Nicola Walker on ‘Annika’ Season 2: ‘No One Wallows in Anything’

The chief of Scotland’s Marine Homicide Unit tries to keep her head above water after that big reveal in last year’s finale of Masterpiece crime drama Annika.

Once Season 2 premieres on PBS on Sunday, October 15, others will soon learn what Nicola Walker’s Annika Strandhed told viewers in one of her fourth-wall-breaking moments: that a detective on her team, Michael McAndrews (Jamie Sives), is the father of her teenage daughter, Morgan (Silvie Furneaux).

Regardless of the fallout, Walker promises no overwrought emotional eruptions in this series that mixes dry humor with dark cases. “What I love about the show is no one sits and wallows in anything,” she says. “They get on with it.”

Cast and crew had to do just that when they started shooting new episodes in 2022. The departure midway through the six-episode season of one detective on Annika’s team, Tyrone Clarke (Ukweli Roach, who took the lead role in another British cop show, Wolf), and the real-life pregnancy of actress Katie Leung, who plays tech expert Blair Ferguson, required some adjustments, including the addition of a gung ho new investigator, Varada Sethu’s Harper Weston.

Leung’s character works remotely part of the time, a move Walker praises as a positive sign of the times. “In the old days, if you were pregnant, you were [likely] to get sacked,” she says. “Whereas [the creative team behind] Annika just said, ‘Great! We’ll write it in.’”

Nicola Walker and Jamie Sives (© Black Camel Pictures & All3Media International)

This season’s homicide victims include a recently released prisoner, a former police officer, and a man found in a block of ice. Rest assured, Annika will still be confiding in viewers as she calls on literature and mythology — Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1984, and Prometheus, among others — to work through whodunits.

It’s a quirky method for solving crime, but it works for Walker and series creator Nick Walker (no relation), who considered books a source of comfort for the Norwegian girl when she was growing up. “Nick said he imagined her coming over from Norway and being put into one of those international schools where she didn’t really fit in, so she sort of just embraced literature,” Nicola explains. “Those writers were her friends, and I like the idea that they’ve always been with her, chatting to her in her head.”

Outside of work, Annika must contend with two men shaking up her life. She reconnects with Jake Strathearn (Paul McGann, top, with Nicola Walker), the therapist she went out with in Season 1, who found her to be an interesting case study. On top of that, Annika’s formidable dad, Magnus (Sven Henriksen), pays a visit. “She has a complicated relationship with her father,” Walker previews. “She tells the audience quite bluntly, ‘My dad doesn’t like me very much.’”

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In addition to delving deeper into relationships, the show also went further afield for filming this go-round, a part of the job Walker especially enjoyed. “It’s ridiculous how beautiful Scotland is,” she says. “I spent a lot of time, everywhere we went, Googling whether or not I could live there.”

The series often shoots in the area around Glasgow, but the second installment took the cast and crew to Edinburgh, a city Walker visited repeatedly as a Cambridge student when she performed in shows at the city’s fringe festival. Still, her favorite location was Loch Lomond, north of Glasgow, where many of the aquatic scenes were shot.

Walker realizes how lucky she is to get to work in such a stunningly beautiful setting: “Being on a boat on Loch Lomond and just noodling around or making doughnuts and being paid for it — me and Jamie just look at each other and giggle.”

Annika, Season 2 Premiere, Sunday, October 15, 10/9c (check local listings at pbs.org)

This is an expanded story from TV Guide Magazine’s 2023 Returning Favorites issue. For more first looks at fall’s returning shows, pick up the issue, on newsstands now.