Ten Questions with Matthew Goode
The actor has left behind the privileged world of Downton to play “DCI Del Boy” in a new cop drama
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- Craig McLean
All episodes of Dept Q will be available on Netflix from Thursday. Add it to your watchlist
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Matthew Goode is the star of Dept Q, a Scotland-based Netflix police procedural that puts a fresh spin on “tartan noir”. That twist is having a heavyweight American showrunner, Scott Frank (Godless, The Queen’s Gambit, Monsieur Spade) and an originally Danish story transposed from the source novels to Edinburgh. The dark drama has an appropriately all-star Scottish cast, including Mark Bonnar, Kelly Macdonald, Shirley Henderson, Kate Dickie and Jamie Sives. But leading from the front, as detective Carl Morck, is the 47-year-old Devon-born actor and father of three who starred in Downton Abbey and fantasy series A Discovery of Witches.
Dept Q is a cosmopolitan concept: based on a Danish crime novel, adapted by an American, filmed in Edinburgh with a Scottish cast but an English lead. What makes that mix work?
There are two stars of our show. One is Jussi Adler-Olsen, who wrote the original ten novels. The other is the showrunner Scott Frank. He scares me slightly, just because he’s intellectually far superior. And look at the amazing cast he assembled…
Did the smorgasbord of different Scottish accents ever confound you?
Only with some of the grips when they’d had a drink. Glaswegian is occasionally challenging. My brother went to university in Glasgow, so I spent time there. But even to me, when someone is drunk, the accent can be a bit quick. I occasionally just have to smile and nod.
Matthew Goode in Dept Q. Justin Downing/Netflix
Did you read the source novels for preparation?
I was told not to. And on this occasion, I listened to my director. In the past I have found it sometimes very useful, and sometimes it’s been a right pain to read the source material. Of course, things are going to change [from page to screen], and you’re going to hold on to a bit of the book – so it can become complicated.
DCI Carl Morck is an irascible curmudgeon with few friends. What’s made him that way?
Fifteen years on the murder squad and a divorce. But we might find out there’s other stuff from his past. I’ll be shot if I say more because we don’t know if this
will go to a second series.
In Downton I was edging towards becoming a bit of a wet lettuce
Matthew Goode
Are you generally a fan of detective shows?
My daughters and my wife watch everything. But I’ve also liked them since I was a kid. One of the films that made me think I might be able to do this job was Young Sherlock Holmes [from 1985, executive-produced by Steven Spielberg]. So, yes, bring on the detective genre. There’s always room for more.
Like every good telly ’tec, from Columbo and his raincoat to Luther’s herringbone overcoat, you have signature outerwear. How did you and the wardrobe department arrive at Morck’s sheepskin jacket?
We played around with a few options. I said, “It’s got to be the Del Boy, hasn’t it?” But it was funny to wear, because any wind, the jacket would suddenly whip up and you realise there’s two big, sheepy pockets inside. It ruined a few takes.
You and Scott Frank go back to his 2007 directorial debut film The Lookout. What are your memories of filming in Manitoba?
Getting off the plane and thinking, “I’d better go and buy a decent jacket.” Outside of our hotel it said: “Lowest recorded temperature in Canadian history”. It was something like minus 98. And then it said, in brackets: “plus wind chill”.
Your last television role was the criminally underrated 2022 drama series The Offer — about the making of the classic gangster film The Godfather — in which you played film producer Robert Evans. How did you go about inhabiting his old-school Hollywood flamboyance?
Matthew Goode as Lady Mary With Michelle Dockery in Downton Abbey. ITV
Once you work out the voice and characteristics, it becomes fun. But there was another role that they’d asked me about. Three months went and I thought, “Oh well, this isn’t going my way.” Then my agent phoned when I was on the golf course. “You’re playing Bob Evans.” “Who’s fallen out?” “It doesn’t matter, you’re doing it and you’ve got two weeks to prepare.” Fear got me through that. And if I hadn’t needed the funds desperately for me and the family, I would probably have found a way to inveigle my way out of it, because I’m a self-saboteur.
In Downton Abbey you were a posh love interest. In A Discovery of Witches, a posh suave vampire. In Death Comes to Pemberley, The Crown and Ordeal by Innocence, posh rogues… How worried are you about typecasting?
I’ve done other things! But you don’t always get choice. I know what you’re getting at. You want to have a difference. If you’re turning up with a pipe playing a Lord all the time, it would be terribly dull. But on all those projects, I was lucky to have great writing and great people.
Speaking of Downton, we saw your character Henry Talbot, the husband of Michelle Dockery’s Lady Mary, briefly in the first movie spin-off. But you weren’t in the second and you aren’t billed as being in the third. Why?
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I was unavailable for the second because I was doing The Offer. Then [for the third] I was shooting this. But I also buggered my knee, and I had to have an operation. That takes weeks to get over, so I was never going to be able to do it. And let’s face it, he was edging towards becoming a bit of a wet lettuce. So maybe it’s a good thing.
Authors
Craig McLean
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