Interview: Kris Marshall on evolving his character for Beyond Paradise Series 3; “It’s a real love to be able to mess with him.”

For over a decade now, Kris Marshall has called Paradise home.

After leaving quite the lasting impression in the hit crime comedy/drama series D.e.a.t.h in Paradise across four seasons, Marshall’s Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman moved Beyond Paradise to a more rural setting to continue his police procedural work.

Returning to Shipton Abbott for a thrilling new series of the hugely successful series, season 3 is packed with mystery, humour, and heart as we follow Humphrey and the team as they tackle more mind-boggling puzzles, all set against the breathtaking landscapes of Devon and Cornwall.

As the new season arrives to stream on BritBox here in Australia, Peter Gray spoke with the Love Actually standout about exploring his distinctive character over so many seasons, what challenges he has faced, and what he thinks Humphrey can teach us about emotional perception.

Your character, Humphrey, is quite a distinctive character.  He’s quirky, he’s brilliant, but he’s deeply human.  How has your understanding of him evolved since D.e.a.t.h in Paradise? Were there any nuances that you got to explore in Beyond Paradise that you didn’t get to before?

I’ve never really played a character for as long.  I’ve always kind of done two or three seasons of something, and then moved on.  To revisit a character with a bit more miles on the clock…the more miles is great, because you get the opportunity to really evolve.  Physically, 10 years, people do change.  It’s a joy to really have the opportunity to evolve the character, and (Humphrey) becomes more human.  In Beyond Paradise, you follow more of his personal story.  You did a bit in D.e.a.t.h in Paradise, but not as keenly as Beyond Paradise.  It’s a real love to be able to mess with him, in a way.

I don’t think his core values have changed, but I think the way he reacts to people, and his little intricacies.  I’m always about putting little Easter eggs in the shows that I do.  Obviously I’m a lover of movies and TV, and especially the detective genre, so, for me, I always put in a lot of marches to characters, and I love it when audiences spot them.  If they don’t, that’s fine, because they’re really just there for me.  And they’re not all detective show homages.  There’s movies homages in there, and I hope they’re quite subtle.

That’s the fun side of it for me.  But in terms of his evolution as a character, it’s just great to have the opportunity to play a character that long.  Filming can be such a “get in – get out” process.  Film is a smash and grab.  It’s time, it’s money, you’ve got to get the shot and go on to the next.  So, for me, it’s a real once in a lifetime to be able to play a character for as long as I have.

Is there anything about Humphrey that challenges you the most as an actor? Specific traits or mannerisms that you have reinvented for him as the series goes on?

I’m not entirely sure.  He’s a challenge anyway, because, and this would go for all my characters, but especially with Humphrey, is to maintain his likeability without making him, as you Aussies would say, a doofus.  It’s to follow that line to make him quite playful but also believable that he has a keen enough mine to not just solve crimes, but to spin people around and tie them in webs.  What I love about him more than anything is for him to play.  I have a theory that he has a hunch very early on as to who the antagonist is, and then he just plays with them a little bit.  A bit like a cat, except cats are kind of evil (laughs).  Sorry to all cat lovers, but I’m not really a cat person.  But they’re quite emotionless, I find. Humphrey is full of emotion and morality, but he’s not a moral compass.

Going back to your original question, I think it’s gotten easier the more I do it, because you sort of gain through playing him year after year.  With age comes a certain gravitas.  You know, (Humphrey) was announces in series three of D.e.a.t.h in Paradise by falling out of a window.  Physical comedy is always a huge part of what I do, so it’s maintaining that without it looking stupid and idiotic.  Sometimes the script writers will write something, and I’m like, “Guys, that’s a bit…I’m a 52-year-old man.  It’s a bit childish.”  What we do is try and hone it a bit, so I try and basically keep that line where he’s believable.  Likeable, acerbic, and a bit of a genius.

I was going to say that he’s probably quite an underestimated character.  There’s that perceived awkwardness, but he sees through people with clarity.  Do you think he teaches us anything about unconventional intelligence and emotional perception?

