Star of St Elmo’s Fire to play US cop who moves to UK in crime show Wild Bill

After a career spanning four decades in film, television and theatre, including acclaimed performances in The West Wing and St Elmo’s Fire, Rob Lowe is taking on his most ambitious role to date: a Lincolnshire police chief constable.

Lowe, 54, an Emmy and Golden Globe nominee, will star in a new ITV crime drama titled Wild Bill. Lowe’s character, Bill Hixon, is a high-flying US cop who moves to Boston, Lincolnshire with his 14-year-old daughter, Kelsey, in the hope of fleeing a “painful recent past”, according to the show’s producers.

However, “this unfamiliar, unimpressed community will force Bill to question everything about himself and leave him asking whether it’s Boston that needs Bill, or Bill that needs Boston”.

Wild Bill is the creation of David Griffiths (The Hunted, Collateral Damage), Kyle Killen (Halo, Awake), and Dudi Appleton and Jim Keeble (Silent Witness). Lowe is also an executive producer.

Lowe said: “As an actor, Wild Bill is a larger-than-life character who’s outrageously articulate, has nothing to lose and revels in being an American fish out of water. As executive producer, I’m excited to work with such talented partners and to come back to work in the UK, which I always love.”

Hixon is described as having a first-class degree in criminology, a masters in psychopathology and a doctorate in statistical mapping, making him impressively qualified to lead a police force in the east Midlands. Hixon sets out to use algorithms to implement brutal cuts to the force, but is quickly confronted with the difficulty of trying to settle into a new community while doing so.

Keeble and Appleton said: “Wild Bill gives us a chance to write about modern Britain and modern crime through unique eyes. We wrote this for Rob Lowe, for his smart-talking, anarchic, soulful voice. Displacing Rob in Brexit Britain and specifically in Boston, Lincolnshire allows us to tell stories that are left-field and unexpected. We wanted to write something that couldn’t take place anywhere else, or at any other time.”

Filming will take place around London and in Lincolnshire from November and is expected to carry on well into 2019 according to an ITV spokesperson.

No date had been set for when the show would hit TV screens.