Murder most foul, TV most fabulous.
That’s Broadchurch.
Debuting on BBC America on Aug. 7, this British import follows the murder of a young boy in a small, sea-side English town. Written by Chris Chibnall, the series stars David Tennant as a new chief inspector, Olivia Colman as his local assistant, and Jodie Whittaker as the boy’s mother.
The series is a self-contained, eight-hour mystery: At the end of the run, you will know who the murderer is. For Colman, that was essential – anything else, she says, would have been cheating.
If solving the mystery was a game, the actors got to play along. They didn’t learn who the murderer was until the last script came out, and spent much of the shoot trying to guess. ‘We were obsessed with it.”
Like her character, Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller, Colman has children. But she does not feel that having children is essential for playing a role like Ellie, who is devastated by the murder of her best friend’s son.
“I maintain that you don’t have to be a mother to imagine. Everyone has some children in their lives. …This is the worst thing you can imagine, and it’s fairly easy to imagine how awful that is. …There were many scenes where it says ‘Ellie doesn’t cry,’ and I said ‘Good luck with that.’ ”
Happily, she says, she was able to leave those tears on the set. “At the end of the day, you let it go and you carry on.”
Colman assumed she would be letting go of the role, as the end of the story does not seem to leave a lot of room for a second season. And then, she says, when the show concluded on British TV, a card flashed on the screen saying Broadchurch would return – which she took as both good and bad news.
“We’re all going ‘How? How will that happen?’ It is going to go again, but that’s as much as we know/ … The premise, we’re not sure about. Who’s in it, we’re not sure about. We’re a bit nervous.”
Source:app.com – TV doesn’t get much better than Broadchurch
