new friends their son Jack is hanging around with, not to mention his new lippy attitude.

There seems to be more than just teenage hormones at work – is he still feeling the fallout of being held hostage at gunpoint in the Ridley series 1 finale?

The case in episode 3 is one of Ridley’s most tense and twist-filled cases yet. Read on for those guest stars and how their characters fit into the plot…

Sarita Grant (Sudha Bhuchar) is the matriarch of the Grant family and CEO of the family business [Credit: ITV]

Sudha Bhuchar guest stars as Sarita Grant

Sarita Grant is the matriarch of the Grant family and CEO of Grant Construction and Development, having parted ways with her “philandering” husband. There is no love lost between them.

But she’s about to pass the company over to her son, the current CFO, Oliver Grant. And her other son, Lewis, is not happy with this situation.

Not long before this role, Sudha Bhuchar appeared in the BBC’s gritty crime drama Virdee, playing title character Harry Virdee’s conflicted mother, Jyoti, who had to live with her husband’s decision to disown their son.

She also’s managed a Coronation Streets and EastEnders double whammy, appearing respectively as Sonia Rahman, who had an affair with Sharif Nazir on the Street in 2016, and as Meena McKenzie, sister to long-suffering market trader Gita Kapoor, in the Square (1993-1996). You may also have seen her in Mary Poppins Returns as Miss Lark.

Lewis Grant (Danyal Ismail) is the brother of the murder victim, but he still won’t be getting a promotion [Credit: ITV]

Danyal Ismail plays Lewis Grant

Lewis Grant is one of Sarita Grant’s two sons, and not her favourite one. She resents the fact that he’s remained in contact with – and loyal to – her ex-husband, and so he’s never in the running for a juicy position within Grant Construction and Development.

Despite this, Lewis still looks out for brother Oliver.

Danyal Ismail, who plays Lewis Grant, was also in Virdee (2025), though in that series he was one of the cops. He played Harry Virdee’s by-the-book partner, DS Khalil Amin, in all six episodes (interestingly, the actor who played his boss in that series, Elizabeth Berrington, guest starred in the previous episode of Ridley as Jean Dixon – is this show working its way though the Virdee cast?).

Ismail has also made guest appearances in McDonald & Dodds (thee episodes as DC Martin Malik in series 3) and Vera (2022).

Ava Tunstall (Lauren McQueen) is an influencer and rave organiser [Credit: ITV]

Lauren McQueen appears as Ava Tunstall

Ava Tunstall is an online influencer who organises underground raves, including the one in Allerton, where Oliver Grant is found dead. The rave actually takes place in a property that is under development by Grant Construction and Development, but does Ava know that?

Lauren McQueen, who playsAva Tunstall, was previously best known as Hollyoaks’ Lily Drinkwell (2017-2019), who married Prince McQueen, had a fling with Romeo Nightingale, was scarred in a car crash, went into a self-harming downward spiral and died in the train station toilets.

Since then, she has appeared in ITVX’s Belgravia: The Next Chapter (2024) as the recurring character Nell (one of the Trenchards’ servants) and Apple+’s Masters of the Air (2024) as a US Red Cross volunteer Rose.

Does Amelia Mellor (Ellise Chappell) know what kind of a man her fiancé really was? [Credit: ITV]

Ellise Chappell is Amelia Mellor

Amelia Mellor is Oliver Grant’s fiancé, and while she does love him, she’s not unaware of his less respectable side, and realises the upcoming marriage is as much a business opportunity as it is a romantic attachment.

Ellise Chappell plays Amelia Mellor – the actress was Morwenna Carne/Whitworth/Chynoweth (delete according to marital status) in series three to five of the BBC’s Poldark (2017-2019).

She also plays Lucy, one of Jack’s friends, in the where-have-the-Beatles-gone? movie Yesterday (2019) – she’s the one who ends up with Jack’s UK record producer, Gavin. And in on the first series of the Netflix series Young Wallander (2020) she played pro-immigration protestor and Wallander ally, Mona.

Go-karting magnate Matt Brandon (Alexander Cobb) [Credit: ITV]

Alexander Cobb plays Matt Brandon

Matt Brandon is the manager of a local indoors go-karting track, and he’s very proud of his community-minded outlook for the place.

“I bet you I’ve got the best outreach program in the area,” he tells Ridley. “Free go-karting for kids to give them somewhere positive to hang out.”

But Ridley suspects there may be another reason he’s enticing youngsters into his shady orbit.

You may recognise Alexander Cobb from early series of Grace (2021-2023) where he played the dodgy journalist, Kevin Spinella, who always seems to know slightly too much about the cases Roy Grace was working on.

He’s also appeared on Disney+’s Moon Knight (2022), as museum security guard JB; Acorn’s Whitstable Pearl (2022); the BBC’s Boiling Point (2023); Father Brown (2024) and ITV1’s Van der Valk (2024).

Charlie (Oliver Wellington) wakes up with a blinder of a hangover to make a horrific discovery [Credit: ITV]

Oliver Wellington appears as Charlie

Charlie is a rave-goer who over-indulges on certain substances and wakes up the next day in the now-abandoned site
to make a horrifying discovery.

Oliver Wellington has previously worked on three episodes of Brassic (2020) as Jake’s brother Aaron, and on all six episodes of the Sheridan Smith / Ardal O’Hanlon-starring Sky comedy Rosie Molloy Gives Up Everything (2022), where he played Nico.

Debbie Kurup is the actress and singer player the unnamed guest performer at Marling’s jazz club [Credit: ITV]

What are the songs at Marling’s jazz club in Ridley series 2 episode 3, Fool For Love?

It’s not just Ridley singing at Marling’s in this episode. The first performance actually comes from an unnamed guest singer who joins the regular house band.

She sings a fairly well-known standard, You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It), written in 1913. Judy Garland sang a version with amended lyrics (and performed it for Clarke Gable at his birthday party in 1937). It became the B-side of Somewhere Over The Rainbow in 1938.

The actress playing the guest singer is Debbie Kurup, who’s not well-known for her screen appearances (apart from Wicked movie). But she has appeared in a long, long list of musical theatre productions. This includes The Bodyguard musical in London’s West End, which earned her an Olivier nomination.

Later in the episode, Ridley sings Try to Remember from the musical comedy play The Fantasticks (1960). Its most famous version was by Gladys Knight & the Pips, who combined it with a cover version of Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were, for a single that reached number four in the UK charts in 1975.