APPOINTMENT VIEWING:
Marton Csokas plays detective. Plus today’s listings.
Falcon Thursday, 8.30pm, Sky Movies Extra
It’s a well-trodden TV cliche – the cop with the troubled personal life. Confident professionally, disastrous romantically. Haunted by hidden truths and a dark past. If that sounds like every other detective drama you’ve seen before, there’s at least one good reason to watch this new crime mini-series, and that’s the leading man.
New Zealand’s own Marton Csokas stars as Javier Falcon, a ‘‘troubled cop struggling with divorce and drug abuse’’. So far, so old-hat, but not only is there the Kiwi connection to draw you in, Falcon is also beautifully shot, right from its first few minutes featuring a sun-baked bullring and a handsome matador waving a cerise cloak.
‘‘Javier is the son of a very famous artist, who is a national icon, a hero of Spanish painting,’’ Csokas says. ‘‘He carries that family legacy with him but there is something amiss in his past that he can’t put his finger on. There are things that he doesn’t understand, that come into his mind, that are troubling him.
‘‘This internal journey collides with the external journey of the actual crimes that are taking place. Somehow the crimes connect with his interior world. So it is something of an existential quest set in the world of crime and art in Seville.’’
The mini-series was adapted from Robert Wilson’s novel The Blind Man of Seville. And as well as Csokas, the rest of the cast is also high calibre – Hayley Atwell ( Any Human Heart, Captain America: The First Avenger), Emilia Fox ( Silent Witness) and New Zealander Kerry Fox ( Shallow Grave, Mr Pip).
Csokas says he worked with Seville’s homicide department to research the role, which ended up being a gruesome experience.
‘‘We were shown a robbery case where someone had their head blown off,’’ he says. They were given an inside guide to the case and how it was solved which ‘‘brought a reality, a scientific control’’ to the role. But the emotional side of the job had a big effect too.
‘‘Detectives deal with death all the time and their response to it is that the body is definitely a piece of meat, it is no longer the spirit,’’ Csokas says. ‘‘It makes them feel very optimistic about being alive, because they know life can be taken away in an instant, so their response is to live. So as an actor, I suppose doing this makes me appreciate life too.’’
Concludes Thursday, February 27, 8.30pm.