Who's who in The Victim
The characters
Published: 27 March 2019
Anna Dean (Kelly Macdonald)
Anna’s life changed forever the day her nine year-old son Liam was killed. She separated from Liam’s father and now has a new husband and young son called Ben. She continues to campaign for the rights of victims of crime and for her son’s killer’s new identity to be made public.
Craig Myers (James Harkness)
After an unhappy childhood and a wayward adolescence, Craig finally found peace and stability with his wife Rebecca. They are determined to give their daughter Jessica the loving upbringing neither of them had. He has everything he wants - a job he loves and a family he adores.
D.I. Steven Grover (John Hannah, pictured)
Grover is an experienced detective investigating the attack on Craig and trying to discover who made the online accusation against him.
Louise Dean (Isis Hainsworth)
Louise is Anna and Christian’s daughter. She is doing a law degree and living at home to stay close to her mum.
Danny Callaghan (Andrew Rothney)
Danny is Louise’s boyfriend, and despite the age difference of ten years they are inseparable.
Lenny Dean (Jamie Sives)
Lenny is Anna’s new husband and he believes Anna’s obsession with Liam’s killer is slowly killing her too. He truly loves her but he needs her to move on for both their sakes - and crucially their son’s.
Rebecca Myers (Karla Crome)
Rebecca is Craig’s wife. Like him, her childhood wasn’t a happy time, and when they got together the two decided to make a fresh start. Their daughter Jessica is the centre of their world.
Tom Carpenter (John Scougall)
Tom is Craig’s best friend and is good company. Where Craig can be caustically sarcastic, Tom appears open minded and open hearted.
Ella Mackie (Chloe Pirrie)
Ella is Craig’s lawyer and believes passionately in justice - but not always the law. Despite her inexperience she’s dedicated, ambitious and hard-working.
Solomon Mishra (Ramon Tikaram)
Solomon is Anna’s lawyer and is determined that justice should be available for all, and not just all who can afford it. He will use all of his considerable skill to represent Anna’s point of view.
Christian Graham (Cal MacAninch)
Christian is Anna’s ex-husband and serving his fifth custodial sentence since Liam’s death, all for drink-related offences. He is a trained accountant, but just can’t get back on track.
Mo Buckley (Pooky Quesnel)
Mo is Anna’s friend. She worked in the courts for a while before setting herself up as a private investigator, at the non-glamorous end of the market, and she has contacts in all sorts of places.
William Napier (Nicholas Nunn)
William is a troubled young man in his early 20s and a patient at the GP surgery where Anna works.
Who is The Victim and what is the show about?
Kelly: The Victim is a great title. For four episodes you should be wondering who the real victim is.
John: 'The title signifies how we are all impacted by events. In this crime, everyone’s sort of a victim. I think there was a survey that said for every crime there are six victims at least, in terms of the perpetrator, the perpetrated, their family, ancillary family and friends etc. People become the accused, people become the victim, people become persons of interest, giving evidence, and everyone has a title that takes away their humanity. I think it’s about how we are all in a way victims of the systems that we have.
James: I don’t think any of the characters would class themselves as a victim - that would come from the perception of someone else. Not many people would call themselves a victim, I think.
Rob: I wanted to tell a story in which all the people through a certain lens could be viewed as victims. I called the show The Victim because I’ve been interested for a long time in the ripple effect of a crime, not just through a family, but through a community, sometimes through a country.
Sarah: The title says many things about the show. Clearly, there is one very important victim and that is Liam, Anna’s son, and the whole story springs from him.
Can you tell us more about the characters?
Kelly: I play a woman called Anna Dean who lives in Edinburgh with her family and who had a really horrendous experience in her life 15 years prior to when we meet her, and she’s still trying to get over it. I found her quite abrasive and unlikeable in places, which was part of the appeal, weirdly. I quite often get cast as very-good-upright-in-the-community. Anna has a family, she’s a mother, but she’s grieving and she doesn’t always behave impeccably - and so it felt very human to me.
John: Paradoxically, when you have a show where there’s a cop near the centre of it, that cop has issues, relationship issues, drinking issues, issues with authority, they drive an old car, they’ve got a quirky hobby, there’s all this stuff that’s trying to be squeezed in to say something about the character of that individual, and yet, most policeman in the execution of their job are trying not to be ‘characters’.
James: Craig is a family man, he’s a hard worker and he’s a bus driver. He grew up in a bit of a rough background but now he’s just a very determined family man who enjoys his work. The writing is incredible, and as a young actor it was the chance to play a very detailed part: someone that’s really committed and comes from a place that I come from as well, that was good. I’ve just become a father myself as well.
Rob: It was so important to cast the central roles of Anna and Craig well. We talked about Kelly early on, and it was very useful for me to have her in mind when I was writing the latter episodes, and then to go back to the earlier scripts [knowing we had her].
Kelly was and is Anna. To have an artist who can deliver both the passion and the anger, but also just the incredible humanity she brings to all her her roles - it's impossible to think about Anna as being played by anybody else.
