Interview with Executive Producer Ruth Kenley-Letts
Interview with Excutive Producer Ruth Kenley-Letts
Published: 15 August 2017
For me it's a crime show, but it’s also a big love affair, written by an author who has a track record and great skill in knowing how to spin a story and have everybody shouting from the stalls: "Robin/Strike - get together, please!"
When you first engage with this project?
While I was doing The Casual Vacancy, a couple of years ago. The BBC commissioned the three books: The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm and Career Of Evil.
We decided at that original commissioning meeting that the sensible way to proceed would be to shoot all three books at the same time so we could hold on to our two leads, whoever they were to be, whilst we had them.
The idea was to get the three books in the bag at the same time and then the BBC and other international broadcasters like Cinemax in the U.S. would be able to transmit them at a later date either grouped together or transmit them individually.
Career Of Evil hadn’t even been published at that point, so even I didn’t know what was in store for us on that third book. It came through a few weeks afterwards. There was a manuscript locked in a safe and the only way I could read it was to go and sit in a room and read as many pages as I could in each sitting!
As a producer, how do you go about approaching the books from a visual point of view?
It starts with conversations with the directors, production designer, costume designer and directors of photography. They’re bringing their visual eye to a project. When you meet people it’s not so much that somebody like me comes up with what it’s going to look like - but I always know what I don’t want it to look like.
You meet some people and they may say something in a meeting and you think to yourself, no this really doesn’t feel right. You end up employing the people who you feel are on the same page as you.
The challenge of the show was to make sure that we could feel contemporary. In the books, especially the first two, you have a private investigator who’s interviewing many suspects one by one. Then at the very end of the book you’ll be told who ‘done it’ and on how Strike’s solved it.
That’s quite a traditional trope. But Robert Galbraith has taken a very contemporary setting, in London, and told stories with very contemporary characters. We wanted to make sure that we were able to capture that, not only in the visuals but also in the way we told the stories.
Can you set out for us where we are when we are first introduced to Strike?
The premise of the story is that Strike has just left his girlfriend of 15 years, Charlotte Campbell. It’s been a tumultuous relationship, they’ve lived together, they’ve not lived together. They met at university in Oxford. He left Oxford after a year and joined the Army. Charlotte’s always been against him being in the army and that was one of many thorns in their relationship.
When we meet him he’s left the Army, having served in Helmand, and where he lost his leg when it was blown off in an IUD attack in an armoured vehicle. Fast forward a couple of years and we meet him having suffered the trauma of a missing limb; he’s got no money, he’s in debt and he’s just walked out of this relationship with Charlotte. He has nowhere to live, so he’s sleeping in his office in Denmark Street, which is an attic room at the top of a building in Denmark Street.
This case throws him right into the middle of the fashion industry. Is this completely at odds with Cormoran's world?
Yes, that’s true. But he has been with Charlotte, who is a high society girl, so although fashion isn’t going to be Strike’s thing, it’s not a world that he’s totally alienated from because of his associations with Charlotte.
Also his mother, Leda Strike, was a quite well-known super-groupie back in the day and hung out with famous groups and pop stars. Those worlds are sometimes aligned closely together. But she was a drug addict and she ended up living in a squat and didn’t have a penny to rub together. So, he comes from a quite dysfunctional upbringing and has lived in squalor.
Do you think that it wasn't an accident that he’s ended up in an office in Denmark Street, one of the iconic rock and roll addresses?
It makes you think doesn’t it, why did he end up in Denmark Street? Also, of course he’s the bastard child of Johnny Rokeby, who was a big rock-and-roll star, and when we meet Strike his father is still a well-known man. So, everybody knows who his Dad is, but he’s never really known his father. I think he’s only met him a couple of times. He doesn’t have a good or strong relationship with him at all.
Being a private investigator gives the character the opportunity to meet different types of people from different walks of life. Do you think that’s why the books are so interesting, because they allow this character to move around London in such a unique way?
He’s such a likeable character; partly for me it’s because he gives so little away. But you sense that he’s very empathetic to all sorts of people. He’s somebody who can sit and chat to the guy that runs the Afghan café that he goes to for a big fry up, as well as somebody who can spend time with a character like Lady Bristow in The Cuckoo’s Calling, who is very posh and distinguished. He seems equally comfortable with either. He definitely is somebody who can mix with all sorts of people from very different strata.
