'Murder mysteries don't appeal to me'
Despite admitting she’s not a big fan of the genre, Phyllis Logan takes the lead in a new cosy crime drama – puzzling indeed…
Channel 5
- Ginny Dougary
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Phyllis Logan may not be as wildly exuberant as her character Cora Felton in a new soft murder series, Murder Most Puzzling – for the first time in a long career she has the main role, playing a flamboyantly dressed, smoking, swearing, gun-toting, kinky-sex-loving, married-six-times, Bloody-Marys-for-breakfast kinda gal – but she’s no po-faced goody-goody bore either.
The last time we met was in 2013, when I interviewed her for one of the later seasons of Downton Abbey. She was joined as Mrs Hughes by Jim Carter’s beloved Mr Carson and I was yet another pesky interviewer asking, “Will they, won’t they?” (spoiler alert, they did). She told me a joke so filthy it couldn’t be printed in a family magazine.
There’s a heavy artillery of f-words in Murder Most Puzzling – does Logan swear as much as Cora in real life? Pause, a dry laugh and then, in her gently modulated Scottish accent: “Well, of course!” The strongest expletive I hear, for the most part of our interview, is when the doorbell rings and she mutters, “Oh blimey, oh Riley,” under her breath.
Logan and
Jim Carter in Downton Abbey. Shutterstock
However, when we talk about growing older – I’m 68, she is 69 – and I mention Jane Fonda in that fantastic series of unlikely friendship Grace and Frankie, Logan doesn’t hold back: “Now, she is well old. I know I’m old, but isn’t she in her 80s?” Are we having an aging competition now? “Well, we’re much younger than her!”
And apropos of Mike Leigh, with whom she worked about 30 years ago on one of his most successful films, Secrets and Lies, she can’t resist a little dig: “With Mike you don’t have a script whatsoever. You make it up yourself, which would imply that you are one of the writers. But, of course, nobody ever gets a credit for that in any of his films!”
We are talking on Zoom and the actor is sitting in the light-filled kitchen of the west-London home she shares with her husband of 14 years, fellow actor Kevin McNally. Behind her, a cast of different people come and go – grown-up children, friends including Lesley Nicol (aka Downton’s Mrs Patmore) whose dog, Freddie, Logan has been minding.
It's encouraging that older women aren't invisible anymore
Jim Carter had said that his co-star was an incredible hostess and her home was always full of people, so this background bustle seems par for the course. “We used to have endless people coming to stay, relatives and friends, there was always someone with us. It became a bit of a joke on the set at Downton – ‘So, who have you got in the house this week?’”
She is easy and fun to be with and we exchange recipes –her current favourites are pasta with fennel, sausage meat and saffron, and a lentil soup with ginger, spinach and chilli: “I’ve given it to so many people but it’s not up my husband’s street. He’s a big snacker which… [I detect a slight pucker of disapproval – a flicker of Mrs Hughes] Snacking’s fine, but I do like to sit down to a proper dinner.”
We also swap our top authors. “I like a substantial novel, something that’s not necessarily based on true life and not a murder mystery, like Val [McDermid] – I love her but that kind of book isn’t up my street. I love Kate Atkinson’s books, I’ve read them all. Inventive writing that’s very smart, very clever. I recommend her.”
Then she remembers some of Atkinson’s early books, the Jackson Brodie series, which were turned into a TV series starring Jason Isaacs as a former soldier and police officer. “Having said that I don’t read that kind of book, those books were exactly that. He’s different, you see – his girlfriend is an actress, so that was intriguing to me.”
Logan as Cora Felton with Adam Best as DCI Derek Hooper in Murder Most Puzzling.
Murder Most Puzzling, based on the books with the same name by American author Parnell Hall, is a classic “cosy crime” set-up where Cora, a famous puzzle-setter, insinuates herself into assisting the police and solves the murder – think The Marlow Murder Club, The Madame Blanc Mysteries and, of course, Ludwig, of which more anon. Cora Felton is running away from an abusive rock-star husband and seeks refuge with her niece Sherry Carter – basically Absolutely Fabulous’s Saffy to Cora’s Edina – in the market town of Bakerbury, once sleepy but now positively thrummingly alive with death.
But Cora isn’t all she seems. When asked about home-baked biscuits she promotes as part of her brand, she says, “Oh, I don’t make them myself!” with a whiff of mock-horror, suggesting, “Do I look like someone who bakes?!”
