From Versailles to Downing Street
Star of crime drama on his last-minute cross-Channel comeback
It might have frustrated millions of Line of Duty fans to be told they would have to wait an extra year for the return of the gripping TV series. But Stuart Bowman says they will not be disappointed by writer Jed Mercurio’s new work. The actor stars in Bodyguard, starting on the BBC next Sunday, and said: “I think the similarities are that it’s great writing and there’s a tension built up with huge skill. “The storyline is utterly different but it has all the brilliant qualities of Line of Duty and is utterly compelling.” Stuart, 52, plays the head of MI5 in the drama, which also stars fellow Scot and Game of Thrones star Richard Madden as the bodyguard of the title and Keeley Hawes as the Home Secretary. Like Line of Duty, the plot is being kept tightly under wraps, with Stuart, who has starred in shows as diverse as Gary: Tank Commander and Versailles, very open about being a closed book. “Most of my scenes were with Keeley,” he says. “The Home Secretary and the head of MI5 are very much pushing for more security. It’s what’s described as a snooper’s charter, with more surveillance on the public to help counteract terrorism. But that’s not what the head of the police, Gina McKee, wants. That’s about all I can say.” Stuart, who is from Dundee, is just off our screens with Versailles, in which he played Louis XIV’s confidante, Alexandre Bontemps. The third series was the last, with the cast told halfway through filming that it was being axed. Stuart said he was sanguine about the cancellation, conscious of the potential difficulties of finding fresh storylines. But having had an initial three-year contract, he had moved to France with wife, Candida, and their two sons, Tavish, seven, and Sholto, four. There was some hard thinking to be done and although he was happy that his kids were bilingual, Stuart says concerns over French schooling helped with the decision to move back to the UK. “In the year Tavish was due to go into French schools start to get a bit stricter, a bit more disciplinarian, which I wasn’t particularly thrilled about,” said Stuart. “If we were to move back, we wanted to get him back into the London school where he’d had a term before we moved to France. It is just round the corner from our house, but we didn’t find out until very late that he had got in. “If he hadn’t, then we would have stayed in Paris.” It was all very last minute and within days of finishing Versailles, the family were back across the Channel and Stuart had started filming Bodyguard. Another factor for Stuart, who had moved abroad before the Brexit vote, was what kind of country he was coming back to. “It was certainly an issue,” he said. “Did we
want to go back to an England that was so confused? Westminster is a shambles at the moment and it’s very discombobulating. But we’re in a very liberal part of London, the east end, and that’s not a bad place to be.” Stuart has a new project north of the border on his radar and he says that moving back to Scotland is something that’s always at the back of his mind. “I miss lots of things but most of all it’s just hearing your own accent and not being aware of your voice being different,” said Stuart, who will also be seen shortly in the returning Jack Dee series, Bad Move. “When I come back I realise how comfy it feels. I remember, when I was 10, my mum took me to see Billy Connolly at the Caird Hall in Dundee and I was thinking recently about his Parkinson interviews. “That, I think, was when we were aware of being special and funny. It’s a lovely thing to be thought of like that as a nation. I miss experiencing the shared culture.” Bodyguard will air on BBC1 next Sunday at 9pm.