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."
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Stokoe's transformation ability can be seen in past roles like Gawain in Netflix's take on King Arthur, Cursed, and from BBC's period drama The Village. He also starred in Sky One's Jamestown, where he met fiancée Sophie Rundle who has been in Peaky Blinders, Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack. The pair got engaged in 2019 and in 2021 welcomed a son.
Speaking about taking on the role of Moat, Stokoe said he was 'frightened' and playing the murderer took him out of his comfort zone: “I remember getting a phone call to say they were making a drama about Raoul Moat. I said to my agent ‘I really want to be part of that in whatever capacity I can be involved’, thinking that usually several people would already have been cast and we would be talking about the peripheral parts. I remember thinking ‘That’s going to be a bit of a hot potato. Tackling something like that. They’re going to have to find somebody with a thick skin to play him’. Not thinking it was ever going to be my problem.
“Then they came back to me a couple of days later and said ‘They don’t want to see you for one of the police officers. They want to see you for the role of Moat’. It was the most frightening thing ever. Which is always a sign that you have to pursue it. That it’s completely out of your comfort zone. So I went away and learned the limited material they had sent me and gave an interpretation of how I remembered he was, based on half an hour’s worth of online searching. Then a couple of weeks later a call came through and said ‘You’re going to do it’.”
Matt added, as many involved in the production have, that the drama is not about Moat as the main character, but the victims: "It’s important to say that Raoul Moat is not the lead character in this drama. Nor should he be. One of the purposes of this drama is to bring the victims to the forefront. They were highlighted at the time of these events in 2010 but in a very fleeting way.
"Moat was the story as far as the tabloids were concerned. He was the one selling national newspapers, to the point where they were almost goading him with past pictures. There was this strange narrative between them and he started addressing what he didn’t like in the papers. And trauma the victims went through got totally lost in that. This was also happening at a time when social media was still in its infancy. And this almost viral story began to spread online. It started to bleed into people posting things on Facebook about memorials and so on. I remember a collective mania when Paul Gascoigne’s name came into the mix. It became this online craze. And we have all seen what has happened with social media since.
"I keep coming back to the word ‘misogyny’. We have seen how that has developed online right up to the present day. When you listen to people like Moat talk and his opinions on women and ownership and masculinity and then you see some other men today in the news, it’s really not difficult to draw a comparison." For more showbiz and television stories get our newsletter here.
When is the Hunt For Raoul Moat on TV?
The drama starts on Sunday, April 16 at 9pm on ITV and ITVX.
The next two episodes will air on subsequent evenings, Monday, April 17 and Tuesday, April 18 at the same time.
Read next:
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The Welsh locations that have featured in Hollywood films and how you can track them down
The Hunt for Raoul Moat: Full cast list including The A Word and Jamestown stars
The real story behind the drama about Britain's biggest manhunt
