Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson pair up for a missing child investigation in Apple TV’s Down Cemetery Road
Mystery novelist Mick Herron has a knack for crafting stories that make for good TV. But before he became a household name thanks to the success of Apple’s adaptation of his Slow Horses series, Emma Thompson said she had long been a fan of the Gold Dagger winner’s books.
“I’ve been a Mick Herron fan before Slow Horses came out, and long before he was thought of for television. When I first read him, I thought he was extraordinary,” Thompson, 66, said.
With the Emmy-nominated Slow Horses, now in its fifth season, becoming one of Apple’s most popular original series, thanks to Gary Oldman’s leading role as the acerbic Jackson Lamb, it didn’t take long for TV execs to narrow in on another one of Herron’s works. Morwenna Banks, who adapted Slow Horses, set her sights on Herron’s Down Cemetery Road.
Released in 2003, Down Cemetery Road was Herron’s first published novel and centred on the exploits of private investigator Zoë Boehm. Herron penned four novels following Boehm, making the character an ideal one to adapt for a multi-season television series.
The new series follows a distraught art restorationist (Ruth Wilson) who hires Boehm (played by Thompson) to find a missing child following a house explosion in Oxford.
The police say the blast was because of a “gas leak,” and try to sweep the news of the injured child under the rug. But Wilson’s concerned character soon finds herself untangling a nefarious coverup.
Emma Thompson is a longtime Mick Herron fan.
It’s the kind of story most female actors don’t get to be a part of, two-time Oscar winner Thompson says.
“It’s very unusual to find characters that are this fully realized,” she says.
Wilson, herself a Golden Globe winner who is best-known to audiences for her roles on The Affair and Luther, says the end result is “really refreshing and fun to explore.”
During an early-morning conversation from London, Thompson and Wilson spoke more about Down Cemetery Road and their penchant for taking risks in front of the camera.
Q Down Cemetery Road combines a lot of the humour and mystery audiences have come to love about Slow Horses. What appealed to you both about doing the show?
Thompson: Mick’s a unique, original and funny writer. (His characters) seem full of cynicism, but of course, Mick isn’t cynical at all. He really believes in human decency. So, the characters he’s created present as chaotic and eccentric, and perhaps a bit reckless or out of control. But at the centre of them, there’s a real moral purpose … I think that’s why these two women work together. Even though on paper, you’d say, please don’t put these two women in a room together, ever. That’s what drew me. And knowing that Ruth was going to play opposite me. I just thought, I can’t wait to get the chance to act with her in this.
Wilson: This is a genre that we all know, but this is a subversion to the genre that Mick Herron does so well and Morwenna Banks adapts so well. My character feels like you or me when she finds herself in the middle of a crime thriller … I knew that she had a huge journey to go on and I knew working with Emma we would find a really fun dynamic in that. It’s got loads of juice, it’s funny, it’s propulsive, it’s got an emotional journey, it’s a road trip. There’s guns being shot at us. There’s lots of stuff in it.
Down Cemetery Road star Ruth Wilson enjoys a challenge.
Q In both your careers, you haven’t played it safe. How important has it been for you to take risks as an actor?
Thompson: I think we’re both people who don’t want to keep repeating ourselves. And also, we’re both looking for female roles that actually are complex, interesting, fully realized, instead of just a cipher. You could replace so many female roles in so many films and TV series with a sexy lamp … So, I was excited (to play Zoë). But it’s also different from making a movie. In a movie you only have two hours, maybe; unless you’re a man, then you get three hours. But most women, get between one-and-a-half and two hours. In this, we had eight hours to really be with these people. I think that’s the advantage of television. We had time to spend with the characters, and each other, and play with it. That’s a privilege.
Wilson: You’re looking for things that are different that challenge you. You don’t want to play the same thing twice. You want to keep moving. It’s keeping yourself interested as much as anything else, and existing in worlds you haven’t been in before. I think that’s why I dart around and do different things. It’s to keep myself interested. It would be boring otherwise.
mdaniell@postmedia.com
