Dark Heart
Tom Riley plays a bereaved cop in ITV’s harrowing crime drama…
Many TV detectives have personal troubles, but Dark Heart’s DI Will ‘Staffe’ Wagstaffe, played by Tom Riley, has more disturbing baggage than most.
A pilot episode of the drama aired on ITV Encore in 2016 and now it’s coming to ITV for a six-part series, which sees the talented but tortured cop deal with challenging cases, while living under the shadow of the unsolved murder of his parents when he was a teenager.
‘It’s as much about his personal journey as the cases. His parents’ murder is an ongoing mystery,’ says Tom. ‘They were killed in a way that implies it was part of something else, and everything he does is based around the idea that maybe something will make sense of it.’
Grisly discovery
The detective’s job also takes him to some dark places and the first two-part case explores the gruesome death of a man who was suspected of sexually assaulting his stepdaughters. But it’s not long before a QC with a similarly murky past is also attacked…
‘The cases he is assigned are unpleasant, he’s dealing with nasty, depraved things and there’s a real danger that manifests itself over time,’ says Tom. ‘These investigations are his speciality but the monsters he’s chasing begin to form him as a person, so his grip on morality is loose.’
At work, Staffe’s sidekick DC Josie Chancellor (Bodyguard’s Anjli Mohindra) provides solid support but his personal relationships with on-off girlfriend Sylvie (Miranda Raison) and his sister, Juliette (Press’s Charlotte Riley), are rather more fractured, particularly as he disapproves of Juliette’s new boyfriend.
‘Staffe finds interpersonal relationships annoying,’ smiles Tom. ‘He and Juliette are the only ones who understand what the other’s going through, although they rub each other up the wrong way. But he takes unasked-for steps to protect his family that may damage them irreparably…’