I know what British people are like, and you don’t mess with our Christmas TV,” says David Jonsson, the Industry and Rye Lane actor who is appearing on screens this festive season as the first ever Black hero in an Agatha Christie adaptation. It makes starring in BBC One’s Murder Is Easy “a little unnerving”, the 30-year-old admits. Since 2015’s And Then There Were None, the BBC has had a bit of a tradition of airing Christies at Christmas. And Jonsson feels the weight of that. He tells me he asked the team if they were certain they wanted to choose Christmas as the time to break the mould, a period with such huge TV viewership. It’s clear he’s apprehensive about the show airing. “I mean, yeah, to some degree,” he says. “Christie has such a bunch of loyal fans.”
The role sees Jonsson step into the polished loafers of Luke Fitzwilliam, a young man forging a career in Whitehall. On a train to London, he meets Miss Pinkerton (Penelope Wilton), an elderly woman on her way to Scotland Yard to report a string of suspicious deaths in her rural village. When she disembarks and is fatally struck by a car before talking to the police, Fitzwilliam decides to set off for sleepy Wychwood to investigate himself.
