2026 is shaping up to be a big year for actress Sophie Rundle. The 37-year-old is back on television screens for the second season of the ITV series After the Flood, which she stars in alongside her real-life partner Matt Stokoe.
She's also returning for the highly-anticipated Peaky Blinders film where she will once again step into the heels of the headstrong Shelby sister Ada - a role she's played for more than a decade since the television series premiered in 2013. While she's become known on-screen for playing a role in the Shelby family, off-screen, Sophie is engaged to another actor, with whom she shares two children.
Read on for all you need to know about Sophie's relationship with Matt Stokoe, including how they met on a television set and how they're raising their two children together.
© Jo HaleShe's worked on-screen with her fiancé
Sophie is no stranger to working in the period drama genre. While still working on Peaky Blinders, Sophie starred in the Sky One period drama series Jamestown.
Sophie joined the show as Alice Kett in its first season in 2017. It was on the set that she met her future fiancé, Matt Stokoe, who plays the town blacksmith James Read, in 2016.
Sophie and Matt have since worked together on other projects, including the 2024 thriller series, After the Flood. “This is the fourth thing we've done together so we've definitely got a shorthand and we're not the kind of couple anyway that just goes around all over each other,” Matt exclusively told us about working with his partner on the first season.
© ITV“Since 2016, we've on and off worked together so we know each other as colleagues almost as well as we know each other as partners so we have a way of working.
He continued: "It’s not a case of being professional or being discreet or anything like that. It’s just I go to my trailer, you go to your trailer and then when we get home, we don't talk about lines because otherwise it just engulfs your life."
“We have our work heads and we have our home heads and never the two shall meet and that just seems to be the way that it works for us.” The couple have been engaged since at least 2019 and has not publicly confirmed if they have tied the knot or when they might do so.
Welcomed their first child in 2021
Sophie became a mum over the Easter weekend in 2021 when she and Matt welcomed their first child together, a son whose name they have kept private. The actress shared the news on Instagram, gushing that her son had "changed the game forever".
© InstagramThe actress later revealed in a candid Instagram post that she went back to work on the last season of Peaky Blinders just four weeks after giving birth. Sharing a photo of her in costume on set with her baby boy, Sophie wrote: "This is me - sleep deprived and slightly delirious changing a nappy in my trailer in between scenes."
She added it was the "most exhausting and challenging thing I’ve ever done, but worth it."
A second baby in 2024
Sophie and Matt welcomed their second child, another son whose name they have not disclosed, in June 2024. "I am fully ready and expecting to nosedive off the hormonal cliff edge at any moment but for now I am riding this heavenly wave of perfect love," Sophie shared the news on Instagram.
She's since shared photos of her private family life with her kids' to social media, intentionally keeping their privacy by covering her sons' faces. She's shared photos from their family adventures building a snowman, out on mother-son walks, and from trips to the beach and picking apples among other fun activities.
