THE MISSING IS BACK

With a fresh cast, a new case and a clever plot twist, the abduction thriller that wowed us in 2014 is back. Here Keeley Hawes and her co-stars reveal the emotional toll it’s taken on them

Keeley Hawes and her co-stars tell all about the return of the compelling abduction thriller – the hit drama of 2014

Keeley Hawes is talking about her role in the new series of acclaimed BBC1 thriller The Missing when she suddenly breaks down in tears. It’s quiet, selfcontained emotion rather than wails of misery, but it’s enough to make you realise how deeply her role as troubled mother Gemma Webster is affecting her.

‘I feel like I’ve been put through the wringer,’ says Keeley, one of TV’s hottest properties after her recent performances in Line Of Duty and The Durrells. ‘The subject matter – the loss of a child, the return of a child and lots more that I can’t reveal – is grim to film and very emotionally painful to talk about. As a mum it’s very close to home. Not that I regret taking on the role. It’s a brilliant story and it’s fulfilling to do intense, eight-minute scenes after The Durrells, which is all so jolly.’

We’re on the outskirts of Brussels where the eight-part drama, set on a fictional British Army base at Eckhausen in Germany, is being filmed. It’s the follow-up to the multi- award-winning first series about the disappearance of five-year-old Oliver Hughes while on holiday in France and the increasingly desperate attempts of his father Tony, played by Cold Feet’s James Nesbitt, to find him. Shown in 2014, it was a TV masterpiece, although the final episode in which a bearded, mad-eyed Tony hammered on the door of a flat in Russia to be confronted by a blond teenager who might, just might, bear a resemblance to Oliver, divided viewers.

Brothers Jack and Harry Williams, the writers of both shows, have since confirmed it wasn’t Oliver. For this sequel they’ve flipped things around. The starting point here is not the disappearance of a child but the return of one, Alice Webster (played by Abigail Hardingham), who vanished 11 years earlier at the age of 11 from the base where her soldier father Sam ( David Morrissey) was stationed. ‘The family – Sam, Gemma and their son Matthew, who’s now 21 – don’t know how to deal with her return,’ explains David. ‘They’ve dealt with the grief of her disappearance well, it’s been a unifying experience for them, and while they’re obviously carrying a lot of pain, they’re together. But they don’t know how to deal with her return. It splits the family.’

For mum Gemma there’s an additional problem. As much as she’s grieved for her missing daughter for 11 long years, she finds her herself feeling emotionally cold towards her when she returns. ‘She’s just not feeling it,’ says Keeley. ‘She wants to, she really wants to, but that maternal feeling just isn’t there any more. And that’s so hard to play for me. I’m a mother [she has three children – Myles, 16, Maggie, 11, and Ralph, ten – the youngest two with her husband Matthew Macfadyen] and I’m used to playing characters who have maternal instincts. On The Durrells I play the mum Louisa, and I can’t help but feel like a mother figure to the younger actors who play my children, so to suddenly be confronted with a character who has none of those feelings for her daughter goes completely against the grain.’

Keeley, a BAFTA nominee for her performance as DI Lindsay Denton in Line Of Duty, admits that her children are the reason she’s shied away from shows like The Missing in the past. ‘I don’t like being reminded of how dangerous the world they’re growing up in has become, so I’ve always said no to shows that would upset me. They make you think about your own children, make you wonder how you’d feel if something terrible happened to them.

‘My daughter was roughly the same age as Madeleine McCann when she went missing, so I was thinking about how I would feel if the same thing happened to her and it was painful. The problem is, there’s a kind of morbid fascination to stories like Madeleine’s disappearance. When I see stories about her I think, “Oh God, I don’t want to read this,” but I can’t help it. I’m hooked, I have to read it.

‘That was also what happened with the script for The Missing. It has a thriller element which kept me reading. It was like picking up a brilliant novel, it drew me in from page one even though it’s so grim, so torturous The Missing is the brainchild of Jack and Harry Williams (far right), the screenwriting brothers quickly proving themselves to be the masters of the taut, dark thriller that keeps us guessing until the end. Their most recent series One Of Us, a tale of adultery, murder and dark family secrets in the stormy Scottish Highlands, was one of the BBC’s late summer highlights, and now they’re back with a sequel to pretty much right from the off. There’s one scene where Sam and Gemma enjoy a very brief moment of happiness but that’s it!’

