Wreck cast: Meet the crew of potential killers from the BBC Three show

Everyone has a secret on the Sacramentum. Meet the cast of characters from BBC Three’s Wreck and discover the dark secrets they might be hiding according to the actors who play them.

Wreck is BBC Three’s new comedy drama, set on a cruise ship where every cast member seems to be hiding a secret – and for at least one of them, that secret involves a mysterious murder.

At the start of the show, which starts on BBC Three on Sunday 9 October, a young woman named Pippa (played by Jodie Tyack) is forced to jump off the cruise ship by a knife-wielding person in a duck suit. Just another day aboard the Sacramentum. A few months later, her brother Jamie (Ladhood’s Oscar Kennedy) comes on board to find out the truth.

Which Wreck cast member killed her? You will have to watch to find out. But before the shocking truth is revealed, BBC Three spoke to the cast to get them to give us an insight into their characters – and hint at the dark secrets they might be keeping.

Leading the cast is Ladhood's Oscar Kennedy, playing Jamie. This is a very different character, however, from Ladhood's Liam. As the actor described his role: “Jamie is a young lad from Sheffield. He's not quite so sure of himself. He's a bit of a social outcast.

“He's had a troubled home life, and now he’s lost the only person that he cares about and cared about him, his sister Pippa. So his new sole motivation in life is to find out what happened to her.”

And so Jamie does what anyone would do: He buys the identity of a former employee of the cruise ship company and takes on the new identity of Cormac to get on board the Sacramentum and discover the truth.

Is Jamie a suspect? Jamie might be the only person onboard who is not a suspect in the disappearance of his sister.

Jamie’s first ally on board becomes Vivian, a fellow new recruit on the cruise. She is played by Thaddea Graham, recently seen in BBC series like Doctor Who and Us.

Like many of the cast of characters in Wreck, she is on the run from something. As Thaddea puts it: “Vivian is kind of on the run from home, she's just come out to her parents as gay and they've gone, ‘that's great. But don't tell anyone.’ She won’t let them get away with that, so she maxes out her dad's credit card to get onto the ship. And then I think finds a lot more than what she was expecting to find.”

Speaking of her character’s bond with Jamie, she said: “I think both of them have quite a similar experience. And then they come together after she sees him sniffing around for information. So they kind of form a little partnership.”

Is Vivian a suspect? She was not involved in Pippa’s disappearance, but that does not mean her past is entirely clean…

Jamie is not the only one broken hearted about Pippa. Danny (played by Noughts + Crosses star Jack Rowan) was in a relationship with her, and is now trying to get over his loss by making the most of the Sacramentum nightlife. However, could he know more about what happened to Pippa than he's letting on?

Is Danny a suspect? As any murder mystery fan knows, the partner is always a prime suspect for a good reason – usually, they know the victim best, and have the most reasons to kill them off. So it's no wonder that Danny is the prime suspect once Jamie starts digging around the ship...

Olly is a crew member who has worked on the ship’s fast food restaurant for a couple of years – so when Jamie needs to learn quickly how things work, Olly becomes a strong ally.

Actor Anthony Rickman had this to say about his character: “He's quite cool and confident. He's a bit of a social butterfly who has learned to navigate the social hierarchy of the ship… But then the arc is that the more he finds out and the more horrifying everything gets, the more resentful and bitter and jaded he becomes.”

There is also a potential romantic spark between Olly and Jamie – making Wreck UK TV’s first horror show with a queer couple at its centre. What Anthony liked about this was that it was not treated as a big deal: “With Olly and Jamie, there's so much else at stake and so much else going on that their sexuality never needs to be legitimised or validated or scrutinised. It's just accepted and then we get on this thrill ride.”

Is Olly a suspect? Anyone who knows that much about how the ship works would certainly know how to make someone disappear if they wanted to…

According to actress Harriet Webb, Karen is “a lovely psychopath” who rules the ship with “an iron fist. The I May Destroy You star, describes her character, who is First Officer on the ship as, “a dutiful woman, probably quite lonely.”

She is also Scottish, a new challenge for the English actress. “She was written that way,” Harriet said of her accent. “I just felt she was so powerful like that, so hard and sinister.”

Is Karen a suspect? Definitely. Harriet hinted Karen "loves her boys deeply” – and anyone who loves her fellow officers that much is surely willing to do anything to protect them…

“Beaker is the most loveliest, kindest, gentlest person aboard the ship… a true Officer and a Gentleman,” Warren James Dunning joked, before revealing the truth: “He's an awful, awful human being. He's a sociopath. He’s a psychopath. He's narcissistic. He's got mummy issues.”

Karen’s second-in-command, Beaker “uses his power to tear people down and really find out people's weaknesses.”

Is Beaker a suspect? Even if he had nothing to do with what happened to Pippa, this is a man with a violent past: One look at Beaker’s moustache and aviators and you know that he’s trouble. Keep him in a claustrophobic environment like a cruise ship and it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens…

Compared to Beaker, Sam seems like a teddy bear, but do not be fooled. Actor Louis Boyer (Netflix’s Outside the Wire) said of Sacramentum’s Third Officer: “He's a little bit more introspective than a few of the testosterone-fuelled dirtbag officers. He’s a bit more of a vulnerable soul when you scratch beneath the surface.”

Is Sam a suspect? Though he seems like the least villainous of the officers, Sam has a fatal flaw. As Louis teased: “He can't help himself when it comes to sleeping with crew members, which often lands him in hot water…” Could he be capable of doing something drastic to cover up his indiscretions?

“She's a Romford girl. She's from East London, much like myself,” said the actress who plays Lauren, Amber Grappy. “She loves a party. She loves her friends.” You can see why this would lead her to join the work-hard, party-hard crew of the Sacramentum – but she could also be running away from her life on land…

Is Lauren a suspect? She seems like one of the most purely good characters in Wreck – but on this show, nothing is as it seems. As Amber said, “I think she's got a ferocious care for the people in her life, and I think that manifests in the things that she does…”

Alongside the crew and the officers, Wreck also has another clique: The onboard performers. And if the actors put on a performance of Mean Girls, Sophia would definitely be the Regina George. As Alice Nokes said of her character: “she's the typical mean girl… she's very manipulative, a bit of a powerhouse. But I do think later on in the series, you can see a more vulnerable side to her. And you kind of see she's in constant conflict of doing the right thing and fitting in for her reputation's sake.”

Is Sophia a suspect? Depends how far you think her mean streak goes – is she capable of bumping off Pippa to keep the lead role?

What cruise ship would be complete without a Cher impersonator. And in Wreck, that impersonator is Rosie, who can often be seen walking onboard in iconic Cher outfits.

In fact, the costume contained a real item that the singer and actor actually wore. As Miya Ocego revealed: “One of the costume designers on the set [of Wreck] worked on Mamma Mia 2, and she grabbed a pair of shoes that Cher wore in that. So I actually wore [Cher's] shoes.”

Rosie’s time on the Sacramentum, however, is not all Cher shows: She is also the ex-girlfriend of the real Cormac (Peter Claffey), causing plenty of onboard drama.

Is Rosie a suspect? Seems unlikely, but we know that performers will do whatever they can to keep the spotlight…

Wreck starts Sunday October 9 on BBC Three. All six episodes will be released at once onto BBC iPlayer.

Originally published 6 October 2022.