GRIM & BEAR IT
TOM RILEY STARS AS A DETECTIVE GRAPPLING WITH THE CAPITAL’S DARK UNDERBELLY…
Back in 2016, Tom Riley starred as DI Will ‘Staffe’ Wagstaffe in Dark Heart, a one-off drama for ITV Encore. While that channel may no longer be with us, the show itself gets a new lease of life this week as it makes the jump over to ITV. And don’t worry if you didn’t get to see it first time around, as you won’t be left behind – that pilot has been re-edited alongside new material to form the first two episodes of this six-part drama. Inside TV joined
Tom on set in London’s
Soho to find out more about the return of Staffe…
How excited are you that Dark Heart is back on our screens as a full series?
It’s great! I don’t think we ever saw it particularly as a pilot for a longer-running show, we very much focused on it as an hour-and-a-half feature special, and it was very self-contained as a result. Now that we know we’ve got a series, we’re going back into that pilot, reshooting and reworking certain stuff. It’s given us a chance to change things around, and to make it into an even better show than it was originally.
Staffe is quite an angry character with a troubled past – will we be seeing more of that side of him?
There’s a [German philosopher] Nietzsche quote – if you want my pretentious nonsense in a TV magazine! – that if you fight monsters, you have to be careful not to become a monster, and there’s a lot of that for Staffe. He’s not just the detective who doesn’t play by the rules to get things done – sometimes he doesn’t play by the rules because he doesn’t fancy it. He’s got a low-level anger and impatience at the world, which manifests in ways that aren’t particularly good for him, or the people around him.
There are lots of detectives on TV – what made you want to play this one?
This might be my blessing and my curse as far as choices in work are concerned, but
I really like people who aren’t superficially likeable. I want to think, “How can we make someone whose choices you question a compelling lead?” Hopefully if we do it right, the fact that he is so flawed is something that will draw people to him. But he does some heinous stuff over the series – within the case and outside of it. He really steps over the line…