Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
BETRAYAL IN BAGHDAD
A former policeman s on the trail of his missing daughter after the fall of Saddam in a gripping new thriller starring Doctor Foster’s Bertie Carvel – but the hero of this tale is an Iraqi...
He’s bestknown for playing one of the most loathsome TV characters in recent history – cheating husband Simon in Doctor Foster, opposite Suranne Jones. Now Bertie Carvel is back at his duplicitous best in a gripping new six-part Channel 4 thriller set against the politically charged backdrop of Iraq during the US occupation after Saddam’s defeat in 2003.
Baghdad Central follows Iraqi ex-policeman Muhsin al-khafaji, who’s at rock bottom after his wife has died and his son has been executed. He then decides to risk his own life to track down his estranged elder daughter, Sawsan, who’s gone missing, but soon discovers she’s been leading a double life that puts her and others in grave danger.
So he reluctantly teams up with the Iraqi Police Force – led by Bertie’s ruthless former British police officer Frank Temple – in the hope that it will not only help him find her, but also enable him to get the treatment he needs for his sick younger daughter, Mrouj. What begins as a desperate man’s hunt for one child – and his determination to protect the other – soon escalates into a captivating game of cat and mouse.
There have been countless protagonists in TV thrillers who are motivated by loss and find themselves caught up in a mystery that goes deeper than they could ever have anticipated, but Baghdad Centerrorists? tral flips the narrative completely. The hero of this story Muhsin, played by Waleed Zuaiter, is an Iraqi, while the Brits and Americans play supporting roles. And for both Bertie and Waleed, having an Arab Muslim as the lead character is nothing less than historic.
‘Why shouldn’t the roles be occupied by characters we’re used to seeing as It’s a story that travels like a bullet and it’s about this cast of characters that we feel we haven’t seen before. I think that’s brilliant,’ says Bertie, 42. ‘It feels like quite a familiar story from a very unfamiliar angle. It’s long overdue. I was excited to read something and think, “Why haven’t I seen this before?”’
The two actors first met at a readthrough of the script and describe their chemistry as instantaneous and effortless. Yet things could have turned out very differently, as Waleed, 49, was initially unsure about taking on the role because his father had just died. It was only when he read the script that he realised how much he could relate the character of Muhsin to the loss that he too was going through.
‘I felt like I was born to play this role, and everything about it resonated with me,’ he says. ‘Sometimes the most perfect thing for you is the thing that you fight the most, and this was one of them. It’s so refreshing not to fall into stereotype, to play a heroic character who could be from anywhere but just happens to be from Iraq. I love that. It was such an honour to walk in this man’s shoes.’
Bertie likens Baghdad Central – based on Elliott Colla’s 2014 novel of the same name and adapted for the screen by Stephen Butchard
(who also adapted The Last Kingdom) – to a modern-day Poirot, but says he was interested in playing Frank Temple because, like many of the characters he’s played, he’s not someone you can take at face value. ‘People are fascinating, even the most apparently ordinary people,’ he explains. ‘In fact, especially the most apparently ordinary people.
‘Growing up, it struck me that people would often pre-judge me and others, and it’s so obvious to me that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Having had that experience all my life, I’m preoccupied with trying to find characters with enough depth that people realise there’s more to everyone than meets the eye. I definitely look for opportunities to prove that rule.’
Portraying Temple’s sworn enemy in the Us-led coalition, American Military Police Captain John Parodi, is Corey Stoll, who played Buzz Aldrin in 2018 film First Man. Parodi is cocky and unlikeable at first, but Corey also promises there’s more to his character than that initial impression suggests. ‘If anything typified the invasion and occupation of Iraq, it was unearned self-assurance. I wouldn’t go so far
n cro m, ut self-assu et t survive the events of the y,’ say orey, 43. ‘I ’s a given that the world of aghdad and Iraq has bee turned upside down, rules have been thrown out and authority is ambiguous to say the least. But this is a story about a man and his family, and for Parodi and Temple it’s about finding your moral compass within this upside-down world.’
The cast and crew couldn’t have predicted when they started making the drama that the situation in Iraq at the time of its release would make it especially pertinent, yet Bertie for one cannot ignore the wider political messages behind Baghdad Central. ‘I’m keen to say how gripping it is, it’s a brilliant thriller, but if I’m really honest what fascinates me about this is absolutely its politics,’ he says. ‘You can’t tell a story about that part of the world without it being political. And for my money, its politics are in the right place.’
