Malice's Jack Whitehall on the "strange" challenge of playing a villain while adjusting to fatherhood

Jack Whitehall, who's best known for his stand-up comedy, playing "incompetent characters and fools" in comedies Fresh Meat and Bad Education, and "getting sprayed with foam by Jamie Redknapp on A League of Their Own", has described his latest work as "a big departure" from his usual wheelhouse.

And having watched the series, we can reveal that's absolutely not a nifty marketing line designed to dupe people into watching.

In Prime Video thriller Malice, which arrives on Friday 14th November, the comic embraces his dark side as Adam, a psychopath hellbent on revenge.

His character becomes a tutor-cum-'manny' for the kids of wealthy venture capitalist and alpha male Jamie Tanner (The X-Files’ David Duchovny), who has wronged him in some capacity – the details of which are kept firmly under wraps until the series' crescendo.

After joining Jamie and his family on a luxury holiday, Adam seamlessly worms his way into the businessman's opulent west London home. And it's there that he really begins to turn the screw as Jamie begins to wonder: who is trying to destroy him, and why?

"It's definitely the most challenging role that I've ever taken on, but one that I was very excited to do," Whitehall told RadioTimes.com. "It was the good kind of nerves, turning up to work each day and feeling really challenged and, at times, slightly out of my depth.

"But I had a great creative team around me to help me grow in confidence as we filmed it. I'm probably already quite needy as a performer and as an actor, and like to have feedback and conversations with the director and the showrunner, and they were very patient with me and helpful.

"So I really enjoyed it and relished the challenge of doing something completely different."

Whitehall said that it also required the most preparation he's ever had to do for a role – those previous characters "can sometimes be quite easy to play, because you're meant to be incompetent, that's the joke".

But Adam, by contrast, is "adept at cooking, and he can flare cocktails, and he can dance, and he knows about Greek mythology, and all of these things you need to prepare and make sure that you look competent on screen".

He added: "So it was quite a heavy lift compared to just rocking up on Bad Education and falling over things."

But it wasn't just the technical preparation he had to embrace.

There was also some "more psychological prep" to get into Adam's chilling mindset, "which was quite intense" given his status as a new dad.

"There is a darkness to the material and therefore I needed to research the right things," he added. "And there were a lot of references that I was using that were maybe slightly full on, especially when we were preparing for it."

One such influence was Anthony Perkins's performance as Norman Bates in Psycho.

"When you meet him, he's presenting as something very different," he said. "You can tell there's this inner rage. And there are a few examples of performances like that that I'd look at and try to be informed by, choices that other people have made, but then trying to find enough connective tissue to my own personality as well.

"And even in scenes [in Malice] where it's a little bit lighter on the surface, it's just trying to carry enough stuff underneath the surface that hints at this other darker side to him. We didn't want to reveal too much of his hand early on, but you need to understand that there's more to him; everything had to be underpinned with that tension."

Read more:

• Jack Whitehall talks his dark new psychopath role and his plans for an all-new sitcom

That was "one of the major challenges" when approaching the character of Adam. Another was working with such twisted material while navigating fatherhood for the first time.

"I'd just become a new dad, and then was having to read all these books and watch all of these shows and films that were all quite dark," he reflected.

"There was one morning when my fiancée [model Roxy Horner] came down and I was watching Psycho with little Elsie [who was born in September 2023] on my knee and she was like, 'Why are you watching this with our daughter?'

"I was like, 'Well, it's research for this job that I'm about to do, but maybe we'll put on Bluey afterwards, just to palate cleanse.'"

On a more sincere note, Whitehall added that he was in "quite a strange and vulnerable, emotional place".

"And then adding to that, getting ready to do this, and reading some quite strange literature for a new parent, it was a lot," he continued.

"And there are a few scenes and sequences [in Malice] that are very disturbing, and it's hard then coming home at the end of the day and having inhabited that for 10 hours, and then you've got to do bath time. It's a very strange experience, which, again, is just not one that I'm used to.

"I didn't have that as much when I filmed Clifford the Big Red Dog. That was very easy to come home and unwind and break character."

Malice will stream on Prime Video from Friday 14th November – try Amazon Prime Video for free for 30 days. Plus, read our guides to the best Amazon Prime series and the best movies on Amazon Prime.

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