Q&A Hollywood
Q:Who played John Knox, the anti-Catholic clergyman who wanted Mary to resign in “Mary Queen of Scots”?
A: I’m guessing you’re not a “Doctor Who” fan. If you were, you’d have immediately recognized David Tennant, who played the Doctor from 2006 to 2008.
I hate to sell him short, as he’s an incredibly accomplished actor in his native Britain, but most North American viewers know him as the 10th Doctor.There are other possibilities, however.
For example, you might know him as the demon Crowley in the ongoing Amazon series “Good Omens,” or as the villain in the first season of the Netflix Marvel comics series “Jessica Jones” in 2015.
Or maybe you were able to spot him amid the cavalcade of British stars in 2005’s “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” playing the villainous Barty Crouch Jr.This was a relatively small role in an enormous movie — very much akin to his “Mary Queen of Scots” turn in 2018. But again, his biggest work was made specifically with British audiences in mind.
He starred in the critically acclaimed detective series “Broadchurch” from 2013 to 2017 and in the lavish BBC historical miniseries “Spies of Warsaw.” He’s also spent a lot of time doing “Doctor Who”adjacent work, showing up on spinoffs of the show, documentaries about it and comedy spoofs of it.
I don’t mean to keep returning to “Doctor Who,” but Tennant does it, too. It was recently confirmed that he’ll reprise his role as the Doctor in the show’s 60th-anniversary special next year.
Q: I swear I saw a TV movie of a Sue Grafton book.The actress playing Kinsey Millhone was terrible. Am I wrong? If not,
what was the title of the movie?
A: I hate to be blunt, but you’re wrong.
That said, detective novel legend Sue Grafton herself was incredibly blunt about it.
“I will never sell [Kinsey Millhone] to Hollywood,” she said in a 1997 interview with January magazine.“And I have made my children promise not to sell her.We’ve taken a blood oath, and if they do so, I will come back from the grave: which they know I can do.”
Kinsey Millhone is the protagonist of Grafton’s wildly popular and long-running series known as the alphabet books, which started with
“A is for Alibi” in 1982. (They ended, sadly, with “Y is for Yesterday,” the final novel Grafton finished before her death in 2017.)
It’s possible that you’re thinking of one of the numerous TV movies Grafton wrote with other characters — often adaptations of other people’s novels. For example, she penned the scripts for “A Caribbean Mystery” and “Sparkling Cyanide,” both released in 1983 and based on the works of fellow mystery giant Agatha Christie.
This would track with you saying that they weren’t very good — Grafton said so herself and, furthermore, said that’s the reason she made her children promise not to sell the rights to her own books.
“I’ve trashed other writers,” she said in the same January magazine interview. “I’m not gonna let them have a crack at me.”
It seems, though, that she either changed her mind in recent years or else didn’t ask her husband, Steve Humphrey, for the same deal. It was announced a year ago that he would serve as an executive producer on a TV series based on the alphabet books.
A+E Studios won a bidding war for the rights, which means the show, when it happens, will likely air on one of the A+E Networks channels — most likely Lifetime or the flagship channel, A&E.
Q: Is Michael Vartan still acting? I’ve kind of lost track of him since “Alias.”
A: His central role as Michael Vaughn on “Alias” certainly led us to believe that Michael Vartan would continue to be a fixture on our TV screens after the ABC spy smash ended in 2006, and he was — just not on shows that were watched.
Actually, that’s slightly unfair. Few of his more recent shows were true flops, they just suffered from being compared to “Alias,” the sort of landmark show people talked about around the mythical water cooler.
His biggest post-“Alias” role was as part of the ensemble in the TNT medical drama “Hawthorne” alongside Jada Pinkett Smith (“Collateral,” 2004).That show ran for three seasons (2009 to 2011), but never really attained hit status.A few years later, he was a main support in the E! drama “The Arrangement” (2017 to 2018).
His biggest role, however, was probably as a guest — he did a six-episode arc on the second season of the A&E hit “Bates Motel” in 2014.
Between these endeavors, he also dabbled with film, most notably as the love interest in the 2011 action flick “Colombiana.”