It’s a topic that’s close to the twotime Olivier Award-winner’s heart. His father, grandfather and greatgrandfather were all political journalists, so is that what piqued his interest in the show in the first place? ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ he says. ‘I’m the one that got away, so I’m making up for some of it...’
While Baghdad Central takes place across six episodes, Channel 4 is leaving the door open to continue the story. Which is good news for Bertie fans, as Suranne Jones and Doctor Foster creator Mike Bartlett have cast doubt on the show returning any time soon. Bertie doesn’t rule it out, though. ‘The fact they got our band back together and we made a second series was not a fait accompli, because nobody was under option to do it,’ he says. ‘So to do it a third time would be even more complicated. But I’d love to do more. Maybe there could be a crossover, maybe Doctor Foster could go to Iraq.’
The success of his co-stars since the second series makes things trickier. ‘Suranne certainly hasn’t been putting her feet up. Tom Taylor, who played our son, is a bigger movie star than any of us [he appeared in 2017’s The Dark Tower and last year’s The Kid Who Would Be King] and deservedly so. He’s got an enormous career now. Jodie Comer’s not exactly lazy either, so there we are. We’ll see, though, we’d love to do more.’
In the meantime, viewers hungry for a similarly addictive drama starring Bertie need look no further than Baghdad Central. Let’s just hope his admirers recognise him under the facial hair he claims to have fought tooth and nail for. ‘I lost the fight about being from Stockport,’ he says, ‘but I insisted, “I’m not doing it unless I have a moustache!”’
‘It’s a familiar story from an unfamiliar angle’
Slim and dashingly handsome, he wears sunglasses and a smart suit and drives a flashy British sports car with an attractive female companion in the passenger seat. Yet danger lurks at every corner and death pursues him.
James Bond, perhaps? No, it’s Mark Easterbrook, the lead character played by a debonair Rufus Sewell in the BBC’S new Agatha Christie whodunnit The Pale Horse. We meet on the day Daniel Craig officially announces his departure from the 007 franchise, and this role looks like it could be Rufus’s calling card. ‘Except I’m too old to start playing Bond now,’ says the youthful-looking 52-year-old father of two, who’s best known for his eye-catching performance as Lord Melbourne, the PM who captured the heart of a young queen in ITV’S Victoria.
‘Bond a couple of Bonds ago, maybe, but not now. I’m the right age to appear as Bond for a last time but definitely not for the first – I’m a little too long in the tooth. But a Bond baddie or some other character, say 008, would be interesting to play and I’m not too late for that...’
For the moment, though, Rufus takes top billing in the two-part Christie story that also stars Sean Pertwee, Doctor Foster’s Bertie Carvel and 60s acting legend Rita Tushingham. The Pale Horse has been adapted by writer Sarah Phelps, and it is the fifth Christie she has adapted for the BBC after Ordeal By Innocence with Bill Nighy, And Then There Were None with Aidan Turner, The Witness For The Prosecution with Toby Jones and The ABC Murders with John Malkovich. All four have undergone significant changes to Christie’s original.
So how true to the original is Sarah’s version of The Pale Horse, one of Christie’s later works, first published in November 1961? ‘I have been incredibly faithful to the original story in many ways, and I have been incredibly unfaithful to it in many other ways,’ she says cryptically.
With Ordeal By Innocence she even went as far as to change the identity of the killer, so it will be interesting to see what she does
with the huge twist at the end of The Pale Horse – one of the most shocking in the entire canon of Christie novels. She’s not letting on, though. ‘Why wouldn’t I honour that twist, what reason would I have for not doing so?’ she says, even more cryptically.
There’s a real darkness to The Pale Horse, with dead bodies littering the opening scenes. We first see Mark Easterbrook cradling the body of his first wife, Delphine. Has she been the victim of a terrible accident, or has she taken her own life? This disturbing scenario takes place in 1960, before the action shifts forward a year when
we find Mark unhappily married to a new wife, the effortlessly glamorous Hermia (Kaya Scodelario). We know that he is unhappy because he’s already cheating on her with a Soho dancer called Thomasina Tuckerton (Poppy Gilbert).
