L.O.D. MARTIN
TENSE
HE MAY know his way round a set but Line of Duty actor Martin Compston leaves the DIY to his wife.
While it’s usually the man of the house who is left to tackle anything going wrong in the house or with the car or if a shelf needs put up, the Greenock star claims he’s useless with his hands.
And he leaves any DIY jobs around his Las Vegas home to wife Tianna Chanel Flynn.
So while he might look like he knows what he’s doing monitoring the sonar on a submarine in new BBC thriller Vigil, it’s all an act.
He said: “When it comes to the technical side of things it’s purely acting because I am absolutely useless at anything with my hands.
“Anything that requires it – house maintenance, car maintenance, DIY, I’m no use at all. I’m very lucky that my wife is brilliant at that stuff and can carry me through.
“I’m utterly useless, so that submarine would have no chance if I were working on it for real.”
It’s been nearly 20 years since Martin hit the spot in Sweet Sixteen.
And while he kept working in TV shows such as Monarch of the Glen and In Plain Sight, for the past couple of years he’s hit a purple patch – starring in a string of successes such as The Nest, Traces and of course as Steve Arnott in Line of Duty.
Rather than sit back and enjoy the Vegas sunshine Martin, 37, has been in Scotland making back-to-back projects – Vigil, which also stars Suranne Jones and starts on Sunday, a second series of Traces and supernatural thriller The Rig.
He is currently filming ITV drama Our House with Tuppence Middleton.
But deciding to do Vigil was a no-brainer for Martin. He said:
“Vigil is a Scottish story that was being filmed about 30 minutes away from where I grew up in Greenock. “I grew up on the mouth of the Clyde so submarines are a daily occurrence where I’m from. “You see them constantly. Faslane naval base is across the water from where I grew up so it was always normal to see a submarine.” From the producer of Line of Duty, the new series follows cop Detective Chief Inspector Amy Silva, played by Jones, who has to investigate the death of a crew member on the Trident nuclear submarine HMS Vigil while in Scottish waters. Because of its nuclear capabilities the sub continues to patrol and Silva has to stay on board.
The six hour-long episodes also star Gary Lewis, Shaun Evans, Anjli Mohindra and Game of Thrones actress Rose Leslie. Martin’s character Craig Burke’s job involves spending months away at sea.
After spending a lot of time in quarantine because of his various jobs, Martin doesn’t think he could cope working in a sub. He said: “It’s got to be such a claustrophobic job, and you’ve got to be a certain type of person, which I don’t think I am.
“The way the world is at the minute combined with the nature of my job and travel schedule means I’ve had to do quarantine a few times now, and after a week it drives me mental.
“I know this is a very different situation, because you’re around other people and you’ve got a job to do, but being stuck in that one environment for months on months is not for me.
“Humans are not designed for that.
I think it can be a very tense place too – if there was somebody you didn’t like on that boat then that tension would just ratchet up again and again.
“The Navy have got a very strict code of discipline to keep things in check, but the tension aboard a submarine must be unbearable at times. It certainly gets that way on Vigil.”
A replica of the submarine was created to film the six-part series. And for Martin it felt like he was on board the USS Enterprise.
Martin revealed: “On my first day on set in the control room I felt a bit like
I was on Star Trek. It was all going on. Orders being shouted, all of us at our stations being led by our captain, Paterson Joseph [who plays Newsome].
“There’s one scene early in the series where I get in trouble and am dismissed to my bunk, and that whole walk from the control room to the bed was one continuous walk for me, because they’d built so much of the submarine. It just kept going on and on!”
After the success of the sixth series of Line of Duty it looks like Martin, who is up against his colleagues Adrian Dunbar and Vicky McClure for best drama performance at the National Television Awards, has yet another prime time success on his hands.
He said: “With all the lockdowns taking their toll, new television on this scale has been a little less common so far this year. Everyone’s been desperate for new and original content, and they’re going to get that with Vigil.”
Vigil begins on Sunday at 9pm on BBC1.