Tough act

Derek Riddell talks to Janet Christie about his role in new BBC sci-fi cop drama Hard Sun

At last Derek Riddell has been in something he can watch with his children. We may know the Glaswegian actor best as the creepy army press officer turned driller killer in The Missing and James I in the torture-tastic Gunpowder , or even Rab, the bisexual footballer ned from The Book Group. Then there’s the corrupt cop in Undercover and Ashley Jensen’s ex-alcoholic husband in Ugly Betty, with medical traumas in Frankie and No Angels thrown in. But now, besides battling corruption and oh, the apocalypse, as a hard-bitten police chief in the BBC’S gritty new scifi crime series Hard Sun, he’s hitting the big screen as Torquil Travers in the kiddie-friendly Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, sequel to the Harry Potter spin-off.

“Yeah, they’re really excited about it, because it’s literally the first thing they can watch me in. It’s funny, I was at their school last week doing a Q&A about the life of an actor – there was a variety of questions from how much do you earn to do you like cats or dogs – and when they started to get restless, I talked about Fantastic Beasts. It gave me MUCH more cred. So yeah, my kids are very excited.”

Starring Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston and Johnny Depp as wizard Grindelwald, it sees Riddell playing Torquil Travers, a wizard linked to Scamander. Potter obsessives may recognise the name Travers, one of the 28 truly pureblood wizarding families, with Torquil possibly related to the Death Eater Travers. Much more than that, 50-year-old Riddell can’t say, being sworn to secrecy, so like us, his eightyear-old twins will have to wait till next year to find out.

“No, I can’t really talk about it much, unfortunately,” he says. “But I really loved the first Fantastic Beasts and the characters who return in this. It was my first experience of a really big film like that, with that amount of money on board. But David Yates the director is very calm and puts you at your ease, so it felt like you could be making some kind of low budget indie thing, it was very collaborative.”

Much as Riddell enjoyed making it, he’s not about to move back to LA, where he lived with his partner Frances Carrigan when he was filming Ugly Betty, before they returned to the UK when she was pregnant.

“I’m not under any illusions that this is going to give me a major movie career,” he says, matter-of-fact. “If it leads on to other films that would be great, but I’m at the point now... I think it’s age and experience... where my main thing is working with nice people on good material.”

Riddell is up to speed on witchcraft, having just played James I in Gunpowder, the BBC’S period drama starring Kit Harington up to his elbows in explosives. Apart from dodging assassination attempts as a result of religious schism, he also wrote a book on demonology and was obsessed about ridding the nation of ‘witches’, (usually women, with a working knowledge of herbal remedies, a bit of property their neighbours had designs on, and a cat).

“James was a complicated, intelligent character – a patron of the arts and really anti-smoking – there was so much going on with him, his whole obsession with demonology, witches, the Bible and being responsible for setting up the union of the crowns. But he was also a real pragmatist, and in Gunpowder we were dealing with Spain and religion. Some people thought it was too gory, but we had to explain why the plotters did what they did.

“With a period piece everyone has their take on it,” he says, and laughs at some of the attention his spell on the throne garnered for its warts and all treatment. “One of the things that was highlighted in the press was that I actually sat on the toilet. I read that and thought, ‘Oh God, I can’t believe that’s what they picked up on. That’s really newsworthy.’ What can you do?”

“But it’s nice when people also pick up on things you do, like the walk. He was quite a frail man and one of his legs was a bit funny, and also he had a tongue that was a bit too big for his mouth, so I tried to get those things in. And obviously they went big on that he liked boys, but he also did love his wife. Even with some of the boys he was very happy for them to get married and famously sat on the bed with one of them on their wedding night, chatting and giving advice.”

Having sat on the throne, what would Riddell do if he were to find himself in a position of power? He laughs at the idea of being in charge but warms to the theme.

“I think I’d jump in and try and stop a bit of the madness,” he says. “I’m