Martin Compston: 'As Brits, we need to fight for our NHS and BBC'

Martin Compston is feeling combative. This is, in part, attributable to his latest role, in Red Eye, ITV’s high-octane, high-altitude, thoroughly daft conspiracy thriller. In it, he plays Clay Brody, CIA agent attached to the US Embassy in London who strides around regenerated Battersea, looking very hench in an extremely tailored three-piece suit.

He wears the suit almost as well as the thousand-yard stare he sports for scenes in which he isn’t beating up baddies – old-fashioned fisticuffs, throwing them through windows and such – or muttering into his sleeve. “It’s always fun playing the haunted man,” Compston says, “and Brody’s history is murky. We think he’s the good guy, and he does some good things, but who is he really?”

There are lots of fight scenes in Red Eye Fiercely choreographed frenetic ballets in which each of the ‘dancers’ is at the peak of physical fitness.

“We had a terrific stunt co-ordinator and stunt guys who are just great to collaborate with on those scenes,” Compston enthuses. “The trust that you build when you’re throwing guys through stuff.”

It isn’t just trust that you build. There’s muscle too. Since I last interviewed him in 2020, for The Nest, Nicole Taylor’s surrogacy-goes-awry thriller (does surrogacy ever go right in a thriller?), Compston has been working out. “I have,” he says, slightly sheepishly, “but I do anyway. I enjoy working out - I think it's coming from a soccer background - but I am very fond of a pint and a pizza as well so really I need to work out a lot because my diet is not the best.”

He really threw himself into the physical side of the role, training regularly with the director of Red Eye, Kieron Hawkes. “He’s one of my best friends and he got me into Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. I train four or five times a week so when we were doing Red Eye, Kieran and I lived in the same apartment block with its own gym space, so we’d train at night.”

Of Compston’s regime, his co-star and Red Eye lead Jing Lusi told me “We were doing long hours and really hard days and at the end of the day, he’d be off to the gym and I was like ‘I am going to lie on my sofa for five hours’. When we filmed in that building for the American embassy, it was on the fourth floor. But rather than take the lift, he would be up and down four flights of stairs like a squirrel! Martin is so disciplined.”

As well he might be. He may do a bit of running around on Line of Duty but we all know that Vicky McClure is the muscle of that operation. In Red Eye, Compston is a bona fide action hero.

“Harrison Ford said in an interview to do as much of your own stunts as you can because when you see the actual jeopardy of the stunt on the actor’s face, you can relate to it. But as soon as they cut to a wide shot and you know it’s not the actor, a bit of that connection is lost,” he explains. “That’s why Tom Cruise is the best in the business – because he does his own stunts and you see him going through it. On Red Eye, they let you do as much as you can, which is great.”

And Compston had big shoes to fill, replacing Richard Armitage as Red Eye’s male lead. “Because he’s a big old fella, those literally are big shoes! And he’s a proper movie star. I mean, I loved The Hobbit movies!’ Still, Compston relished the pressure. “The first series was a massive success. You’re coming onto it because it’s good and it’s your job to try and take it to the next level, to make it bigger and bolder. And I think we do that. It’s a good pressure.”

Crucially, for Compston, it’s also fun.

“We're just grown-ups running around playing cops and robbers. The writer Pete [Peter A Dowling] grew up on films like Die Hard, Speed and The Fugitive, which don’t make any sense but are a helluva lot of fun. As this show goes on, it gets bigger and more unbelievable - but it's escapism. That's what people want to see sometimes. Of course there are times for dramas like Mr Bates Versus the Post Office but there are other times when people just want to sit down and be entertained. Red Eye lives in that space which makes it perfect viewing for this time of year.

For all that it may be fun to make and to watch – to paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie, for audiences who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing that they like – Red Eye is hard work. How does Compston get into character?

“I've worked with people who are Method actors and I've worked with people who can be telling you an anecdote about how many drinks they had last night and then switch into character. There's no right way of doing it. If you can just deliver what's on that page, whatever way you can, then that's all that matters for me. Essentially, there's no awards for what you do off-screen.”

