It’s spot the location time as TV’S Marcella takes on a familiar look
FOR fans of ITV’S Marcella — the Nordic Noir-inspired drama series starring Anna Friel — the opening titles may sound familiar with their gritty, heavy buzzing bassline. But as the eagerly-awaited first episode of the new series aired last night, things soon looked very different — and a lot closer to home.
The dark foreboding shots of London nightlife have been intercut with images from Belfast.
If viewers were in any doubt, an image of Titanic Belfast, gloriously lit up, confirmed that the third series of the show — made by the same minds behind crime thriller The Bridge — is in new territory.
Friel, whose father was born in Belfast and grew up in Donegal, relocated to the city during production with her daughter, Gracie, who attended Strathearn Grammar School as filming took place in 2019.
The first episode, shown last night, opens with the iconic image of the Harland & Wolff cranes, followed by a shot of Cave Hill. Later on, the action switches to the city’s docklands where the bodies of 10 people — immigrants — are discovered dead in the back of an abandoned haulage lorry.
A drug deal then unfolds on a Belfast street before Friel’s complicated and haunted detective is shown to be living a comfortable new life, one complete with a new blonde hairstyle, new partner, an accountant, and a new (very posh) home.
All it not what it seems, however, as DS Marcella Backland, the police detective who suffers violent blackouts because of her dissociative identity disorder, is working undercover as Keira Devlin, whose cover story is that she grew up in Manchester but her parents are from Belfast.
When viewers last saw Marcella she had lost all that she loved — her kids, her job, boyfriend and her own identity. Cutting ties to her previous life, she faked her own death. At rock bottom, she was living under a bridge, her face scarred from a self-inflicted wound when she was thrown a lifeline as an undercover cop.
Now Keira is trying to find the secrets of crime family, the Maguires, who live the high life under a veneer of respectability via her unassuming boyfriend, Lawrence, who is the family’s accountant and reporting back to her handler, Frank.
Keen viewers will be quick to recognise the Maguire homestead, headed by steely matriarch, Katherine (played by Amanda Burton) is Larchfield Estate, near Lisburn. The estate, 600 acres of beautiful countryside, is the setting for one of the opening episode’s most shocking moments.
With Lawrence out of the picture — let’s just say embezzling a criminal family out of their dirty cash is more than a CV faux pas for an accountant — the consequences see Keira pulled in even deeper into the lives of Maguires.
They are Katherine’s sons — Rory, who has OCD, and the hot-tempered Finn (Aaron McCusker) — and her pregnant daughter, Stacey (Kelly Gough), married to reckless Bobby (Martin Mccann), who operates a secret drug business. Keira moves into their residence and ignites a dangerous liaison with Finn.
The action later switches between Northern Ireland and London, where Marcella’s ex-police partner, DI Rav Sangha, played by Ray Panthaki has just been assigned a murder case of a man in London who’s killed by Bobby. The Met officer’s now fated to cross paths with his former (dead) colleague... stay tuned.
Marcella is available to stream via ITV Hub and is broadcast on ITV1 on Tuesdays at 9pm.