Doctor Who's Peter Capaldi reveals his "very different" role in new police thriller
When we first meet Peter Capaldi's Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty in the new thriller Criminal Record, he's flicking dirty looks in the rear-view mirror at the May-September couple sat in the back seat of his chauffeur service.
It's a side gig he's been doing for a couple of years now. "I've heard all the jokes," Hegarty tells them of his Met Police day job. Not that it stops the woman from taking a stab at a gag and asking if the couple are "under arrest".
Capaldi told Digital Spy he loved the introduction to his character, because he had met police officers moonlighting as drivers while in the backseat himself (albeit without the much younger woman). "If you go to an award ceremony, and it's a big award ceremony, they often employ police officers as drivers because they're both security and drivers," he explained.
"I was driven around by a detective on a number of occasions, because once I found out that they used them, I would always strike up conversation and find out what they were really up to."
From here, Hegarty's looks only become more menacing as he enters a war of policing wills with Detective Sergeant June Lenker, played by Cush Jumbo, when new information emerges about an old murder case Hegarty supposedly solved back in the day.
Capaldi and Jumbo were both involved as executive producers on the Apple TV+ show from its early stages, so that much of the gritty London drama was tailored specifically to them.
An immense amount of research went into that story crafting and it comes across in almost every scene – from the internal bureaucracy of who does what and who reports to who in the Met, to the ways in which parts of the force are broken. We see the agonising all-too-long response times, with coppers coming too many minutes late to avert calamity. Then there's the way officers like Hegarty and his ilk are constantly trying to protect their own hides.
Capaldi noted the production had a "responsibility" to capture the procedural elements accurately. Jumbo said some of that research into London-centric policing came from her own "born and bred" background in the capital.
"I grew up in a lot of the areas where we shot," she told us. "I went to school there. I played in the parks that have now become high rises. I snogged boys around the back of bins down some of the streets that we shot on," she smiled.
"I certainly think some of my own life went into some of the script and some of June's feelings of knowing every back street in London, but now working within an institution which she's grown up underneath."
In what seems to be Criminal Record's mission statement, the drama resists the cop-show boilerplate at every turn. The dynamic between Capaldi's Hegarty and Jumbo's June isn't the predictable disillusioned old guard schooling the ambitious but naïve whippersnapper.
Instead it is far more antagonistic, despite the underlying closeness in what they're both fighting for: a sense of justice by hook or by crook in what is a deeply flawed system.
"In some ways, I feel that their causes are not that different," said Jumbo. "What may have brought them to policing in the first place and what they think they're good at is not that different. But they are completely different generations. They have completely different cultures.
"How they expect to be held to account is different, both in terms of being a man and a woman, but also racially, also their levels within the force and of how the force has changed over time. What's expected then, what's expected now, it's different."
Capaldi agreed that Hegarty recognises a younger incarnation of himself in June. "But I think he also believes that she is not fully developed yet. That life will change the way she sees things."
"And she just thinks, he's going down," Jumbo joked in response.
For both Capaldi and Jumbo, Criminal Record is a chance to step out of their wheelhouses. The Whovians among us may be started to see Capaldi transform into the darkly diabolical detective, surveying seedy London with the same disgust as Morgan Freeman's detective in Se7en.
After being drawn to the role because of the opportunity it afforded him to do "something very different", it was that very darkness which Capaldi said he was "excited to make believable".
"Not just a fantastical strangeness," he said. "But this was someone who was scarred and haunted, and all of those great fun things to play."
On the other side of the policing generational divide, Jumbo said she was keen to play a fully realised woman who wasn't managing it all with impossible ease.
"I wanted to see a real person, who works within a public institution, who really dedicates herself to a job physically, mentally, emotionally. She's not happy at home, struggles to balance everything and feels that she's failing at everything."
As the story unfolds over eight gruelling and whip-tight episodes, it is the "pursuit of truth" which comes to the fore in June's hectic life. As she tosses the rulebook out the police car and tries to stay one step ahead of Hegarty throughout, she ends up in several close shave situations.
One of the most visceral comes at the conclusion of the first episode, when she leaps in pursuit of a man who has just viciously attacked his girlfriend, into a tiny, confined lift with him. Reinforcements are again too many minutes behind to be of use, forcing her to fight it out alone in brutal, claustrophobic scenes which never bestow her inhuman abilities as we might have seen in another police show.
That realism was something Jumbo said she requested. "I did say – which maybe I should have not said – push her as hard as you can push her.
"I wanted to see an officer who was so dedicated to her job and sometimes made action decisions before thinking of the consequences, even though she had a home life and she had rules to follow. She was that attached to finding the truth.
"But it was still on the body of a normal working mother. So I thought it was a nice crushing together of that truthfulness as opposed to her being very shiny and very good at everything that happens and always being able to get out of it. It's like, well, what happens to these officers when they're in these situations?"
Criminal Record premieres on January 10 on Apple TV+.
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