In preparing for the role of Chris Carson in hit BBC One police thriller The Responder, sadly Martin Freeman was not able to enjoy the ‘actor playing policeman’ rite of passage – that of the ride-along on a night in a squad car with real coppers.
The first series was filmed during Covid so ride-alongs “weren’t a thing anymore. They just evaporated.” And returning for series two, which starts on Sunday, it wasn’t on offer. Freeman does admit that when he passes a police car, he’s tempted to jump in. “I do think of going, ‘Hey I played a policeman can I come and see what it’s like?’” He pauses and grins. “I haven’t done it, and they haven’t offered.”
Freeman looks completely different from Chris, the responder whose world is falling apart at work and at home (In the previous series he says, “I’m a f***ing shell, the job has ruined me.”). He no longer has the buzz cut and grey beard, and is in a suit with his now longer hair elegantly styled and swept back. “I grew it out,” he laughs. “I’m happy not to be Chris on my days off.”
There’s no sign of the Scouse accent either – an accent that’s so authentic it’s even fooled some of the locals. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I didn’t know you were from Liverpool’ and I’ve thought ‘Thank God for that.’ That’s the biggest compliment I could get, that I got away with it.”
Despite the star draw in Freeman, the first season of The Responder was something of a surprise hit. It was a gritty, realistic look at the life of a police officer, who is often the first one on the scene when something goes down. Its creator, Tony Schumacher says there was a moment during season one with Freeman and the producers when “we all thought it was a bit special. But we never thought it would be as popular as it was.”
The show is an intense, nail-biting look about someone on the front line of policing coming apart at the seams. So was it obvious Freeman wanted to return to a role that would put an actor through the wringer?
“The intensity would never put me off, as I really love the intensity of playing that character,” Freeman says, though adds it wasn’t a “slam dunk” that he would come back. “I like things being finite, things ending and quitting while you’re ahead. There’s a lot to be said for that.”
But ultimately he trusted Schumacher. “If Tony thinks there’s something worth doing to revisit then I was happy to be in those discussions. Not just because it’s a hit and be flattered into doing another one. We were all proud of the show but there’s no point just coming back because we can.”
This series goes even deeper into these flawed character. For Freeman’s Chris it’s about being a good dad even as his marriage has fallen apart and dealing with his own dad played by the great Bernard Hill.
“Meeting his dad is really interesting,” Freeman says. “I am a father. I had a dad – I didn’t have a dad for very long – but of course I’m interested in that and I’m interested in what makes Chris tick. It was a huge missing piece of the puzzle about Chris, was ‘Oh, his dad.’ It tells us a lot about how Chris has got to be who he is.”
His beat partner Rachel, played by Adelayo Adedayo, also finds herself dealing with the fall out of the first season when she was the victim of domestic abuse. This season here character is “totally isolated. She hasn’t got any help.” It’s a superb performance from Adedayo, who has previously appeared in ITV’s Timewasters and Some Girls on the BBC.
To prepare for the second season, Adelayo met the women who run Liverpool’s domestic abuse service. “I wanted to understand where someone would be,” she says. “I didn’t want to perpetuate any stereotypes or do anything dangerous because this is some people’s real lives.
“It was to really hear what it would be like if someone had done the main thing of physically walking away but then hasn’t got any help and hasn’t mentally left, and how PTSD can manifest in that situation.”
Coming back to the show, with such difficult themes, she said it’s important not to take the character home with you. “It’s not you, it’s not your reality, but there is something in your body that doesn’t understand it’s not real. So even though logically you know ‘I’m fine’ your body takes that on.”
Schumacher, the show’s creator, is a hugely affable Liverpudlian with close cropped hair and a beard similar to that of Freeman’s in the show. It’s hard to picture him as a responder now but he did the job for 13 years.
“I was looking for excitement, looking for adrenaline,” he says. “Somebody said to me, early on, ‘You get there when the blood is still wet.’ I loved that sense of charging into places where it was all going off.”
But he found out that too much adrenaline was not a good thing. “It damages you and that’s why I am the way I am. It pushed me to the edge and over it, I had a total nervous breakdown off the back of it. I wasn’t strong enough to do it for that long. Some people just handle it better.”
It was while he was having the breakdown that he decided to leave the force. “I always wanted to be a writer when I was a kid, but it took me 30 years of life to give me the tools to do it, and one of those tools was the breakdown. I’m a very different person to what I was then.”
The Responder was his first script – “I literally don’t have a clue what I’m doing. People think I’m being funny but I’m not” – and was filmed during the pandemic. “This time has been a totally different experience. It has felt so much more alive. It’s living and breathing.”
While the show is very dark, it’s also very funny. How did he find that tone? “It was just looking at life. I think life is darkly funny. When I was a cop, there was one thing you were guaranteed and that was you were going to have a laugh. It might be with a colleague, or a criminal or a bystander. You just knew it would happen. I don’t go looking for the humour in the show. Like, ‘Oh I need a punchline because it’s been a bit dark.’ The characters do it for you.”
Freeman says that Schumacher often talked about that humour on the job. “That gallows humour. They find a way to come back tomorrow otherwise you’d top yourself,” the actor says. “Some of it is awful, but there is a humour that means we’ve got to do this again and make it bearable.”
Though Schumacher also made clear the cost the job can have. Freeman agrees, “I’d find it pretty unbearable, yes.”
When I ask how playing the role has affected his view of the police, Freeman says, “It didn’t particularly change my opinion because I have the hope, for my own sanity, that most of them are decent people trying to do their best under very very difficult circumstances.
“Just to be realistic about it, take any group of people there will be this, that and the other. And to have people whose job it is go into situations that you and me don’t want to go into, guess what, sometimes it’s going to be messy. Sometimes the police comes under correct scrutiny because it should, and you’re held to a higher account because, sorry mate, you’ve got to be. But I have a great respect that some people want to do it. I’m glad they do.”
Adedayo says, “It made me think about how the fact it’s just not a job that anyone should take lightly. There’s so much thrown at you and you’re held to a much higher level of accountability and responsibility in the way you react to situations. Whether you overeact underreact. In just an hour you realise what a difficult job it is.”
While some police shows have been criticised for being ‘Copaganda’, overly glamourising the police, this is not one of them. “No it’s not like that,” says Freeman. “But it also isn’t anti-cop either, it’s just. ‘Well this is who they are. The good, the bad, the knackered. Mainly it’s the knackered.’”
The first series of the show was described as a state-of-the-nation piece in a review – that it showed something deeper about what was happening in British society. Schumacher says, “I was honoured but it wasn’t what I set out to do. I don’t want to be polemic so I just try and be truthful. I love those people. I am those people. In season one there’s a scene with Chris talking to Marco, that was me talking to me. That angry copper was me, and that scally in the back was me.”
He adds, “I never set out to write a cop show, it’s not a police show, it’s always been about people. Like the Sopranos isn’t a gangster show it’s about love and families and stuff.”
