Man about the house:
Stephen Moyer opens the door to Safe House.
An idyllic house overlooking the sea in the rugged but scenic coastline of Anglesey, North Wales, appears to be the stuff of dreams.
But ex-police officer Tom Brook, who runs a yachting school there with his loving wife Sam, is haunted by a nightmare from his past which becomes all-too-real once again.
This is the setting for the second series of Safe House, with an all-new cast, characters and story.
Stephen Moyer plays the lead role of former detective Tom Brook who has left behind his old life but mentally finds it hard to shake off.
“Tom is running his house as a little sailing school,” says Moyer. “He’s got this other life now that he’s completely invested in. He only uses the place as a safe house to generate a bit of income and doesn’t talk to his old colleagues.
“He walked away from the police during a specific case where he almost had a breakdown and that led to him starting this new life.”
Sam, played by Zoe Tapper who was Ellen Love in Mr Selfridge, is aware her husband had a troubled past but doesn’t know the details.
It was to do with an horrific case in which he investigated a series of abductions by an assailant known as The Crow, who kidnapped wives as their husbands watched helplessly, bound and gagged and held at gunpoint. He would later return to terrorise the widowers.
On hearing news of a similar crime, Tom re-visits his former life. He heads to the crime scene in Liverpool and tells the police he believes The Crow is still out there and that the man they had imprisoned was just one of his disciples.
Meanwhile, the distraught boyfriend of the woman forcibly taken from him, John Channing (Ashley Walters), and the woman’s teenager daughter, Dani (Sacha Parkinson), are taken to the safe house for their protection.
The cast also includes Dervla Kirwan as Tom’s old police boss, Elizabeth Ellroy, and Sunetra Sarker as DCI Jane Burr.
“Tom is almost like a sleeper agent, when he hears about this crime, which is very similar to the case that he was part of when he broke down,” says Moyer, 48.
“He’s activated again by it. He just can’t help himself. Yes, he’s super happy and content and in a relationship, but that’s put under pressure by his obsessive nature of needing to square the circle – to get closure on that case.”
In real-life, Moyer is married to Anna Paquin, 35, his co-star in the US series True Blood, in which he played vampire Bill Compton and she the telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse.
Moyer and Paquin married in 2010 and two years later Paquin, who was born in Canada but moved with her family to Wellington when she was four, gave birth to their twins, Charlie and Poppy. Moyer also has two older children, Billy and Lilac, from two earlier relationships. The family home is in Los Angeles but they also have a place in London.
“Anna and I have this knack of being totally at home wherever we are in the world,” he says. “Anna’s a Kiwi who then studied at Columbia University and is a New Yorker in her guts. I’m a total London boy.
“If it hadn’t been for meeting and falling in love with Anna I’d have filmed True Blood and then simply gone back home. We totally changed each other’s lives.”
Filming for Safe House was done in Trearddur Bay, a fishing village in Anglesey. The opening scene – of Tom and Sam in a sailing boat – is in stark contrast to the fear and menace that is to unfurl in the story.
“I had a couple of sailing lessons and then they filmed us by a drone camera as we sailed out to sea. It was a beautiful scene,” says Moyer. But he was nervous because a previous sailing venture nearly ended in him drowning. “My one bit of sailing experience prior to this was in Italy in 2008 where I went out to sea in a catamaran with my two older kids, got caught in a gale and had to be rescued,” he says. “The kids were smiling and laughing and thinking I was totally in control. But actually we were careering out to sea.”