The troubled detective is nothing new, but in her first police drama Abi Morgan has mixed procedural with a Plato-quoting Victorian poisoner. We go behind the scenes of her hallucinatory new TV show

Stellan Skarsgård is pacing down a corridor in a dank building in London’s Docklands. The rooms on either side of him are full of random clusters of unloved office chairs, the floor tiles are grim. Menace seems to hang in the air. As the cameras roll, the Swedish actor makes occasional stops, in order to speak to no one at all. Or at least no one who can be seen.

A second take: this time, he is talking to a person walking beside him. Next, he’s waiting for a lift, again conversing with thin air. And then suddenly the lift pings unexpectedly – and out wanders Eddie Marsan, straight into the shot. He stops in his tracks with a cheeky grin spreading across his face – like if he doesn’t move, maybe no one can see him. He’s just been down the shops. It’s a moment of light relief in what has been an intense shoot. Someone yells “Cut!” and everyone wanders off to corner offices and meeting rooms.

Doubling as a police station, this steel-and-glass monstrosity is, for today at least, the set of River, Abi Morgan’s new cop series. Morgan brought Margaret Thatcher’s life to the big screen in The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep. Sex addiction followed, with Michael Fassbender in Shame. This month, there’s Suffragette. River, however, taxed her writing powers in new ways. “This is my first cop series – and probably my last. Hats off to anyone who can do them. By episode two, we had to completely throw everything away a few weeks before filming and start again. Because I’d got it wrong.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Filming a scene for River. Photograph: Nick Briggs/BBC/Kudos

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But then River, about to air on BBC1, isn’t your traditional procedural. It melds psychodrama with hallucination and paranoia – and has only the very occasional good old-fashioned duffing up of a suspect in a dark alley. Skarsgård, who was Professor Lambeau in Good Will Hunting and Bootstrap Bill in Pirates of the Caribbean, plays John River, a troubled detective who experiences lucid visions. Understandably, these interfere with his police work, which he conducts with partner Stevie, played by Nicola Walker. River struggles with his cases, mostly murders, as he frequently sees the victims for whom he’s seeking justice. The idea of the damaged detective who gets results is hardly new. But there’s an otherworldliness that sets River apart.

“I had the idea a few years ago,” says Morgan. “I love Truly, Madly, Deeply. I thought it was such a beautiful way of examining grief. So I never wanted River to be psychic: they’re not ghosts he sees, but manifestations of his grief, just as I never believed Alan Rickman was a real ghost in Truly, Madly, Deeply. I like the gag of it. You think it’s a cop show, but it’s not. It’s like, ‘How do you fuck up the logic of a cop show?’ The types are all in there: the old, world-weary cop, the younger sidekick. The stereotypes. I’m hopefully showing the idiosyncrasies underneath. It’s also about the fragile mental health we all experience. We all have moments when we’re fragile.”

Morgan embarked on the first episode with the hope of getting someone Hollywood but credible involved, in much the same way as True Detective starred Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Skarsgård came on board almost immediately, after Morgan and producer Jane Featherstone flew to meet him in Stockholm. He then, says Morgan, became “the muse” of the piece. “He’s one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met. And he’s got that Scandi thing going on that’s slightly ‘other’. He’s quite magical – truthful, yet magical. He’s a Viking.”

Adeel Akhtar, who plays a befuddled fellow detective, says Skarsgård can be brooding and actorly one minute, all poop jokes the next. I finally meet “the Viking” during a brief break from filming. He’s sitting on a burst sofa in a tatty glass box of a meeting room. The “green room” is another glass box facing this one, stuffed full of actors and dry cleaning. There’s an iron. It all feels a long way from Hollywood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicola Walker, left, with Stellan Skarsgård and Georgina Rich. Photograph: Nick Briggs/BBC/Kudos

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“I’ve been offered police series so many times,” says Skarsgård. “I always turned them down, because the procedural side bores the shit out of me. But here, that stuff is in the background. In the foreground are the man’s psychological difficulties.” Indeed, what’s central is a gnawing sense of people adrift in grief, notably River, who is almost broken by it. The theme of friendship is equally strong, the chemistry between Skarsgård and Walker warm and genuine. They eat fast food, sing karaoke and, as Morgan notes, “talk about nothing” just like real people.

Skarsgård did not, however, just turn up and do as he was told. “I would complain when I wasn’t happy and we’d talk about it. I let everybody know exactly what I think about everything, all the time. Sometimes she used what I said, sometimes not. But we haven’t been co-writing. She’s the writer. And she’s good.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eddie Marsan as Thomas Cream in River. Photograph: Nick Briggs/BBC/Kudos

Among the more peculiar aspects of the show is Eddie Marsan’s character, Dr Thomas Cream, a real-life serial killer from the 19th century who was known as the Lambeth Poisoner. River is reading a book about him only to find Cream appear, waxed moustache and all, in his darker visions, taunting him. In one brutal scene, River attacks Cream, but only succeeds in bloodying his knuckles on a wall. He comes to symbolise River’s self-doubt and anger..

“He was the little mosquito I put in the script for myself,” says Morgan. “The bit of fun for me. I was googling these incredible quotes about death, but they were way too florid for any character. So I gave myself this one person who could get away with it. He spews Plato and Aristotle. He’s like tickertape running in River’s mind. I wanted to explore the psychosis of a murderer – and this was a way.”

River takes Skarsgård through a grimy, twilight world of kebab shops, neon karaoke bars, drive thrus, strip-lit stores and housing estate stairwells. Aren’t life-like hallucinations, I ask him, just a bit too high concept, within the framework of a cop show?

“It gives a lot of freedom to Abi as a storyteller,” he replies. “She can bring in dead people, bring in whoever she wants to create some disorder and change the pace of normal television storytelling. Abi’s writing is not normal television writing. It’s complicated: there has to be a basis of police procedural, but it must never take over. Otherwise, the air leaves the balloon. Then it’s a normal TV series. And then I wouldn’t be in it.”