Viewers are bound to make a compar ison between the cases of Madeleine McCann and Alice Webster when they tune in to the show, even though Alice has returned while the McCanns can only hope that their daughter comes back to them. ‘When I was researching my role I read quite a lot about Kate McCann and her continuing belief that her daughter will be returned to her and her family,’ says Keeley. ‘She talked about opening her eyes every morning and thinking to herself, “Today’s the day it’s going to

‘I feel like I’ve been put through the wringer’ KEELEY HAWES

happen,” and I can’t imagine what that must be like.’ Dressed in a less than fetching green raincoat and with her face devoid of make- up, Keeley cuts a rather dowdy figure as she chats about the show. ‘ They’ve put me in some s** t clothes,’ she laughs, ‘ set me down next to a tractor factory in Belgium and let me get on with it!’ One wonders just how much more difficult the shoot would have been for her without David Morrissey as her costar. ‘ David is hilarious, and extremely helpful when it comes to filming,’ says Keeley. ‘ We’ve known each other for years, which always helps. We appeared Keeley Hawes, David Morrissey and Abigail Hardingham in the new show together in a BBC adaptation of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend 18 years ago when we were both very baby- faced. And Laura Fraser [ who plays Sergeant Eve Stone, the military policewoman assigned to the case] is a terrible giggler, which was a big surprise to me. We take our work very seriously but it’s nice to have a chance to let off steam.’ David, who lives in London with his novelist wife Esther Freud and their three children Albie, 21, Anna, 18, and Gene, 12, seems less emotionally affected by the subject matter. Does he bottle up his parental anxiety? ‘ I’m certainly a worrier when it comes to being a parent,’ says David, a smoothly spoken Liverpudlian who now enjoys global recognition thanks to his role as a despotic ruler in hit US zombie series The Walking Dead. ‘ If one of my kids is trying to grab a jar from the top shelf I’m full of dread. My wife’s much more trusting whereas I’m there saying, “Be careful!” My son Albie said he wouldn’t go on holiday with me again if I kept telling him to be careful, so I must say it a lot!’ Like the first series of The Missing, which was told partly in the present and partly in flashback , the new story timeshifts too. There’s a snippet from 2003, when Alice goes missing, the only clue to her disappearance being the sighting of a van close to where she was last seen. Most of the action takes place in 2014, when she appears again, and in the present day with David’s character having noticeably changed over the past two years. ‘ He’s suffered some kind of accident that’s left him with burn- like scars on his face and back,’ says David. ‘ Having the prosthetics put on has been quite a palaver. Lily, the make- up woman, does a fantastic job but it’s still taking nearly two hours to apply the scars.’ Although series two is about a new case involving a new family, there is one survivor from series one – dogged, retired French detective Julien Baptiste, played by Tcheky Karyo. ‘ Alice Webster talks about encountering Sophie, a girl whose disappearance Baptiste investigated 12 years ago, during the years she was missing, so suddenly he’s a detective again,’ says Turkish- born Tcheky. ‘ He thinks he’s on to something, he thinks he can finally solve the Sophie case. He springs back into work, even though his family want him to stay at home.’ There’s a certain irony to Baptiste’s family trying to prevent him from going back to work. Tcheky’s real- life wife didn’t want him to appear in series one of The Missing for pretty much the same reason. ‘ I had a very young child, Louise, and another on the way when they asked me to work for six months on the first series, with an option to hire me for three years after that,’ explains Tcheky, 62. ‘ So I said no initially. Then three months later I read the script again and realised I had to do it. Now I’d sign on for as long as I could.’ Tcheky is quietly spoken with a warm smile but he says he’s not afraid to speak his mind on set when the need arises. ‘ I love working with British people like Keeley and David because they’re reserved and I’m not so we complement each other perfectly. I’m not afraid to yell if I have to. I think we work wel l together. I bring the volcano, they bring the ice!’ So what of that ambiguous ending to series one that left some viewers confused? The sight of little Oliver’s trademark squiggly man drawn in the snow on a car windscreen in Moscow raised hopes that he was still alive and his father’s desperate searching wasn’t in vain. Even executive producer Charlie Pattinson admitted, ‘ We didn’t think there was any ambiguity about the ending but clearly in the minds of some viewers there was and we may have messed up.’ Which means there’s no ambiguity at all about the end of series two. ‘ The producers have gone to great pains to make sure there’s no uncertainty,’ says Keeley. ‘ I know there were still question marks in people’s minds at the end of series one and, for that matter, at the end of the two most recent series of Line Of Duty, with some people being confused about the endings. But with this? Not a chance. The final outcome will be crystal clear.’

‘ They don’t know how to deal with Alice’s return’ DAVID MORRISSEY

The Missing starts on Wednesday 12 October at 9pm on BBC1.