He rolls up outside her place of work in his gorgeous convertible car, before whisking her away for a night of passion. Viewers will then see a semi-naked Mark the morning after, finding a dead rat in the sink in Thomasina’s run-down London bedsit before discovering something far more sinister... Thomasina is dead in her bed.
Mark then tries to cover his tracks for fear of being accused of murdering her, but when he tries to get rid of his clothes by throwing them down the waste disposal chute in the fashionable apartment block where he lives with Hermia, his young wife smells a rat (and it’s not the one in Thomasina’s sink). Slowly, and in typical Agatha Christie fashion, the pieces of the story all start to fall into place.
Soon, Mark is contacted by Detective Inspector Stanley Lejeune (Sean Pertwee) and told that his name has appeared on a list discovered in the shoe of a dead woman called Jessie Davis. Many others on the list, including Thomasina Tuckerton, have now died. In fact, it isn’t too long into the story before only two people whose names were hastily scrawled
‘I’m too long in the tooth nowtoplay James Bond’ RUFUS SEWELL
on the scrap of paper by Jessie remain alive – Mark and a strange gentleman called Zachariah Osbourne (Bertie Carvel). The pair of them, it appears, may actually be in mortal danger.
There’s no Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot to sort out this baffling mystery and even Ariadne Oliver, a writer of detective fiction who appeared in Christie’s original Pale Horse novel, is nowhere to be seen. It’s up to Mark – possibly with a little help from Zachariah – to find out what’s going on before it’s too late.
‘His investigations take him to the Surrey village of Much Deeping, where things appear to take a rather supernatural twist,’ explains Rufus. It’s there that Mark encounters the residents of The Pale Horse, a former pub that is now a house occupied by three self-styled witches, Bella (Rita Tushingham), Thyrza (Sheila Atim) and Sybil (Kathy Kiera Clarke). Could they hold the key to Jessie Davis’s terrible roll-call of death?
Rita Tushingham – who is still bright-eyed and beautiful at the age of 77 – needed a rather unflattering grey wig to transform herself into old hag Bella, but the really shocking transformation of
Bella, Sybil and Thyrza. Below: Sean Pertwee as DI Stanley Lejeune the show is undergone by Bertie of getting a handle on the character,’ Carvel, who appears as the nerdy explains Bertie, who in reality 60-year-old Zachariah Osbourne, is 42 and has a voice as complete with a set of crooked smooth as fine wine. teeth, a drab overcoat and an irritating ‘In my mind I had an owl – nasal voice. Sarah Phelps describes Osbourne
‘I love doing homework for a as owlish with hornrimmed role, so ahead of talking to the spectacles in her director, the costume designers script – but also a particular and make-up artists I imagined type of rat, a which kind of animal Osbourne naked mole rat. So he’s might be. I then suggested different possibly not the most species to them all as a means attractive of men, although I wasn’t insulted that I’d been asked to play the role. I seem to remember thinking, “Well, they’ve come to the right shop” when I was first asked to play a balding 60-year-old with dandruff and bad breath.’
The Pale Horse is the latest attempt by Sarah Phelps to reinvent the Agatha Christie whodunnit. ‘It was when I was adapting And Then There Were None that I realised I could tell the story of 50 blood-soaked years in the 20th century, from the 20s to the 60s, through Agatha Christie murdermystery stories. And, actually, they’re not even that – they’re not so much about murder, mystery and bloodshed as people might think. ‘I reckon what really fascinated Agatha Christie was how people lie, and the different ways they lie in order to keep themselves safe. There is quite a lot of that going on in
The Pale Horse, and it’s never been more relevant than in the world we are living in today.’
Sarah did say she would only adapt five Christie stories and, with this show, that quintet is now complete. ‘Although never say never,’ she says. ‘There’s an even later Christie story than The Pale Horse called Endless Night which interests me.’
She says she certainly won’t be put off adapting more stories by the reaction of some of the Agatha Christie purists, with fans of the novelist very clearly furious at the spin she’s put on their heroine’s stories. Inventing a back story for Hercule Poirot in The ABC Murders, in which he was seen as a priest resisting the advancing German army in war-torn Belgium, was clearly the final straw for some serious fans.
‘They took to social media and said, “Why are the BBC letting that pervert Sarah Phelps do this?”’ she recalls. ‘But it’s water off a duck’s back as far as I’m concerned. In fact, the best thing that’s ever happened to me was being called a pervert!’
‘What fascinated Christie was the way people lie’ SARAH PHELPS