Grover, of the leading characters, was more of an unknown quantity to me, even when I was writing him. That was until we saw and spoke to John, and actually he very much informed the character of Grover, which was really useful.
In James’ case, we instantly saw the rawness that he brings to the role. We always talked about the character needing to be somebody who you’d be slightly nervous of, but who you’d want to mother a bit. And that’s an incredibly difficult quality to have.
Sarah: One of the things that I am very keen to do is get more production in Scotland and take advantage of the incredible talent both behind the screen and on screen here. On screen we have international world class talent like Kelly Macdonald and John Hannah which is completely wonderful. We are also going to be showcasing the talent of some those emerging stars - the stars of tomorrow.
What interested you in The Victim and why is it different to other courtroom dramas?
Kelly: There's so much drama there, and that was exciting. I liked Anna's character and all of the grey areas. You kind of like her, but she behaves in a way you wouldn’t yourself. Within an episode your loyalties will be shifting and moving; it’ll keep everyone on their toes.
It’s not a courtroom drama, although there is a lot of that in there. It’s about family dynamics, it’s a mystery, it’s a thriller, but it’s grounded and real. It takes one tragic event and shows the domino effect on so many people. It’s basically about two families, good and bad. Nothing is black and white - it’s almost Shakespearean.
John: When I first read the script it came across kind of like one of those dramatised documentaries that are quite prevalent at the moment. As we go through the four hours people’s opinions will change: out of it all comes this horrendous story. The Director, Niall, has a background in documentaries, and there is a certainly a sense of trying not to make it too dramatic - trying not to impose drama upon each moment.
James: The story basically is about a hard-working family man accused of killing a child when he was a child. Again, you don’t know if it was him or it wasn’t, but it’s more focused on the fact of the smear campaign, and how hard it is for someone’s life to be completely turned upside down - and also for the accuser. She’s determined to find answers, she’s looking everywhere she can, and trying everything she can to get them. It’s a story of determination I think.
Rob: When I was thinking about the idea for The Victim, I decided that I would like to set the series in Scotland, just because there are subtle but also quite large differences in the way the Scottish legal system works compared to the English legal system.
Finding a vehicle to explore the difference between the human need for justice and the law’s need for a black and white resolution - alongside a real desire to write something people talk about and disagree about - coalesced.
I would describe The Victim as a courtroom drama, but also a crime drama and a relationship drama. It is hopefully universal, in as much as it seeks to explore the effect of a crime not just those directly involved, but also the people who are indirectly affected by it.
It’s a thriller with a big question at the heart of it, but it’s also, essentially, a character-driven piece about the lasting effect of crime.
Put simply: as a mother who has lost a child in horrific circumstances, what would you do if you simply couldn’t move past that? How far would you go to feel that some justice had been done? And alongside that, how would you feel if you were accused of something so grievous without any evidence, knowing full well how difficult it is to prove you haven’t done something?
Where did the idea come from?
Sarah: Rob Williams is a writer I’d worked with before, and we had been talking about the Oscar Pistorious trial, how everyone in the office was talking about it and people had different views about what the truth was. We were discussing why it is that drama rarely have the same power to divide people and get them talking, so we talked about the kind of issues that might divide people in the way that real-life cases sometimes do - and out of that came the idea for The Victim.
The Victim is set in Scotland and has a very strong sense of place. It is set within the Scottish legal system, which is unique, but it is also a show that has big, incredibly universal themes, which anyone the world over could relate to.
One of the most important things was that the drama felt completely authentic, in terms of legal procedure and police procedure and court procedure, but also in terms of authenticity of performance. We were dealing with big, emotive subject matter and we needed somebody who was really going to treat that with a real sense of responsibility, someone who would do justice to those kinds of stories.
What can viewers expect from The Victim?
Kelly: I think it’s a compelling mystery. I’m hoping that viewers will want to find out what the truth is.
John: I think people will have a gut reaction to it and then they’ll find themselves questioning that. It’ll be a game of four halves!
James: It’s about legal proceedings, but this is a completely different story to any that has been told before; it’s unique and it stands on its own. It’s definitely something you can come back to and watch two or three times and see it in different ways. What I believe is, the audience will invest in those characters from the very beginning - because they both have very powerful stories -and will want to go on a journey with them, because they really care about their fates and care about how the things are going to unfold.
Sarah: There’s one fantastically big question running through the whole show, which is whether Craig Myers is really Eddie J Turner. And that’s a question that I hope will drive viewers to the very end of the show. It’s a story that works on many levels: it works on the level of genre, in the sense that each episode has a fantastic cliff hanger. It leaves the audience in a very different place at the end of each episode from where they started, in unexpected and very surprising ways.
Rob: It’s the characters. It’s Kelly Macdonald as Anna. It’s James Harkness as Craig. It’s John Hannah as Grover and the wider cast who are just fantastic, and we will want to know more about their stories. They’ve all got stories that we will come to care about them very quickly and will want to come back to see what happens to them. By the end of the series, we’ll be able to look at each character and say actually their life was changed that day by that act, and things were never the same again.