How does it feel to be the lead, does it feel different? An extra sense of responsibility for the show’s success? “It definitely does and I didn’t take it lightly. I was actually quite daunted by it – and I mentioned that to the director, Tom [Dalton] when I first met him and we spoke about the possibility that I might do it…
“Just looking at all the scripts and my involvement in practically every scene [a small, amazed laugh] on every page, I thought – you know – physically I don’t know if I’ve got the stamina for something this big. So, it was daunting and because of taking the principal role… you obviously want the audience to relate to you and, yes, it’s all a big responsibility.”
But once you started was it fun? “Oh God, yes – but it was hard work, Ginny, don’t get me wrong. I was exhausted.”
In The Bombing of Pan Am 103. BBC/World Productions
Straight after filming Murder Most Puzzling, Logan went into filming another police procedural called A Taste for Murder (she rolls the ‘r’s with relish), for Britbox US (she thinks that it will air on ITV at a later date in the UK). Does she like watching soft murder or hard murder or no murder at all? “I’m not really into murders, I have to say – murder mysteries don’t really appeal to me.”
While watching Murder Most Puzzling I was struck by the two-buses syndrome, since we have recently seen David Mitchell playing a crossword-creating sleuth in his cosy crime series, Ludwig. What are the chances?
Logan says that she was filming the BBC series about the Lockerbie tragedy, The Bombing of Pan Am 103 (available on iPlayer) at the same time as Colin Firth was filming his Sky series, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (available on Now), which must have been challenging for the community: “It still throws up a lot of unanswered questions – it’s horrific, actually. We shot it in the big Lockerbie Cemetery [and Garden of Remembrance] and there was one gravestone which was dedicated to people whose house had been directly hit and it said, ‘Bodies never recovered’. They were plainly just vaporised, this family. It’s horrible. Anyway, that’s just me saying that these two series on the same subject were also being filmed at the same time.”
We talk about there being more interesting roles for older women now. “It’s encouraging that we’re not invisible any more. There are myriad different types of 69-year-olds and it’s nice to play Cora with her fabulous outfits. I just love it, so long may it continue. But whether it will or not…”
Logan is such a talented actor, she doesn’t play her character just for laughs or as a cartoonish figure. Even in the first episode, she shows Cora’s vulnerability and how important it is for her to have purpose and be taken seriously. I wonder, though, is there a new stereotype for older women that they have to be quirky, a bit of “a character” and isn’t there a danger in this, that our life experience and even wisdom could get discounted?
It's time to hang up our Downton keys and say goodbye
“I think it’s usually someone who you’d call eccentric who might also be called ‘a character’ – I don’t think Cora is herself eccentric. She might be in the way that she dresses but I think she, herself, is quite straightforward.”
Cora’s earrings are notably gravity-defying; Logan says she used to wear such bold ones, too, but now – as she demonstrates, with her dainty studs – she’s more Inigo Jones to Cora’s Frank Gehry.
Since graduating at 21, Logan has continued to act and feels grateful for having been able to sustain a long career. Her husband has been in every Pirates of the Caribbean film, and she has had Downton which, as she says, was a huge worldwide success, “and gave me lots of opportunities and is a great stroke of luck which has enabled me to be more picky, I suppose.”
This September sees the release of the third and final Downton Abbey film and we cannot part ways without having a Downton moment or two. When she spoke to this magazine just before the sixth and final season of the television series, she talked about a sort of “grieving”.
Logan with her husband Kevin McNally in Miss Austen.
“Well, that is a bit overblown, isn’t it. I mean, come on! But, God, it was sad,” she says. Jim Carter was blubbing! “I remember standing by the make-up truck to get my wig on and Lesley – who just picked up her dog – that is, Mrs Patmore was there and Sophie [McShera, aka Daisy, the maid], we three were stood sobbing into each other’s necks for about 20 minutes.
“And then Jim made a speech and started breaking up – and that’s not Jim at all – and so that set everybody off. There was a boom operator and one of the sparks – great big guys, you know, and they were sobbing behind him and I was, like [here it comes! Cursing alert], ‘Oh, for f**k’s sake, I can’t take this!
“So that was sad – but we were so lucky that we got to do the three movies and we could all be together again.”
Do you think you’ll get weepy again when the last film is screened? “No, because it’s probably – no, definitely – time to hang up our Downton keys and say goodbye.
“I did love playing that character, so it’s sad in a way that I won’t be getting into that wig again and putting that chatelaine on…” She stops for a second, as though genuinely struck by a revelatory idea.
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“But I could always go shopping with them around my waist, now that would be weird.”
Authors
Ginny Dougary
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