Until Hannah Khalique-Brown landed the lead role in The Undeclared War, Channel 4’s gripping new political thriller, she had always assumed she’d be hopeless at coding.

“I didn’t consider myself a logical person at school, or someone who was good at maths,” she tells me over tea in a King’s Cross hotel. “But to play this part I realised I needed to understand it.” So she decided to mug up on programming languages, starting with C++ and JavaScript, “and I picked it up really quickly”.

Just as well: in her first major screen role, Khalique-Brown, 23, stars as Saara, a young coding prodigy who takes up a work experience placement at GCHQ – and finds herself thrown into an international cyber war.

Peter Kosminsky – the writer/director who brought Wolf Hall and The Government Inspector to the screen – began work on the series five years ago, but the plot feels bang up to date: a cost of living crisis has led to protests on the streets, and Britain’s hawkish, Eton-­educated prime minister (played by Adrian Lester) is looking increasingly out of his depth. Simon Pegg plays GCHQ’s beleaguered head of operations, in a rare straight role, while Kosminsky regular Mark Rylance appears as John Yeabsley, a Cold War era intelligence operative hauled out of retirement as tensions with Russia ratchet up.

Yet, as GCHQ’s “pale, male, stale” hordes battle to bring under control a cyber attack designed to cause major disruption to national infrastructure, it’s Saara, on her first day in the building, who discovers in the malware a concealed virus timed to bring down the entire internet three days later – and in so doing exposes the potentially catastrophic scale of the threat.

Saara is a refreshingly unstereotypical character: a non-hijab-wearing Muslim, who lives with her boyfriend and places work above family, even as her father lies dying in a hospital bed. “Saara is very flawed,” Khalique-Brown tells me. “She has a very complicated interior. I’ve mainly only seen this depth of characterisation in male characters, usually white ones.”

She adds: “I never expected to be the lead at this point in my career. As an Asian girl, I’m more easily seen as a supporting character. It’s quite frustrating, knowing what I expect of myself while being aware that others might not expect the same because of how they view me.”

From a young age Khalique-Brown, whose previous screen experience extends to a couple of short films, has been determined to exceed those expectations. “I get that from my mum, who’s a barrister,” she says. “She was born here but her family is from Pakistan, and she’s from a generation where it was really hard for an Asian woman to make a life for herself. She works her socks off.”

Khalique-Brown grew up in Birmingham, attended a local grammar school, and always knew she wanted to be an actor. Throughout her childhood, she would devour films with her father, a retired NHS surgeon (among her favourites were the Monty Python movies and the 1971 adaptation of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between with Julie Christie). Yet at 18, she chose not to go to drama school – “I knew I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t grown up much. I didn’t know anything about technique and I’d never been taught how to act” – and instead read English at King’s College London.

It wasn’t what she had expected. “Everyone was only there to have a good time. Nobody paid attention,” she says. “I would be in lectures and everyone else there would be doing online shopping. I thought about the people who would have killed for a place who either couldn’t afford to go or hadn’t had the opportunity – and it made me really angry.”

While completing her thesis on Hartley, she redoubled her efforts to break into acting. At that point, as a mixed-race woman, she says: “I realised that certain doors to becoming an actor weren’t open to me. I knew no one in the business and I hadn’t been to drama school. I had to rely on other Asians to lift me over the wall.” She took to ­bombarding agents and directors with invitations to see her in student productions, but none replied.

Eventually, she secured a spot on a showcase for black and Asian talent organised by actor Suraj Shah and immediately got three offers from agents keen to represent her. “I saw a lot of the agents there who I’d been emailing for the last two years,” she says. “They all said, we don’t have any Asian actors on our books!” She signed with one in 2019 and by the end of her third year at university was auditioning for Saara – a process that took almost a year.

For someone so new to the industry, Khalique-Brown radiates an appealing poise and confidence “although I flip-flop between that and terrible imposter syndrome, too,” she admits. As a child it never bothered her that she rarely saw people on screen who looked like her. “Instead, I would watch Amélie and think: ‘I want to do that.’ I view myself as a spectrum of different things. Wanting to act has always been a bigger part of my life than my race.”

All the same, The Undeclared War wears an awareness of race and ­representation on its sleeve: in one early scene Saara angrily asks a colleague at GCHQ if she only got the place there because of her “brown face”. What’s more, at the start of the first episode, her father encourages her to go for the placement with the words, “Do it for your country”, which challenges viewers who might assume he means anywhere other than Britain.

“Saara feels British Asian, and I feel that way too,” says Khalique-Brown. “I feel very resonant with British culture, at least the nice parts, but I think that’s partly because I grew up in Birmingham: at school about 50 per cent of the people in my class had an ethnic background so I never really thought about race. But I do sometimes wonder if other people see me as British. I really like the way you have this Muslim man in the script deliver such a direct, unapologetic line about wanting his daughter to defend Britain.”

She agrees that, when it comes to representation on screen, there is some way to go for Asian actors. “There’s been huge progress made for black actors, but for Asians there is still work to do. It’s all about casting. My agent doesn’t see me as someone who can only play Asian roles. She puts me up for a Lucy or a Georgia – roles that a casting director might not otherwise think ‘Hannah the British Asian’ could play.”

The approach is paying off: ­Khalique-Brown already has two significant new film roles in the pipeline – one in a highly anticipated release – about which she is sworn to secrecy. “I’m lucky. I have Asian actor friends whose agent only puts them up to play ­refugees or terrorists,” she says. “That would really piss me off.”

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‘The Undeclared War’ begins on Channel 4 at 9pm on Thursday June 30