‘Line of Duty is too much for lockdown’
Adrian Dunbar tells Julia Llewellyn Smith why the new series of ‘Blood’ should hit the spot
Adrian Dunbar, best known as Line of Duty’s Superintendent Ted “Mother of God!” Hastings, is spending lockdown at his home in Highgate, north London, gardening frantically – “Gardening’s taken the exercise edge off me – it’s been great.”
More seriously, he is concerned about his 86-year-old mother, who has Alzheimer’s and lives in a care home in his native Northern Ireland.
“I’m worried about her, I’m worried about those care workers, whether they’re getting the PPE [personal protective equipment] and when they’re going to get tested – they’re front-line workers. We can see my mum and talk to her on Whatsapp, so there are positives, but it’s a really vulnerable sector and the Government has to swing its focus on to it,” he says.
Dunbar, 61, a notedly more urbane character than Hastings, fond of thespy “darlings”, but with a guardedness at his core, returned to London from Belfast in mid-march. Filming was abruptly halted on Line
of Duty’s sixth season four weeks in, following news that crew members on Bloodlands, another series being filmed in Northern Ireland, had Covid-19 symptoms.
“That was enough to make people think, ‘This might be closer to us than we think’ so there was a collective decision to stop,” Dunbar says. “It was the right thing to do and we’re just hoping everything will pick up again.”
Fans feeling deprived of their Dunbar fix can watch him reading Seamus Heaney’s poem Storm on the
Island on the late poet’s Twitter account, at the request of Heaney’s daughter Catherine. “I love Seamus’s poetry and they asked me to record something for lockdown,” the actor reflects. “Everybody in the arts is trying to think of some kind of response.”
Then, from next Monday, we can watch Dunbar on Channel 5 in Blood, the second series of the twisty TV drama, in the Broadchurch vein, in which he plays the complex character of Jim Hogan, an Irish small-town doctor. “During lockdown people want something that’ll exercise them, a bit of fun is OK, but sometimes you want something that makes you go ‘OK! Right!’, that you can follow but for just six episodes.” He chuckles: “Not like
Line of Duty flogging you to death with all those series.”
Blood’s first series, in which Hogan was implicated in his wife’s death, aired two years ago and gained impressive viewing figure and strong reviews. Dunbar thinks Blood appeals to audiences partly because of its “spooky” rural Irish setting. “The environment gives places personality – that’s why we’re fascinated by all that Scandi noir. But it’s also a family drama, where – unlike police procedurals – we’re all experts. You show me a family, I’ll show you dysfunction.”
The oldest of seven children, Dunbar himself is close to his siblings, who all live in Ireland. He spends much of the year either filming in Belfast or in his house near Enniskillen. His teenage years in the heart of a Nationalist community coincided with the peak of the Troubles; previously he’s recalled being dragged from a sweet shop and beaten up by thugs who spotted his Catholic school blazer, and making petrol bombs to defend his estate (older boys threw them), saying: “We were fighting for our very existence.” Despite his patriotism, the decision to move to London in the late Seventies to study drama at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama came as a relief: “Northern Ireland was a difficult place to be then, very tense, people were living under huge pressure, so living in London was like being released from all that and you thought ‘I’d like to stay’.”
Dunbar’s earlier career included roles in films such as My Left Foot and
The Crying Game and TV series such as Inspector Morse and Cracker. He’s always been the master of conveying superficial rough-and-readiness underscored with touching vulnerability. But it was Line of
Duty that made him a household name. “It’s been a game-changer,” he says frankly.
Until coronavirus put all our lives on pause, he’d enjoyed the actors’ dream of dividing time between Blood and Line of
Duty, interspersed with theatre – he’d planned to appear this summer in
Uncle Vanya in Dublin’s
Gate Theatre. An accomplished musician, he dedicated any spare time to singing with his jazz-folk band. Is he fearful now for the future of performing arts?
“I’m optimistic. They’re pretty tough, resilient people within those industries and we’re hoping the collective buzz of being in an audience is something people will really value coming out of this. But for now, it’s all just collapsed, we’re dealing with jobs that have fallen apart. I’m just hoping when we get the green light the jobs will still be there.”
Many jobs won’t, but – as the BBC’S biggest ratings puller last year – Line of Duty seems certain to survive, although it will be discombobulating to pick it up again. “It’s a bit like putting on wet swimming trunks and getting back in the pool,” Dunbar laughs.
With a quarter of series six in the can, can he give us any hints as to possible plots? For example, could Hastings, who in the past series was suspected of being criminal mastermind H, still turn out to be the force’s ultimate bad apple? “No, I think that’s all been resolved,” he says. “But – as ever – you’ll have to have a word with Jed [Mercurio, the series’s creator] to know for sure.”
Yet it sounds as if this season Hastings may be less in the spotlight than previously. “He’s absolutely there, but I don’t think we’re going to be focusing on him and his personal life as much. But I haven’t read the final episodes, so who knows? Ted could meet some really interesting woman, though I don’t see him doing that online. It would have to be in the pub or at work, how people used to meet in the old days.”
His on-screen love life may be disastrous, but to large swathes of the female population Hastings has become a somewhat unlikely sex symbol. When last year I asked Anna Maxwell Martin, who played Hasting’s deadpan interrogator DCS Carmichael, if she fancied him, she replied, “Doesn’t everyone?”, relating how her fellow actresses tittered at his jokes “like Victorian ladies”.
“Anna’s a very funny girl,” Dunbar says drily. “I haven’t been aware of any tittering.” What does his Australian actress wife Anna Nygh, with whom he has a 33-year-old daughter and a 40-year-old stepson, make of his dreamboat status? “She thinks it’s a bit of laugh. We all do. It’s just part of the whole fun.”
Yet audiences don’t love Hastings so much for his looks as for his righteousness. Dunbar has previously revealed that Hasting’s trademark catchphrases (“Now we’re sucking diesel”) were inspired by his late carpenter father. But generally, he adds now, the character is based on “those great Scottish football managers like Jock Stein, Bill Shankly, Alex Ferguson, plus Fulton Mackay [the actor who played prison officer Mr Mackay in Porridge]. Workingclass men of moral fortitude.
“People feel a lot of warmth towards Ted because his decisions have been based on doing the right thing,” Dunbar says. “We like to think there are people running our institutions who have a genuine sense of civic duty, that’s the sort of thing that’s missing today, so he represents something from an older world. Ted has an old-school integrity.” Certainly, more than ever, audiences need the likes of Ted Hastings to reassure them all will come right in the world – eventually.
‘I’m just hoping when we get the green light the jobs will still be there’