It’s straight in at the deep end with Bertie Carvel. The London actor, who was once the most hated man in the country as Suranne Jones’s cheating suburban hubby in Doctor Foster, is speaking to me about the second season of his Channel 5 detective drama, Dalgliesh. He appears over Zoom from the Hampstead house he grew up in, which he moved back into with his wife during the pandemic. That must have provided some comfort in uncertain times, I proffer. He tilts his head sideways. “Well, it was distressing in some ways, because we moved back here because my mum had passed away.” Oh, right. “It was a lot to encounter all of your history in that way, but amazing, too.” Around the same time, Carvel’s son was born. “I was looking back over my life as he was starting his,” he says. “It was sort of amazing and poetic and wonderful.”
It was at this intersection of life and death that Carvel signed on to play Adam Dalgliesh, the poet-detective created by the baroness novelist PD James in the Sixties. Dalgliesh is no Luther: he pootles around the British countryside in his immaculate Jaguar E-type, stoically solving crimes while grieving the untimely deaths of his wife and child. “One of the reasons it was exciting for me to take that role was to have somewhere to put it all,” he says. “To me, it was about grief.”
