Peter Capaldi’s ‘complex reasons for doing bad things’ in new thriller

We’ve seen Peter Capaldi play nice in Doctor Who and we’ve seen him play nasty as sweary politico Malcolm Tucker in the BBC’s classic satire The Thick of It. Now, in Apple TV+‘s new drama Criminal Record, he’s playing somewhere in between.

“Hegarty is a mature detective, been around the block, probably reaching the end of his career in the East London police,” says Capaldi. “But he comes with this ambiguity. You don’t quite know at the beginning what he’s about or whether he’s corrupt. And that’s what makes it interesting: I had always wanted to play somebody who had complex reasons for doing bad things.”

Criminal Record is, he points out, his first detective and so he wanted Hegarty to be something out of the norm. “Often in crime dramas at the end of the show the characters are the same as at the beginning. If you’re a cop about to retire, you’re the same cop about to retire at the end as you were at the start. Our characters aren’t like that — they evolve.”

By “our characters” he’s referring both to Hegarty and his co-star Cush Jumbo’s (The Beast Must Die) June Lenker. Criminal Record is a tug-of-war detective drama that sets Capaldi’s DCI at loggerheads with Jumbo’s young upstart over a historic murder conviction.

It’s a combination of thriller and relationship drama. Over eight episodes it explores issues of race, institutional entropy and the quest to find common ground in a polarised Britain. It’s a plum role for Capaldi, and one that he admits he was able to hone to his own design, because his partner, the BAFTA Scotland Award-winning executive producer Elaine Collins, helped create the show.

“Elaine used to be an actress, but she’s been a producer for a long time.” (Collins brought Shetland and Vera to the screen, the latter written by Criminal Record’s writer Paul Rutman.) It’s Collins, Capaldi says, who’s the brains behind the operation. “She’s incredibly well read. People walk in to our house and it’s full of books. And they always say to me, ‘Have you read all these books?’ And I say, ’No, my wife has, but I haven’t read any of them. I’ve just read the Doctor Who annuals that are over there.”

Collins’ reading had drawn her towards an idea about people confessing to crimes and then years later retracting that confession. What does that mean for, among other people, the detectives who “solved” the original crime? “As she talked to me about it,” says Capaldi, “it was clear that there was a character developing there. I said, ‘I think that’s got my name on it.’

“It was great to be involved in the project from that early point because I’ve never been in something where the writers on the show knew it was going to be me. So they’re already imagining you in that role, they know your syntax and the way you speak and the way you look. That’s very exciting. It’s also a little exposing: I had to deliver from the start.”

Capaldi, modest to a fault, is keen to stress that he is just one half of Criminal Record. The show is a battle of wits between him and Jumbo’s Lenker. Writer Paul Rutman (Vera) calls it, “a private war, a generational stand-off, conducted by these two figures who see and feel their city so differently.”

As that suggests, some of the highlights of the show are Capaldi and Jumbo’s extended two-handers, psyche-out tennis charged with tacit bias and simmering resentment. There is even an undercurrent that Hegarty, an old hand, might be harbouring racial prejudice of his own.

Capaldi says that didn’t put him off the role: “That’s my job: to try and bring those characters to life. That’s the way that character is. You can’t say, ‘I don’t want to say that.’ There are lots of things that he does that I wouldn’t want to do: I wouldn’t want his job in the first place; I wouldn’t want to be him. But you try to embrace it and infuse it with life.”

In modern-day London, he points out, there is misogyny and there is racism. It’s just a fact. “One of the things that we were very lucky with was that because both myself and Cush were involved from the start, Cush was able to provide us with a perspective about what she called the sort of day-to-day racism that goes on, the paper cuts that go on, the remarks that people make. I think it’s important that we look at those issues and present them. Because we’re in a bad time where this polarisation is the norm, when we stop looking at issues with any complicated lens, where we just want everything to be literally black and white: you’re on that side, or you’re on this side. We wanted to do a show that said, ‘Take a closer look at what’s going on around you and take a closer look at the people who are involved.’”

That closer look at Hegarty includes multiple jumps back and forth in time through the series, in order to learn his backstory. It meant that Capaldi, who is 65, has had his hair dyed, been aged up, aged down, and generally forced to confront his mortality every day in the make-up chair.

“The ageing process means that every day is a disappointment when you wake up and find there’s another ache and another pain… but every day is a joy as well, because you’re still there! I am always constantly surprised that I’ve got white hair. In my head I think I’ve got the same hair I had when I was 35. Which clearly I don’t. When I see myself on screen. I’m like, ‘Wow, who’s that old guy there?’

But then that’s the whole point with Capaldi’s best work; you’re never quite sure who he really is. And that, as he says, is what makes it interesting.

Criminal Record is on Apple TV+.

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