Patience rewarded: Her big scenes are here

For years, Melissa Johns was in the “Grantchester” background, unnoticed and underused. We all know the feeling.
Still, she says, she felt OK. After all, she got the job during the pandemic.
“I actually assumed that it (show business) was over and most of us would never work again and there wouldn’t be an industry,” Johns said by Zoom.
Now her patience is rewarded. Over the next two Sundays (9 p.m. July 13 and 20, on PBS), there are great moments for Johns and for Brad Hall (both shown here).
He arrived in the fourth season as Larry Peters, a police sergeant who seemed sort of inept at work and (especially) socially. She came in the sixth as Jennifer Scott, the drolly efficient administrator.
“They said that Miss Scott might have a relationship with someone,” Johns recalled, but they didn’t say whom. “The minute they started writing that Larry was flirting with Miss Scott, I thought, ‘It must be him.'”
It’s an unusual romance: They’re opposites in many ways; also, their office has a rule against people marrying and continuing to work together.
Then again, Johns is used to being outside the norm. She was born without a right hand and forearm; also, her dad grew up as a Romany Gypsy.
“He was born in a caravan,” she said. “They traveled around the land, working.” Then “he married outside the Gypsy community” and settled down.
Well, sort of settled. “My mom is a homebody …. My dad and I get itchy feet all the time. We kept going on adventures; we can’t stay still for long.”
Maybe that spirit nudged her toward acting. Or maybe it was the relatives she came across. “Nobody tells a story like a community of Gypsies.”
For whatever reason, she boomed ahead. “I don’t know if I was just brave or a bit stupid, but it never dawned on me that you don’t see people who look like me” in movies or on TV.
Johns was one of the winners of the prestigious Laurence Olivier Bursary award, which helped finance her final year of drama school in Essex. Then came a cold stretch, followed by a role in “Coronation Street.”
That’s a perpetual British soap opera. “I had grown up watching it, my (mother) had grown up watching it, my grandparents watched it.”
As a kid, Johns used to sit in her room, imagining she was on the show. Now she was on it — only for a dozen episodes, but in a flashy role as a lead character’s troubled friend.
There were other scattered jobs and the “Life” mini-series — “my first lead role in a 9 o’clock drama.” She wrote and starred in a play; then came Covid.
“Theaters were closing just as I was touring my show,” she said. It closed, jobs vanished, prospects were bleak.
That’s when Johns was chosen as a contestant in the original (British) version of “Celebrity Master Chef” — and had a “Grantchester” audition.
“I really thought they were just seeing me as an equality tick-box,” she recalled. “Nobody could be more shocked than me when I actually got it.”
The show has Robson Green as a veteran cop, forever solving crimes with the help of a handsome vicar. Hall arrived when it was switching vicars, from James Norton to Tom Brittney. Johns came two years later; three years after that, in the ninth season, the show switched from Brittney to Rishi Nair.
Now it’s in the 10th season, with Johns’ life evolving. When the job started, she’d broken up with a boyfriend and was staying with a friend. “I bought a house in Season 8, got engaged in Season 9, got married in Season 10.”
That was with a little help from a new friend.
“I had grown up watching Robson Green.” Johns said. He’s been a star of intense series and mini-series, including “Reckless,” “Touching Evil” and “Wire in the Blood”; he was also, briefly, a pop-music star under Simon Cowell. Now, at 60, he’s sort of paternal — on the show and in life.
“When I was dating different people,” Johns said, “Robson would ask me the day afterward how the date had been.”
He was crucial as she neared a first date with Dan Hampton, who played professional, American-rules football in England. Green “absolutely loves American football,” Johns said. She still has a video of him using water bottles to explain the game to her, before the date.
It went well; so did subsequent dates. Johns and Hampton married during the filming of this 10th season, the year she’d waited for patiently.