I’ve had many theological discussions with Reverend Richard Coles,” a grinning Matthew Lewis tells me. The actor, once the bumbling and endearing Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films, is leaning in, visibly scintillated by the thought of a good existential debate. He had plenty of opportunities for them while playing a rector in the TV adaptation of Coles’s best-selling mystery novel, Murder Before Evensong. Set in 1980s rural England, the story follows Canon Daniel Clement, a young cleric living with his mother, who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation after a man is violently killed in his parish church. The script is laced with Coles’s trademark blend of humour and theology that made him a fixture on panel shows like Have I Got News for You. Lewis, however, is a “dyed-in-the-wool” atheist. “I can’t deny it,” he admits. “And yet, I’m very much drawn to the mysticism and the ritual [of organised religion]. I wish it were true because I love it. I love all that esoteric mystery and stuff.”
Murder Before Evensong, on Channel 5 in the UK and Acorn TV in the US, is the kind of cosy crime caper that harks back to the bucolic idyll of village life. There is a lord of the manor (played by TV’s go-to posh guy Adam James), a journo for the local paper, and a surly groundskeeper. “I’ve never lived that life,” Lewis says of village fêtes and cricket on the green. “It’s nonsense! And yet there’s a part of me that’s quite sad that no longer exists. I guess it’s just in our DNA as Englishmen.”
