Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
A COPPER IN CRISIS
Finding himself on a serial killer’s hitlist pushes a troubled detective to the brink in new thriller Ragdoll
Nathan Rose is a man with a tendency to violence who’s recently returned to his dingy flat in south London after a spell in a psychiatric unit. He’s also a detective and the case he’s about to investigate would push even the most mentally robust of detectives to the edge, never mind one with such a troubled past.
A serial killer has murdered six people and stitched parts of their bodies together to make a grotesque Frankenstein-like monster, which police nickname Ragdoll when it’s found inside a flat. But the killer isn’t done yet. After viewing the horror, Rose returns to his office to discover a letter from them with a list of six future victims – and the last name on there is Rose himself.
Henry Lloyd-hughes plays DS Rose in fast-paced six-part thriller Ragdoll (made by the team behind Killing Eve), with BritishBrazilian actress Thalissa Teixeira as his friend and colleague DI Emily Baxter. Henry readily accepts that his character is deeply flawed but says that, in the best traditions of dysfunctional TV detectives, he’s also a bit of a genius when it comes to cracking crimes. ‘He actually held a higher rank until an incident involving a suspect led to him being removed from the police force,’ explains Henry, 36. ‘It’s unfortunate that the first case he’s asked to investigate after his spell in a psychiatric unit involves the very person who caused him to be there in the first place.’
The drama begins with a flashback to a court case involving Mark Hooper, a man dubbed The Cremation Killer. Although he’s as guilty as sin, Hooper smirks at Rose when he escapes justice on the grounds that crucial evidence against him has been deemed inadmissible. It’s all too much for Rose, who’d been working on the case against
Hooper for months. He snaps, leaps across the courtroom and beats the defendant to a pulp.
Later, in the psychiatric unit, Rose befriends a psychopath named Joel, who tells him he can arrange to have Hooper killed. Back in the present day, Rose is stunned to discover that the head of Ragdoll belongs to Hooper.
Henry says his personal circumstances at the time he was filming Ragdoll lent themselves perfectly to the character. ‘I was in the right headspace for such a troubled role. Like the rest of the planet, I was discombobulated by the events of the last two years and my wife and I moved house in the first week of filming.
‘On top of that, we had two toddlers who were waking me up at all hours. I didn’t sleep much during the shoot and so I had just the right mentally frayed mindset, and the look to go with it, for someone coming apart at the seams.’
He says it was often a case of ‘no make-up required’ when he turned up for work in the morning. ‘It’s just as well I wasn’t playing somebody looking rested and refreshed – that would have required so much prep. As it was, I’d plonk myself in the make-up chair and they’d say, “Yep, you’re fine, nothing needed here.”
‘And I’d say, “But today’s the day when my character has a breakdown” and the make-up artists would still say, ‘No, you really do look perfect. Just a bit of powder and off you go.”’
Ragdoll is partly about the hunt for a killer but also about the relationship between the three detectives on the case. While Rose and Baxter are closer than close, the cuckoo in the nest is American DC Lake Edmunds (Lucy Hale from US teen drama Pretty Little Liars). Humourless and officious, only gradually does she start to bond with the others.
‘We got on a lot better than our characters do, although there was a disconnect between British crime dramas and the kind Lucy’s familiar with in America,’ says Thalissa. ‘She wanted to know when her gun training was going to start and we had to tell her it wasn’t that kind of police drama, it’s more about the psychology of the characters. The most lethal weapon Lake uses is a torch!’ ■
Tim Oglethorpe Ragdoll, Mon-tue, 9pm, Alibi.