Heart of darkness
After years of exploring evil minds, Colonel Marlon van Wyk is struggling to see the light.
The Docket Season 1 Wednesdays SABC3 (*193) 21:30
Investigative squad The Ravens might be answerable to the public and politicians in cop drama series The Docket’s (2018- current), but the team has only one real boss: lead investigator Colonel Marlon van Wyk (Duncan Johnson). Duncan opened the dossier on his character to give us an inside look into this man who explores South Africa’s most vile criminals in order to bring them to justice.
EVIL MINDS
To sum up Marlon, Duncan says calmly, “He is a loner overprotective single father who lives for his work. He’s a bit sick in the head because his work is constantly putting profiles together of sick people.” Marlon is far from being a regular beat cop who gained power. “He is a profiler and he is a very intelligent man. He is a very educated man; he’s very well read in philosophy, crime and existentialism. He is also a published writer, he writes non-fiction crime novels about actual cases that have happened. He only has time for subtleties when it comes to catching a killer. Then he can read the psychology and the make-up of people he has to,” says Duncan. While researching the role, the actor got some insight of how damaging that daily journey into darkness must be for Marlon. “As research, you read about serial killers in the US like Ted Bundy. I went on YouTube and watched videos until three in the morning and I could see what evil looks like. As an actor, you have to decide how deep you want to go and how you are going to protect your soul,” he admits.
A SHADOWED LIFE
Knowing what’s out there and walking the dark path with killers has given Marlon a twisted need for control. “He has to deal with this one killer who was encroaching on his personal space. He’s chasing this one killer throughout the series who he actually has a past with,” reveals Duncan. “He’s got this hatred and revenge in him because it stems from the whole environment and his struggle against the druglords. He has a warped view of society. All he sees is that it’s bad and there are evil people out there. Marlon deals with cannibals, with serial rapists, with murderers who literally behead their victims and stuff like that. That is his world. And he’s got to try put all these profiles together, which means he has to get into the minds of these criminals. And he’s been doing this for years and years. So he loves control. He has this daughter who he needs to protect against this evil society, he has all these locks on his doors inside his house. He’s overprotective but it’s because of the reality that he knows.”
NO TIME TO PROTECT
Surprisingly, it’s this overprotectiveness that lies at the heart of Marlon’s apparently misogynistic attitude to women in general. “He does not like to work with women and a lot of them see it as a male chauvinist thing. But that’s only the surface,” says Duncan. “He just focuses on the job and he sees women as the lesser sex only in terms of the fact that they need to be protected. And he doesn’t have time for that. They need extra protection and he can’t show that emotion and stuff; he doesn’t have time. And when the female officers come into the unit, they don’t last long because he wants to protect them and he is very hard on them.” But don’t ever ask Marlon to chill on the protective thing! “His past haunts him. When everyone tells him, ‘No, it’s not like that. You have to relax,’ when he sort of relaxes his guard, inevitably stuff happens that he foresaw. And then he goes back into his shell again,” says Duncan.