Daniel Mays: new Channel 4 police drama is nothing like Line of Duty
The Line of Duty actor takes on a crime drama with a twist in Channel 4's The Interrogation of Tony Martin, using real police transcripts to tell the story
It's no surprise that Channel 4's one-off crime drama The Interrogation has sparked Line of Duty comparisons, seeing as 99 per cent of it is set in an police interview room.
But Daniel Mays has starred in both – and he insists they could hardly be more different.
Featuring Mays as DC Peters, Stuart Graham as DS Newton and Steve Pemberton as Tony Martin, The Interrogation is a "verbatim drama", using police transcripts to recreate word-for-word what happened in the interrogation room after Norfolk farmer Tony Martin shot dead an intruder in his home in 1999.
The actor previously earned a Bafta nomination for his role as Sergeant Danny Waldron in Line of Duty series three.
"I've done Line of Duty... but it's not really like that," Mays says in the new issue of Radio Times.
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"I've played so many policemen but the fact that this is verbatim – I don't think I've ever done anything like this before."
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He explains: "When you begin this piece the police are incredibly reasonable. At the beginning there's this very wounded, vulnerable figure. Then all of a sudden things start to shift. You start to learn his back story and things that have happened to him as a child.
"The way Steve [Pemberton] plays it, sometimes I feel incredibly sorry for him and then the next minute I'm thinking, 'You could be a killer.'"
And what does he think now?
"Having studied it, learned it, filmed it, I feel none the wiser," he admits.
Read the full article in Radio Times magazine, out now
