A rooftop showdown for Kenzo
Giri/haji
BBC2, 9pm
CHARLIE Creed-miles is one of those actors you probably recognise but you’re not quite sure where from. He’s popped up in everything from Press Gang and The Upper Hand to Agatha Christie’s Marple and Endeavour. Other projects include Peaky Blinders and Ripper Street, which probably provided him with decent training for his role in Giri/haji, in which he plays Connor Abbott.
“In a nutshell, he’s a principled psychopath,” says Creed-miles of the character. “He’s a very powerful individual and he oversees quite a large criminal operation. He’s a self-educated man of the world.
“Even though he’s a proper villain, he’s not a numpty. He’s a well-read, rather sophisticated guy in many ways. He’s a London gangster who’s really quite worldly and into his culture. I’ve got a real fondness for him. It felt like I knew the guy, and I wanted to flesh him out and make him the real deal.”
It’s a role – and a production – he’s wholeheartedly embraced.
“This is no lie – I’ve never enjoyed a job quite as much as I have this one,” smiles the 47-year-old actor. “And that’s largely down to the way Julian [Farino, the lead director and executive producer] steers the ship. He’s just a lovely man, and his intuition seems so bang on.
“I don’t think we’ve ever butted heads – that sounds wrong, ‘cos I don’t butt heads with directors at all! But when you’re working a long time with someone, you’re bound to get the odd note where you think, ‘not sure about that’. It rarely happens with Jules because he trusts his actors and gives them room to express themselves, and breathe, and bring something to the part.”
Creed-miles also has huge admiration for Joe Barton, who came up with the premise and wrote the scripts: “As
I understand it, he hasn’t lived half his life in Japan or anything like that, but he decided, ‘I’m gonna do an international crime thriller-cum-love story that’s set half in Tokyo and half in London and involves Yakuza and English gangsters’ and what he’s written feels absolutely like something that he’s been researching for years.
“He’s just got this amazing knack, and he seems to have no barriers. Just the scope of it, I was like, my God, this feels big and cinematic. I wanted to be at my best, because I had a feeling from the start that I was in something that was going to be special, and I didn’t want to be rubbish in it.”
He certainly hasn’t been that, and in the last episode, Abbot has a very big part to play.
He’s out for vengeance, but Kenzo, played by Takehiro Hira, and Yuto make a deal that sees Abbott join them in a showdown with Jiri, who is threatening to throw Taki from a rooftop unless Yuto hands himself in.
But when Sarah spots Abbott pushing Kenzo into a car, she jumps to the wrong conclusion and decides to follow them – and becomes embroiled in a revealing moment.
Meanwhile, in Japan, Eiko, Natsuko and Rei are found by Fukuhara’s henchmen, and Fukuhara himself must atone for his sins at a yakuza peace meeting.