He's starred in Misfits, Jamestown and Bodyguard, but actor Matt Stokoe is about to become a more familar face to TV viewers as he takes on perhaps his biggest role yet as Raoul Moat in ITV's new real-life drama The Hunt For Raoul Moat.
The Durham-born actor had to physically change his appearance to play the man who in 2010 shot three people, killing one, and went on the run for more than a week — read more on that here. He went to the gym twice a day, bleached his eyebrows, had a Mohican haircut and went on a punishing diet to recreate the brutish figure that was Moat just after being released from prison.
Stokoe said: "There are so few photographs of him. But they include the one of him coming into a hardware shop with his orange T-shirt on. He’s got such a specific silhouette because when he came out of prison he’d not had access to steroids and protein powder. He had got much leaner by virtue of being deprived of all of his supplements. So that became the look we were trying to achieve and I went on this really punishing diet and tried to get that body fat down. Make him look almost gaunt and trust that Gareth Bryn the director would frame it in a way that he looked like he was this mountain."
