Peter Capaldi says the Criminal Record cast 'tried to be responsible' with police corruption storyline
The Apple TV+ series is out now
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Criminal Record explores themes of police corruption, miscarriages of justice and institutional racism over the course of its eight episodes, and Peter Capaldi tells Yahoo UK that he and his co-stars "tried to be responsible" whilst doing so.
The new Apple TV+ series follows two very different detectives: Sergeant June Lenker (Cush Jumbo) and Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty (Capaldi), who go on a collision course when Lenker begins investigating one of Hegarty's closed murder cases after a 999-caller claims her abusive boyfriend is the man responsible, and the person who was sent to prison is innocent.
"We tried to be responsible about those things," Capaldi says of the crime drama's examination of the aforementioned themes.
"Cush and I were very lucky in this instance that we were involved in the show from the start, even before the scripts were written."Peter Capaldi
"Paul Rutman, who's a wonderful writer, and the writing team he had around him were able to imagine us from the beginning as those characters. But it meant that Cush was able to... I think she was keen to make sure that the themes of racism were not exclusively large, dramatic ones, that there was also an examination of day-to-day cuts, or offences, or rejection that occurs.
"Also the misogyny really, that seems prevalent in a lot of the men of my age and has probably been injected into the culture in the police that allows a certain lack of sensitivity in those areas.
"We wanted to say 'well that exists, and it's true and it's there', but also to say let's look at these characters more deeply and perhaps suggest why they do what they do, or say what they say."Peter Capaldi
Hegarty is a man of mystery, someone who keeps his cards close to his chest and faces the world with a scowl. He has many secrets, and appears suspicious from the get-go, but Capaldi was keen to depict the detective as something other than an reprehensibly corrupt cop.
"I wanted to make sure that you had the sense of him being a real person, but at the same time there are things that he's done and he has led a life that is dark, [and] has darkness," he explains.
"I always think he's walking in an ever deepening shadow."Peter Capaldi
"I just had to think a lot and make a little map of his life, which I wrote a little book and I carried in my head so that I knew he had a history and that he wasn't empty. But at the same time it was quite hard because he's quite veiled, he deliberately does not express himself to people.
"He doesn't give things away, so that's quite a tricky job when you're an actor because a lot of the job of being an actor is saying the line and then somehow expressing another idea through subtext or expression, or whatever. Whereas he doesn't do that.
"But that was a challenge and I liked that, and that was one of the interesting things for me about playing him because he's mysterious but in a real way and, really, as the show goes on we learn more about him."
The biggest joy of making the series, though, was the way in which he was able to bounce off of his co-star. Capaldi and Jumbo not only star in the show but executive produce it as well, meaning they had a lot of say in how the story was told and the way in which they approached their respective characters.
Speaking of building a bond together, Capaldi says: "We never really discussed it, because we know each other —I've worked with Cush on Torchwood, and I cast her and I directed her in a show — we decided without really discussing it, we didn't rehearse anything.
"She's such a brilliant actress and I knew that she would be full of surprises in what she did — I never saw what she did until we did it, and similarly she never saw what I was going to do."Peter Capaldi
"Then we just tried to respond to each other in the moment in that way and I think that was quite useful. It was placing an artificial distance between us because we're not, although we know each other we can't seem to know [each other] on screen."
Criminal Record is out now on Apple TV+
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