Torchwood legend Eve Myles reveals why dark new drama "took its toll a bit"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Eve Myles has played a cop several times in the past few years, in We Hunt Together, The Crow Girl and now in Gone, the new ITV series from George Kay. It seems fair to ask, then, if she’d make a good cop. She leans into the screen – she’s at home in Cardiff – and pulls a face.

Just as I fear she’s unhappy with the question, she roars with laughter. “I’m way too empathetic! I’d be the person bringing in cakes in the morning for everyone who’d just had a terrible night. I’d take everything home with me. I just feel too much.”

Empathy is Myles’s superpower. It made us advocate for her in Keeping Faith, in which she starred as a lawyer whose husband (played by her actual husband, Bradley Freegard) disappeared out of the blue.

It made her utterly believable as a detective chief inspector investigating a string of ritualistic murders of young men in the first series of The Crow Girl. And now, in Gone, she is the compassionate Annie Cassidy, a steely detective assigned as family liaison officer to private school headteacher Michael Polly (a very uptight David Morrissey) after he becomes the prime suspect in his wife’s death.

Before you say: “Not another woman found dead in the woods”, Gone is elevated not only by the cat-and-mouse game between Cassidy and Polly, but also by the fact that it’s inspired by the career and work of Julie Mackay (see sidebar), a former detective superintendent, and her book, To Hunt a Killer. The book detailed Mackay’s work on a cold case, in which she found the killer of a young woman called Melanie Road who had been murdered some 30 years earlier.

Both Mackay and her co-author, ITV crime correspondent Robert Murphy, were consultants on Gone, and the attention to detail shows. Myles, who has three daughters aged 16, 12 and four, liked the fact that Gone was filmed down the road in Bristol, meaning she could see the girls before school and read them a bedtime story (“not the 16-year-old, despite my persistence”), and that the series was a psychological mystery rather than a procedural cop show.

The “final key” in taking the job was Mackay always being on the end of the phone for her. “Julie is a remarkable human being. Being in the force wasn’t easy, but she really used her voice and helped solve a cold case after 30 years. Gone isn’t Melanie’s story, but I took note of Julie’s persistence and resilience when playing Annie.”

Despite being an actor and not a cop, Myles nevertheless still takes her work home – she’s just wrapped on the second series of
The Crow Girl and the story was “so dark and difficult that it took its toll a bit”. Luckily, Freegard, whom she met at the National Youth Theatre in 1994 and married in 2013, firmly but kindly tells her that her work day is done.

“Having a six-foot-three husband plonk a big glass of Malbec in front of you isn’t bad. I don’t want to brag… But I am. I will!” She grins like a lovestruck teenager. “Seriously, though, in this day and age you’ve got to take care of your mental health. I connected with David [Morrissey] on Gone because we were both always running and in the gym. It’s the only way to sustain the frankly ridiculous hours we do.”

Although Myles and her husband lived in Hollywood while she was filming Torchwood and spent years in London, they moved back to Wales – Freegard is from Pontypridd – after looking all over the UK and realising the only option was the obvious one. “I’ve always belonged to Wales; it runs through me like a stick of rock,” she says gleefully.

Myles was brought up by a single mother on a council estate in a small Welsh mining town and could barely afford to attend the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. “My mum was proud to be working class. She was proud to hold down three cleaning jobs a day. She instilled a work ethic in me, and she was the most loving woman. My friends loved to come round to get a hug, a bath, food. I don’t overly spoil my kids, I just ensure they have love in abundance. And a kitchen disco at least once a week.”

When I ask if she’d like to make a TV series her kids can watch, she once again hoots with laughter. “I did a CBeebies Bedtime Story once and I’ve been a hero to my kids ever since. My eldest is looking forward to Gone because she wants to do a degree in anthropology. If the gods are listening, please, let me do something lighter, something funny, so our two youngest can watch. Otherwise” – she is laughing so hard she can barely get the words out – “they’ll always think Mummy and Daddy work in a caravan in a Tesco’s car park, because that’s all they see when they come to set.”

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Gone begins airing on Sunday 8 March on ITV1.

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