King rules over cases that are in crisis
Detective battles to balance job, personal life
“JessKing can go to hell.” The police-station corridor echoes with the venom in the veteran cop’s voice, and all Det. Sgt. Jessica King can do is grin and bear it, while a group of her fellow “boys in blue” watch the man stomp away.
For King, played by actor Amy Price-francis, the harsh words come with the territory. As head of Toronto’s Major Crimes Task Force, King’s squad is brought in to take over cases in crisis. She has just poached another police officer’s job.
While the Showcase original drama enters Season 2 Wednesday, King hasn’t exactly made a lot of friends on the force. No cop wants to be told they’re not good enough, and that someone else is going to clean up their mess — especially if that someone is a young, brash, petite and alluring redhead named King. Go to hell, indeed. “I think a lot of people might like to say that to her,” Price-francis said in an on-set interview.
However, in the scene they’ve just shot, King was taking over the case as a secret favour — and the senior detective’s wrath was only to save face in front of colleagues. But King is usually not so lucky, and will remain a lightning rod for resentment and contempt in the drama’s sophomore year.
“The whole force doesn’t like them,” the 36-year-old actor said of King and her task force. “They are all the outsiders. They’re the ones that take over. There is a lot of resistance to them and there is a lot of judgment (toward) them.”
The nature of the work handed to King’s squad only ramps up the pressure. “It ups the ante,” she said. “Because somebody else has already f---ed up, or they can’t break it. Or it may be a very political case” the chief needs to keep contained.
This season, King and Det. Sgt. Derek Spears (played by Calgary’s Allan Van Sprang) are joined by two new characters to the task force: a young, talented oddball named Pen Martin (Rossif Sutherland) and Ingrid Evans (Karen Robinson), a veteran from the organized crime unit.
But the heart of the show will remain King’s battle to balance the demands of her job and the demands of her personal life. She is far better at the former.
King “really can’t talk about the big stuff,” Price-francis said. “She is exceptional at work. . . . Her brain is lightning fast, she moves quickly. She thrives on it, it’s an adrenalin rush — it’s an amazing ride for her. But the personal stuff, she really doesn’t deal with well. And I think the work, as much as she lives it, is also a saving grace — because she doesn’t have time to look at her life.”
As the new season starts, the personal stakes are even greater. King is “extraordinarily happy” to be newly pregnant, and she is committed to working on her troubled, third marriage with fellow detective, Daniel Sless (Gabriel Hogan). But her extramarital fling with her co-worker, Spears, has left lingering doubts as to whose baby she is carrying.
“It’s a bit of a situation,” PriceFrancis acknowledged. “She did sleep with Spears on a night in which they just drank too much scotch, and Dany and her were having significant problems . . . but she is convinced it’s Dany’s child.”
Price-francis enjoys playing a complex heroine, one who doesn’t always do the right thing and isn’t always sympathetic.
“I like in the writing that she is flawed — she is more than flawed. She has got a lot of stuff to work out. . . . She wants it all, genuinely, but (her) work . . . she eats and breathes and sleeps and wakes it.”