What do you think makes women like him so much?
Ooh, he’s a dark horse isn’t he? He doesn’t say very much. He’s a bit of a mystery man. I think because he’s not a pretty boy or classically handsome, but he’s such an attractive character and you sense the complexity and vulnerability very quickly so I think he is definitely a character that lots of women will find very appealing.
They're big boots to fill for an actor. Did you wonder who on earth could play such a larger-than-life character?
It was a nightmare, actually. The first thing is, what distinguishes him physically is he’s 6' 4" and rather overweight in the books and when you look for actors that are that kind of height and breadth, there really aren’t very many. Especially in the UK. I think you’d have a bit more choice if you were casting it as an American actor. He also feels larger than life. When he walks down a street you kind of feel you’d notice him, he’s a really big physical presence.
Tom Burke sort of came into my imagination when I was first reading the book and thinking about casting. We’d worked together on a show called The Hour so I knew what he was capable of as an actor. I’ve seen him on the stage many times, too. For me he has quite a dark quality as well as somebody whose work is multi layered, and it was all these qualities that I felt would work really well for the part.
Every time we talked about casting, Tom Burke always stayed at the top of my list. He just always kept coming up for me as others were talked about. When I met Tom to talk about the role, he was so engaged with the character that that just made me feel that he was the right man for the job.
One other thing is I really wanted to cast somebody who hadn’t played this kind of role before and would be fresh to an audience. Tom hasn’t played a leading cop.
Did he surprise you in some of the aspects that he brought as the character? Did you feel that he was fulfilling the profile?
What I loved about working with Tom was his dedication to getting it right - the weeks and weeks of training he did to bulk himself up to fill that role, to fill those shoes. Even small things like the fact that Strike as a character had spent quite a lot of time in Cornwall being looked after by his aunt and uncle. He really worked hard to just get a little bit of that accent into his performance. He’s a very detailed actor, he thinks long and hard about what he’s doing and I think all those virtues have really benefited us.
Let’s talk about Robin. We so rarely see such a well-rounded female lead, what were you looking for when you were casting her?
I felt we had to find somebody we could just fall in love with, because the Robin in my imagination and in the book is so warm and gorgeous and open. All the things that Strike isn’t, really. He’s very guarded and keep things to himself and Robin needed to be somebody who was open and instantly likeable. We needed to find an actress who was Northern, naturally, as Robin is from Yorkshire.
We met a lot of actresses for the part and Holliday’s audition came in quite late. She was doing a film in Georgia and we couldn’t actually meet her. So she talked to Michael Keillor, the director, and then prepared a scene which she sent over. I remember very clearly, seeing her audition first thing in the morning one day and it was like, "Oh, that’s Robin. That’s it we’ve found our Robin.We can’t lose her now! We have to book her as soon as possible and get the deal done".
She was perfect, she completely nailed it.
You filled the show out with some fantastic guest stars too. Is that important when you’re making a show like this?
What’s always important is to try to cast the best person for the role. If you’re casting the part of a 70 year-old man, the kind of actors that are available are going to be actors that you’ve heard of. So the two go hand in hand. But it’s always important to start off with the character in the book that then is in the script. It’s not just about who’s the most well-known actor that will give the show extra gravitas. It’s about making the best the choice for the show.
Does the fact that this show isn’t a procedural give you the freedom to move away from the tropes of the classic private detective story?
I think it does. For me it's a crime show, but it’s also a big love affair. I feel that these books are going to keep coming out and that the relationship between Strike and Robin is going to go through ups and downs. I feel it’s a love story and written by an author who has a track record and great skill in knowing how to spin a story and have everybody shouting from the stalls: "Robin/Strike - get together, please!"
I’m dying to see what Robert Galbraith has planned for us further down the line and what he’s going construct that will get in the way of these two getting together. And honestly, who knows, will they get together in the end or not, I’m not going to predict anything. They should and I hope they do. They’re made for each other, they’re brilliant together.
