A VERY bad cop and a movie you have to see

WILL POULTER is on a day off from filming with Charlotte Rampling and Ruth Wilson, who play his mother and sister in The Little Stranger, a haunted house kind of thriller.

Poulter’s enjoying working with director Lenny Abrahamson and leading man Domhnall Gleeson on the picture, which is based on a novel by Sarah Waters, and is currently being filmed at various locations around the country.

And if the end result is as chilling as the book, then this time next year we’ll all be jumping out of our skin.

Next week, though, Poulter is heading over to Michigan for the world premiere of Kathryn Bigelow’s heartstopping film Detroit, that looks at the riots that engulfed that city almost 50 years ago to the day.

Detroit explores what is really a festering sore. During the civil unrest, police and the National Guard were called to the Algiers Motel, from where they believed a sniper was shooting at them.

By the time they left, several hours later, three black youths had been shot dead, and several other men — all black — and two white women had been badly beaten.

I’m not going to go into details of what was done to them because Detroit opens here quite soon — August 25, in fact.

( Coincidentally, it’s interesting that two of the year’s best films so far — I’m also thinking of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk — are opening in July and August — normally the preserve of summer blockbusters.)

Poulter, who grew up in Chiswick, West London, plays Philip Krauss, a composite of the various policemen present at the Algiers on July 25, 1967.

When we met at the union Club in Soho, I told Poulter that, after seeing the film, I hated his character (pictured above).

So why, I wondered, am I not interviewing John Boyega, who is good as a private security guard caught up in the incident?

‘There’s absolutely no one who will empathise with my character, and I understand that,’ Poulter agreed.

TO ANSWER my own question, I wanted to talk to Poulter because, as uncomfortable as it is to watch, his is one of the towering performances of the year .

There’s a moment when Krauss is back at the police station, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and the look of utter contempt on his face — for everyone — is terrifying.

Will told me he didn’t meet any of the men he was portraying . . . and he was grateful for that. The scenes in the picture were so brutal that he and his fellow cast members came to a collective resolve.

‘We made a decision, as a group, that in order to achieve the most difficult, emotionally trying things, we needed to base that on foundations of trust and genuine friendship.

‘ In some senses that makes it hard, because I was inflicting these things on people that I loved, and was socialising with off set. To do it in any other way, though, would have been kind of dangerous.

‘Because unless you can trust the person opposite you, then you can’t go to the extremes we went to.’

As difficult as he found the process, he said it was nothing compared with what his fellow actors endured . . . and in no way comparable to the horrors suffered by those in the line of police rage and fire in the Algiers Motel that fateful night.

The saddest thing in the world though, is that although great strides have been made in race relations, not a lot has really changed.