And if he has to deliver an emotional scene, what is Compston’s process? As someone who got his big break in Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen (2002) after attending an open audition in his community, he has no drama school training to fall back on. “I'll just go find a quiet room and get myself into the right head space. I hate when a set gets tense and becomes a place for one person to stomp about being all ‘Look at me. I'm getting into the character’.”

I ask Compston if doing conspiracy thrillers like Red Eye and Line of Duty changes the way he looks at the world.

“You used to do things and go ‘Well, this isn't believable’ and now you’re like ‘This is nothing compared to what's really happening’. Real life is stretching the limits of credibility and I think it’d be very hard for someone to do a show about conspiracy theory now and somebody say ‘That couldn't happen’. It feels like we're living in a fucking reality show at times right now,” he says with a hollow laugh.

Does the state of the world worry him, especially as the father of a young child?

“It can make you insular,” he says after a moment. “Because you just go ‘The world's turning to shit so I'm just going to look after me and mine and not care about anybody else’. But that's what they want you to think. So you have got to guard against that to an extent because it can make you selfish and make people want to turn on things that they should be defending.”

And here we reach the other root of Compston’s current combativeness.

“It does get my back up when I hear the NHS getting attacked. Being in America a lot, I always find it bizarre when I hear American politicians saying ‘We don't want our health system to end up like Britain’. The NHS is one of the greatest things about being British and an institution we should be proud of.

"Of course it can be improved - many of our institutions can be improved - but most of them are underfunded. I do feel we should try not to lose what's best about us. The NHS should be fought for and cherished while the American system is…,” Compston, who lives in Las Vegas with his wife, American actress Tianna Chanel Flynn, and their young son, is momentarily lost for words. “I don’t know how sick people survive here. You’ll go into hospital for something and two or three years later, you’re still getting bills for $100 or $200.”

Compston recalls going to hospital following a minor car accident in Los Angeles a few years ago: “The doctor told me that I needed an MRI and it would cost two grand. I said ‘I’m not paying two grand for an MRI’ and the doctor replied ‘No, you get their insurance to pay for it’. And that’s when I realised that’s what it’s all about: an industry sustaining itself. It’s a bit of a racket. Which is quite depressing.”

As we’re talking about (beloved) institutions under attack, does Compston feel the same about the beleaguered BBC?

“The BBC is a great institution. Of course it can be improved – of course it can! – but you look at the licence fee and if it was a Netflix, Apple or Amazon saying ‘you’re going to get all these channels, all these dramas and radio and podcasts’ and everything you get for the licence fee, you’d go ‘that is a great deal’. For me, the licence feel is very much worth it,” he says. “In relation to Red Eye, it’s on in that 9pm slot on ITV. That slot on both ITV and BBC1 is where you want to be as an actor because you feel as if you’re with the whole of the UK. It’s the crème de la crème.”

Speaking of which – and really it couldn’t have been a better segway if I, or a shadowy organisation, had planned it – I think this is my cue to ask Compston about the return of Line of Duty. After all, he once told Radio Times that it’d be a sad day when he wasn’t asked about Line of Duty - and who am I to make the 41-year-old actor glum? No danger of that as he breaks into a broad grin.

“We always knew we'd work together again at some point, but Jed [Mercurio, Line of Duty’s writer/creator] was adamant that he wouldn’t come back if he didn’t have a story to tell. Nor would there be any announcements until it was concrete. I get that because you don't want to get people excited by saying “Yeah, we're doing another one’, they ask when, and you say ‘We don’t know’.

With it now official that the cop’n’corruption drama will return, dare I ask when AC-12 gets back together?

“We're back next year and I'm looking forward to getting back with the team. They’re more than colleagues. They are some of my best friends,” he says with such warmth in his voice. “So even just from that point of view, I can't wait to get back over to Belfast and then have Vicky running our lives.”

Is there anything he can say about the story?

“I think it’s going to be quite,” he pauses for effect, “explosive.”

Combative, perhaps. But Martin Compston is also feeling contented.

Red Eye premieres on New Year’s Day on ITV and STV and will be available for streaming on ITVX and STV Player.

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