I think he’s on the spectrum.  I’ve always struggled in my own mind with, and I’ve said this a few times before, with whether he’s doing certain things on purpose to send people down a slightly different path.  I can’t really answer this question myself, but I worry if it becomes too calculated or not.  I think he’s somewhere in the middle.  I think he definitely has some trait of ADHD or dyspraxia.  I get letters from people who have dyspraxia, and they have said how there’s finally a character who represents them.  That’s really humbling.

I think we’re now being really opened up to the different ways the mind works in different people.  Before it would have been a blanket assumption that they’re a little odd or that they’re a little late or clumsy.  We’re starting to understand and accommodate people’s different traits.  And I think if Humphrey can be a representative of that, I think that’s a good thing.  Maybe we all need to learn, myself included, to understand more how people’s traits shouldn’t just be put in boxes.  I think neurodiversity is something to be celebrated.

As you mentioned about being introduced in D.e.a.t.h in Paradise.  How much was mapped out for you, versus organically developing with the writers? Are there any moments where you felt compelled to influence what the writers were going to do with Humphrey?

I’ve always been lucky enough to have a pretty keen ear of the writers and creators, Robert Thorogood and Tony Jordan.  If there’s stuff I don’t like, I think it’d just be honed a little bit.  They’ve always been very, very accommodating.  I tend to generally keep my powder dry.  I think an actor doesn’t necessarily know better than the writers.  You can get confused and a bit obsessed with your own character, rather than the bigger arc, so I tend to trust them.  It’s an organic process.

With Beyond Paradise, I’m a producer as well, so I’ve been involved from the very beginning.  It’s very much a collaborative thing.  I created the character, but I couldn’t have created this character unless it was on the page.  It has to be an organic collaborative process, and it’s really joyful.

With the more rural setting within Devon, does location affect the way you embody him and connect with the tone of the series at all?

With (D.e.a.t.h in Paradise) being in the Caribbean, he was a fish out of water.  I think he’s a fish out of water in any walk of life, but he’s a little less of a fish out of water here than he was in the Caribbean.  He did assimilate himself into the culture, and he was always open to that.  I’m from the West of England, and the three counties there, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, and they’re all Celtic-like counties.  There’s a paganism to them.  There’s a wild savagery to those counties.  It’s wild down there, and you get wild weather.  (Humphrey) has always been quite an outdoorsy person.  He’s weirdly rugged.  Location is always a huge part of any show, and I think it imbues the show and my character.

As you mentioned about collaborating, there’s great chemistry with Sally Bretton.  How is that to build? Is there a lot of rehearsal? Or is that something that just develops naturally on set? Do you find any of your real conversations show up on screen in some sort of way?

(Laughs) I really hope our real conversations don’t end up on screen.  I’d never met Sally before we did D.e.a.t.h in Paradise.  I’m pretty sure we hadn’t met at all (laughs).  We never knew she was going to become such an important character, such an integral character, because we didn’t have that foresight.  But going back about 10 years, when we first started together, I thought we should go out to dinner before we start shooting, just to click and see how we get on.  It sounds like a cliche, but I guess cliches are cliches because they’re true.  We got on so well.  It was fluid and that immediately translated on screen.

She’s obviously a very beautiful actress and very graceful, but she’s also got this quirkiness to her that I think dovetails quite nicely.  I think that sometimes you can have two quite quirky characters and they clash on screen, but for some reason that I can’t fathom, we just dovetail quite well together.  We’ve worked on stage back in the UK together.  She’s almost like a de facto wife, even though we’re obviously happily married to other people.  It’s a very natural thing.  I hope she feels the same way. I can’t speak for her.  She might think the complete opposite, but, for me, it feels very natural.

Well, these characters feel very lived in, and watching them is quite comforting.  Even though it’s a crime show, as you said there’s so many of these types of shows, but it’s always so great when the format is changed up just enough to feel continually fresh.

I hope that everyone enjoys the show and continues to watch.  Obviously, there’s a plethora of detective shows.  There always has been, but there seems to be so many now, and, cynically, maybe it’s because they’re really popular that people want to make more of them.  I think the longer you go on, it becomes harder and harder.  There’s only a certain amount of ways you can kill a person (laughs).  But that’s something about Tony Jordan’s writing that, to me is, so lovely and unique, how he weaves a storyline into an hour of television.  It’s incredible.