You might have had an inkling about it, but that didn’t make the reveal on tonight’s The Level any less shocking: Nancy is Frank Le Saux’s daughter. Yes, the murdered drugs haulier she’s been protecting for years, and her best friend’s dad, is, well, her own dad. DUM DUM DUMM.
And if you had no idea the twist was coming then don’t worry, Karla Crome – the actress who plays good-or-maybe-very-bad-cop Nancy Devlin on ITV’s Brighton-based whodunnit – was none the wiser while reading the scripts.
She told RadioTimes.com: "I didn’t see that twist coming at the time. At all. I thought there was some bigger connection between Frank and Nancy, maybe something romantic. But I wasn’t expecting that!”
So, what are the wider implications of this revelation? Well, we now also know that the killer-on-the-loose was aware of the secret father/daughter relationship – remember, they previously sent a text to Nancy referring to her as “Frank’s girl” (the twist seems obvious now, right?). In other words, the murderer is probably somebody very close to our antiheroine.
And there’s a reason why Nancy looked so shocked about this in tonight's episode: while filming, Karla genuinely had no idea who the killer was.
Because the show was filmed in two chunks (episodes 1-3 in one lot, and 4-6 in another) she wasn’t given all the scripts at once, meaning she was largely in the dark during the first shooting block.
“It was easier to get into Nancy’s paranoid mindset as I didn’t know who the killer was,” said Karla. “In between takes I would be turning around to whoever was in the scene and say ‘is it you? Are you the Killer!?’. It was like playing real life Cluedo.”
So, just how much misery will Nancy be put through before she finally finds out who the killer is? “It’s going to get pretty bad for her," said Karla. "There’s so many upcoming little twists and turns in the next episodes and it’s going to be really interesting to see how much Nancy can take.”
In summary: things are going terribly for Nancy and they’re about to get a lot worse. We can't wait.
The Level continues 9pm next Friday on ITV1
