How the ‘Line of Duty’ star handles female admirers
‘Line of Duty’ star Martin Compston on his working-class roots – and dealing with ‘saucy’ fans
As DS Steve Arnott, scourge of every bent copper in the BBC’s hit police corruption series Line of Duty, Martin Compston has become something of a sex symbol. “When people have a few drinks in them,” he confesses with a modest blush, “they tend to get a bit handsy. Women in particular.”
My first thought is that something must be getting lost in translation. Unlike his best-known character, whose accent is Estuary English (based, the actor says, on Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who broke Barings Bank), in the flesh 32-yearold Compston has what he calls a “fairly strong” Scottish accent.
But he runs his hands up and down his legs and torso to demonstrate the groping. “After the last series it definitely went up a notch.” Compston shakes his head in disbelief. “The short sex symbol in a waistcoat.”
The diminutive DS Arnott’s garb in Line of Duty is a three-piece suit. “He is the hero because he has strong morals,” Compston says, “but he can also be an arrogant little bastard. That is why I was determined to put him in waistcoats. He is that overdressed w----- at work.”
His clothes might make him an unlikely Lothario, but Arnott has had a busy time in the bedroom in Line of Duty’s previous three series, during which it became BBC Two’s highestrating crime drama in 15 years. Perhaps that is why those handsy members of the public are so willing to confuse Compston with his character? He laughs nervously, “Luckily, when it happens, the wife’s usually not that far away.”
For the fourth series, which starts on Sunday, Line of Duty is getting an upgrade. So far, each new season has featured a big-name female protagonist – Gina McKee, Keeley Hawes and Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine. This time around it has landed a Hollywood A-lister in the form of Thandie Newton. What’s more, it is moving to BBC One.
“I was more than happy for it to stay on BBC Two,” says Compston, “because I feel that was our home. My fear if it gets bigger and bigger is for the quality – that it would have to change to appeal to a wider audience.”
Compston takes a sip of peppermint tea and perches on the edge of his chair in the central London hotel lounge where we have met. No waistcoats today. He is dressed in a simple black T-shirt and jeans.
Home is now Los Angeles, but not because he is following the trade route in British actors across the Atlantic. His reasons are more personal. Last summer he married Tianna Chanel Flynn, a Las Vegas-born nightclub manager, who used to be a competitive cheerleader – “the ones who do the flips and the backflips and all that sort of thing”.
They met in a bar. “She had a claddagh ring on [a traditional Irish symbol of love and loyalty], and I always wear one,” he recalls. “I started singing her some songs from the old country and that was that.”
One day, he says, they plan to return to his native Greenock, a former shipbuilding town on the River Clyde, to put down permanent roots – but not just yet. His new wife has been “very patient”, he says, because they still haven’t got around to a honeymoon. “It’s not been the ideal start to married life.”
First he was shooting In Plain Sight, a three-part ITV drama in which he starred as Fifties Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel. “He was so dark, you couldn’t have gone Method to play him or you’d end up killing yourself, or somebody else.”
Straight afterwards he was on to filming the new series of Line of Duty in Belfast, and today he has arrived back in London from a stint in Prague on The Aftermath, a Second World War drama, with Keira Knightley.
Compston is at one of those moments in an actor’s career where the offers are coming in thick and fast. He is caught up in a whirlwind, but he isn’t letting it give him delusions of grandeur. En route from Prague to London, he stopped off in Glasgow to meet up with his three best friends from school and visit Parkhead to cheer on his beloved Celtic.
Only there, he confesses, did he have a “celebrity moment”. “I met Billy Connolly at the game. As we were talking, it was whirring through my mind that here I was, deep in conversation with Billy Connolly. There are legends, and then there are icons. Along with Sean Connery, Billy is probably the most famous Scot of all time. That was mind-blowing.”
Had the cards fallen another way, Compston might have ended up not in the stands but on the pitch as a professional footballer. “Or an accountant,” he adds for good measure. “Weirdly, I really enjoyed that while I was at school.”
In 2002, just short of his 17th birthday, he had been offered a place at Manchester University to do a degree in accountancy, but he had also been picked up by Scottish Second Division side Morton and was training with them four nights a week. Then, out of the blue, one of his teachers at his Catholic secondary suggested he go along to an audition the director Ken Loach was holding nearby for his new film, Sweet Sixteen.
“I’d done more acting up than actual acting in school,” he recalls. “Where I come from acting is not what people would think of as a normal career.” Nevertheless, he landed the lead role of Liam in the film, about a young lad waiting for his mother to be released from prison.
“It was a mad time, but I didn’t feel it was life-changing. I did the film and then I went back to play professional football. I genuinely didn’t think much more about it. But when it did well at Cannes [winning Best Screenplay], I knew I had a decision to make, but you can make too much of that. It wasn’t like choosing between Man United and some Hollywood franchise. It was another year at Morton in the Scottish Second Division or be an unemployed actor.”
He opted for the latter, headed to London to audition for ITV hospital drama The Royal, and again got the part. After that, he did two series as a gamekeeper in the BBC Sundayevening staple Monarch of the Glen. “I was with Richard Briers, Susan Hampshire and Julian Fellowes. For me, that was drama school.”
It was also his first experience of saucy fans. “There was one woman, in her nineties, who would send me cards that were always just a bit provocative. ‘If I was 30 years younger…’ they would begin. I was 21 at the time and all I could think was, that still makes you 40 years older than me.”
Like his Line of Duty co-star Vicky McClure, Compston is proud of his working-class roots in a profession noted today for its preponderance of privately educated stars. “I do feel that if people went to Eton, they tend to get a bit more recognition. Vicky is such a terrific actress that I’m sure she would be a dame now if she had gone to Rada. It’s to do with our background.” But he is keen not to sound as chippy as his incorruptible alter ego, DS Arnott.
There are compensations, Compston adds. “Young Scottish lads come up to me in the street and say that seeing me make it as an actor has made them believe that they can do it, too. I find that really heart-warming.”
‘Where I come from, acting is not what people would think of as a normal career’
‘There was one woman in her nineties who would send me saucy cards. I was 21’
Line of Duty starts on BBC One on Sunday, 9pm