‘Criminal Record’: Peter Capaldi, Cush Jumbo & More Talk Detectives’ Battle in Search for Truth
Preview
It’s detective vs. detective in Apple TV+‘s new crime thriller series.
Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo are happy to be working together again — they previously starred in Torchwood in 2009 — in Criminal Record, premiering January 10. “It was so funny because when I remember Cush from Torchwood, she was just this kind of bright light, this kind of youthful teen,” he tells TV Insider. “I wasn’t a teen, but I was pretty young,” she interjects. “I was just terrified. That’s why I was bright. My poor eyeballs were so wide. Which direction should I be walking in?”
The two have worked together and seen each other since, and Capaldi makes sure to praise Jumbo’s work as both a playwright and performer, including in Josephine and I, a play about Josephine Baker. (“I’m paying him commission for this,” Jumbo jokes.) But they’d been trying “to find the right thing,” which this is, she shares.
“I couldn’t wait to work with Peter again. We both got to go into and develop characters that we wanted to play, which is so unusual but makes it all the more exciting,” Jumbo explains. “The hardest bit was not being buddies on set because we had to really be two people who didn’t know each other and then didn’t know where the other person’s perspective was coming from. We are so friendly in real life, so we had to kind of keep a distance slightly.”
The two are brought together here by an anonymous phone call about an old murder case. Jumbo’s Detective Sergeant June Lenker is in the early stages of her career when she comes to Capaldi’s Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty, who’s well connected and determined to protect his legacy.
“Very early on, I was really taken up by the idea of that phone call. We don’t see her face, we don’t know who she is, but we can hear she’s in distress,” writer and executive producer Paul Rutman says. While that call initially draws Lenker in, he continues, “the trap is really set when she meets Hegarty and thinks, ‘This man has something to hide,’ then later, ‘This man is trying to bully me into going away.'”
“I don’t think Hegarty is particularly threatened at first by the appearance of June Lenker. He thinks he can deal with her and get rid of her very swiftly, but she is more powerful than he expected,” previews Capaldi. “There’s something about him that quite likes the fact that she’s there, and also at a deeper level, he’s been expecting for some years someone to show up with this thought that he may have misbehaved. So, in a way, he’s relieved that it’s her and he finally gets to see the face of the avenging angel.”
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Executive producer Elaine Collins notes they’re “keen to keep the audience guessing all the way through about Hegarty and his motivations and his past,” which is key to getting to the truth. She describes his character as having “one foot in the shadows, a creature of the night, somebody that you can’t quite make up your mind whether you’re drawn to his charisma or you’re repelled by what you feel might be his darker nature.”
But because he’d been expecting someone like Lenker to show up, “he almost relishes the battle,” Collins says. “He starts to realize she’s a worthy opponent. He’s dismissive at first, and then he realizes, oh, there’s more to her than meets the eye. And he starts to admire her. And with the trepidation, there is also the excitement of the challenge.”
Lenker isn’t expecting what comes when the two cross paths at first, either. “As somebody that plays by the rules at the beginning, she thinks she’s going to show up and say, ‘Hey, I think you missed something,’ and he’s going to go, ‘Thank you so much for coming, Ms. Lenker, you’ve done a wonderful job,'” says Jumbo. “What she gets is not just someone that dismisses what she’s brought, but someone that completely shuts it down.”
But while Lenker may be determined to get to the truth and thinks she can do just that, Errol Mathis (Tom Moutchi), in prison for the crime she’s investigating, can’t let himself hope.
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“This whole series and Errol’s character journey is all down to negligence, and the journey is seeking truth,” according to Moutchi. “He’s just a regular man. He was a barber. The message is, this could be any young Black man. He loved his girlfriend, he loved his stepson, and out of nowhere, now he’s in jail for life. It can happen to anyone.”
His mother continues to fight for him, but as Errol sees it, “Why’d you even come here? It’s been 12 years. You should give up,” the actor shares of what we’ll see from that relationship onscreen. “The only one who matters to him is his son, Patrick (Rasaq Kukoyi). “He knows that that kid now has to grow up thinking his dad killed his mom and the child doesn’t want to speak to him,” he continues. “You’re in these four walls for life just thinking these thoughts and they just bounce off the walls and come right back to you. I think Errol’s depressed.”
And so when Lenker begins digging — after he’s been in prison for 12 years (“that’s the difference from bootcut jeans to skinny jeans,” says Moutchi) — “he’s got nothing left to give [her],” he says. “She’s got everything to give because she’s fiery. There’s a whole female misogyny as well. There aren’t many senior positions for women. So I’m sure Cush’s character has to feel like she has to push extra hard, being a woman and then also being a Black woman.” Errol, on the other hand, sees this just as “oh, another one.”
But he might not realize just how determined this “avenging angel” is.
Criminal Record, Series Premiere, Wednesday, January 10, Apple TV+
