I feel like 007, says new Line of Duty star
Kelly Macdonald tells Fiona Sturges of her joy at being cast inthenewseries of the hit drama
ONE of the stars of the new series of Line of Duty has said landing the role is like being the new James Bond.
Kelly Macdonald plays DCI Joanne Davidson in the sixth instalment of the hit police anti-corruption drama, filmed in Belfast, which returns to BBC One this weekend.
She said it is “the dream job” — and is already fielding calls from friends about the plot.
Following in the footsteps of Stephen Graham, Lennie James and Thandie Newton, Macdonald is taking on the coveted “guest lead”.
But it hasn’t been plain sailing. She was three weeks into the shoot last year when the first lockdown was announced.
“Nobody had any idea of the magnitude of what was happening. We thought we were getting sent home for a few weeks, and even that seemed an epic amount of time,” she recalled.
When they went back on set in September, the schedule had been turned upside down to accommodate new Covid rules, which meant they were no longer filming chronologically but according to location. When the director Daniel Nettheim was unable to travel back from Australia, the series’ writer Jed Mercurio stepped in to take over what was left of his episodes.
Macdonald (45) is talking from her home in Glasgow, where she lives with her two children. She split from her husband, the Travis bassist Dougie Payne, in 2017. She is warm and full of smiles, despite having endured a packed morning of Zoom-based promotion.
It is with a hint of sheepishness that Macdonald reveals she hadn’t watched Line of Duty before getting the call about the part — “although I haven’t seen The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, or Ozark.
“That thing where people tell you that you should watch something, I get really stubborn about it. I’ll choose when I watch!”
In Line of Duty, she plays DCI Davidson, a detective whose conduct around the arrest of a murder suspect piques the interest of AC-12, the police anti-corruption unit led by Ted “mother of God” Hastings (Fermanagh actor Adrian Dunbar) — although discussing the part is not easy given the ferocious embargoes surrounding the plot.
Such is Line of Duty’s runaway success — the last series finale was the most-watched programme of 2019, with a consolidated viewing figure of 13.7m — that intense secrecy now accompanies each new series.
Commenting on the complexities of the script, at one point Mcdonald mentions a specific scene and then yelps, “SPOILER!” Sure enough, an email arrives later from the publicist politely asking me not to mention that bit. All of which underlines what a big deal Line of Duty has become since its launch in 2012.
“It’s the dream job,” Mcdonald says, of her role. “It feels a bit like being the new Bond or something. Or maybe Doctor Who is comparable.”
She loves the speculation and intrigue the series provokes offscreen, adding: “That’s the fun of it and it’s so glorious that it comes once a week and people have to wait and so they talk about it. I have close friends who have not been interested in my work before, and now they’re suddenly asking if I’m [the corrupt high-ranking officer] ‘H’.”
One of the sadder consequences of working under Covid rules, she notes, was not being able to socialise.
“Say if you’re doing a big interview scene, the guys would say, ‘This is the night that we would all go out and have a curry and have a few drinks and decompress.’ I’ve definitely had a different experience.”
Nonetheless, she found everyone welcoming and observed a closeness on set that she has rarely seen before.
“They all get on like a house on fire and everybody keeps in touch [between series]. I was on Boardwalk Empire for a number of years and we all got on well. But we didn’t hang out a lot in between seasons.
“We would have occasional dinners but these guys are completely different. I think Vicky [Mcclure, who plays DI Kate Fleming] has a lot to do with that. She’s like the head girl.”
The film and TV landscape was different for young women when Macdonald started out, and only in recent years have we heard them talking about their experiences of exploitation on and off set.
Macdonald says that Trainspotting, in which she had an explicit sex scene with her co-star Ewan Mcgregor, was a baptism of fire, but that she was fortunate since she was well looked-after.
“It was spoken about from the first audition – ‘There’s this [sex] scene and how do you feel about that?’ I just went along with it and almost thought, ‘Well, we’ll never get there anyway.’ I kind of felt that way right up until shooting the scene, but we did rehearse for it and allocated a lot of time to it. And I was okay with it.”
On meeting Mcgregor for the first time, she hid behind her script “because I couldn’t look at him because he’d done this show on TV called Scarlet and Black”. She lets out a big gurgling laugh.
“And he was quite, um, naked in that. Let’s just say there’s a scene of him jumping out of the window that I had watched a lot of times.”
Macdonald feels the lot of women actors has improved nowadays, not least in the number of roles available to them. Right now, she is delighted to be playing TV coppers — Line of Duty is the second police drama she has done recently, after the cult hit Giri/haji.
She adds: “People love detective shows, don’t they? They just do. I grew up watching Taggart — I may well be the only Scottish actor that wasn’t in Taggart.
“In the case of Line of Duty, I think it does what people want it to do and there’s nothing extra. It’s got the drama and it feels genuine. It really walks the walk. Now I get what all the fuss is about.”
‘It’s so glorious that it comes once a week and people have to wait and so they talk about it. Friends now ask if I’m the corrupt officer’