At the end ofa day’s work, I take off Grace’s suit and tie, hang them up, and put on my own clothes and I go home. I don’t dwell on things after a show, or a day’s shooting. That’s been work. It stays as work.
Leeds actor John Simm is returning to our screens as DS Roy Grace. Phil Penfold met him to find out what we have in store.
John Simm is one of those actors who defies being pigeonholed. Musical theatre (albeit early in his career)? Tick. The classics? Tick. Mainstream drama? Another tick. Doctor Who? Which fan of the series could ever forget Simm as The Master? Add in The Lakes, State of Play, Twenty-four Hour Party People, playing the artist Vincent Van Gogh in The Yellow House, and Life on Mars, and you get the picture. Leeds-born Simm has a huge range, a lot of fans and a way of picking a winner when it comes to a performance on stage, TV or the bigger screen.
He’s now 51 (and still has a fresh face and a genuinely cheery, and rather self-effacing nature), he’s married to Kate McGowan (herself an actor and producer) and the couple have two children. He first came to notice in the long-running crime drama Cracker almost 30 years ago – and Simm hasn’t stopped working since.
Now he’s back as DS Roy Grace, the series based on the novels by Peter James. When the first strand was shown on ITV last year, audiences loved it all, and the ratings told of around eight million viewers. Sensing a winner, the canny folk at ITV swiftly commissioned more, and Simm and his colleagues will be back later in the month.
Simm has gone on record as saying that he will continue to play Roy Grace “for as long as they keep on asking me to return. I was thrilled by the initial reception.
“I was deeply flattered to learn, not so long ago, that when Peter James wrote the first of his novels, he had a picture of me in his mind. He’s told people that if the books were ever dramatised, I was his first choice to play his rather extraordinary man. How gratifying is that?”
All the action of Grace takes place in and around the south-east coast, and the focus is on Brighton – where James lives, and where he has a remarkably close relationship with the Sussex police. “It’s that inside knowledge that brings such honesty to his writing,” says Simm.
The first of four full-length films is Looking
Good Dead, and if that title sounds familiar, then the reason is that it was the same James novel, initially adapted into a stage play, and which is currently on tour in the UK. On screen however, and with Simm, it is far more explicit, gritty and yes, at times, horrifyingly gruesome, since – at its core – the story deals with extreme and graphically violent movies. Do they actually exist in real life?
“Yes, indeed they do,” says Simm, “but don’t go thinking that I did any research in that direction. No way. The writing is all there on the page, in the scripts. That’s how we get our information. By the same token, another in the series is all about the trafficking of human organs. Unbelievable, but true, and there is a ghastly trade in them. Peter told me that there were even brokers out there, one of whom lives in Berlin, so we do indeed live in a very bleak world where anything has its price.”
He adds: “In my own case, it doesn’t help that I am terribly squeamish – I don’t like blood and gore. Some of my colleagues in the cast have been invited to go and witness a real-life autopsy at some point soon. I will definitely not be going to anything like that! And, at the end of a day’s work, I take off Grace’s suit and tie, hang them up, and put on my own clothes and I go home. I don’t dwell on things after a show, or a day’s shooting. That’s been work. It stays as work. Home is downtime with my wife and our children.”
What appealed to viewers, he thinks is that Grace isn’t
yet another lonely cop, with relationship hang-ups and a problem with drink. Peter James assured him that, were the latter the case, these days Grace “would not survive a fortnight with the force”. Instead, and intriguingly, Grace was married, but his wife Sandy mysteriously disappeared some years before, and he doesn’t know if she is alive – or dead.
“So, he is searching to find proof, or information, either way. There are so many histories like his. When you have seen the proof that your loved one is there, in a hospital bed or in whatever circumstances, and they have died, that’s it. It’s tragic, it’s over, and you have that closure that everyone needs. But if they are lost, vanished, disappeared, that is an appalling limbo, and an interesting dynamic. And that’s where Roy finds himself.
“In one episode of the new series, he believes that a victim of a case that they investigate could indeed be his wife – and that comes at a very sensitive point because he is tentatively starting to
explore dating someone he has met through work. And when he meets this new lady he is, for once, lost for words.
“It has been wonderful to have Peter James on hand, because, as the creator of the characters, he knows how we eat, sleep and live. The most minute of details. And what he doesn’t know about police procedure could be written on the back of a postage stamp.”
Simm’s fascination with performance, he thinks, has its roots with his father Ronald being a hardworking musician on the working men’s clubs circuit of Yorkshire and around Manchester. But Simm opted for acting rather than song and dance. However, he was a once a much-respected singer and songwriter with the band Magic Alex (who toured with Echo and the Bunnymen).
He admits that he would love to get back on the stage again. “I’ve been getting an itch for live performance”, he says – he was an acclaimed Hamlet at the Sheffield Crucible a few years back, and returned to that venue to play Jerry in one of Harold Pinter’s most provoking plays, Betrayal. How about something at the Leeds Playhouse? “Ah now, that would indeed be interesting”, he muses. “Honestly, I don’t have any set agenda, or any ‘wish list’, I just want to do work that interests me, and which audiences will respond to...
“I’m getting to a fair old age, cracking on a bit”, he laughs, “and the knees are starting to creak a little, so I leave the super-dodgy stuff to our admirable stuntmen. I think that I learned that lesson fairly early on, when I had my leg shattered doing a stunt when I was only 24 years old. From that moment, it was ‘let the experts do it’. Mind you, there is a sequence in one of the up-coming dramas when you’ll see Grace chasing a villain over the glass roof of Brighton station. Is it me? Or the expert? That’s for you to try and see the join!”
There’s a lot of state-of-the-art technology in Grace. Is Simm au fait with the latest developments?
“Let’s put it this way, my youngsters are better by far than their old dad. They are miles ahead!” And he also confesses that he often wonders, when the Grace team are on location and in a real-life home rented out to the film-makers “Why on earth would anyone let a total band of strangers into their very personal environment? And then you turn, and you see that their bookshelves are full of Peter James’ novels. So, I’m hoping that our viewers are going to be just as loyal as his readers…”
■ The new series of Grace returns toITV on Sunday at 8pm