My story is huge… but it’s not sad,” says Talisa Garcia, the Chilean-born English actress who plays Kim Vogel in Baptiste, the BBC’s new six-part crime drama spin-off of The Missing. Following a twist at the end of tonight’s episode in which French detective Julien Baptiste, played by Tcheky Karyo, discovers that Vogel was born male, Garcia has chosen to reveal for the first time that she, too, has had gender reassignment surgery, when she was 18.

“For me, it has always been a secret. I was a bit embarrassed, I suppose, of not being a ‘normal’ woman,” she admits, making air quotes with her hands.

Garcia is slender in a black and white jumpsuit, with pointed stiletto boots and freshly blow-dried, long, brown hair. As she flicks her wrist, a silver Pandora charm bracelet jangles.

“I look different to a lot of transgender people and have been extremely lucky,” she says. “I was just a woman and no one ever questioned it. So I kept it hidden.”

Until now. Speaking openly about her transition, the 45-year-old knows the news will come as a shock to some who know her, not least the former boyfriends, colleagues with whom she worked on serial dramas such as Silent Witness and Doctors, and friends to whom she never confided her full story. But, hot on the heels of her first major television role, she is excited to no longer have “a little secret that’s always there in the back of my mind”.