He wears the suit almost as well as the thousand-yard stare he sports for scenes in which he isn’t beating up baddies – old-fashioned fisticuffs, throwing them through windows and such – or muttering into his sleeve. “It’s always fun playing the haunted man,” Compston says, “and Brody’s history is murky. We think he’s the good guy, and he does some good things, but who is he really?”
“We had a terrific stunt co-ordinator and stunt guys who are just great to collaborate with on those scenes,” Compston enthuses. “The trust that you build when you’re throwing guys through stuff.”
He really threw himself into the physical side of the role, training regularly with the director of Red Eye, Kieron Hawkes. “He’s one of my best friends and he got me into Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art. I train four or five times a week so when we were doing Red Eye, Kieran and I lived in the same apartment block with its own gym space, so we’d train at night.”
As well he might be. He may do a bit of running around on Line of Duty but we all know that Vicky McClure is the muscle of that operation. In Red Eye, Compston is a bona fide action hero.
And Compston had big shoes to fill, replacing Richard Armitage as Red Eye’s male lead. “Because he’s a big old fella, those literally are big shoes! And he’s a proper movie star. I mean, I loved The Hobbit movies!’ Still, Compston relished the pressure. “The first series was a massive success. You’re coming onto it because it’s good and it’s your job to try and take it to the next level, to make it bigger and bolder. And I think we do that. It’s a good pressure.”
View Green Video on the source website“We're just grown-ups running around playing cops and robbers. The writer Pete [Peter A Dowling] grew up on films like Die Hard, Speed and The Fugitive, which don’t make any sense but are a helluva lot of fun. As this show goes on, it gets bigger and more unbelievable - but it's escapism. That's what people want to see sometimes. Of course there are times for dramas like Mr Bates Versus the Post Office but there are other times when people just want to sit down and be entertained. Red Eye lives in that space which makes it perfect viewing for this time of year.
“I've worked with people who are Method actors and I've worked with people who can be telling you an anecdote about how many drinks they had last night and then switch into character. There's no right way of doing it. If you can just deliver what's on that page, whatever way you can, then that's all that matters for me. Essentially, there's no awards for what you do off-screen.”
I ask Compston if doing conspiracy thrillers like Red Eye and Line of Duty changes the way he looks at the world.
Does the state of the world worry him, especially as the father of a young child?
“It can make you insular,” he says after a moment. “Because you just go ‘The world's turning to shit so I'm just going to look after me and mine and not care about anybody else’. But that's what they want you to think. So you have got to guard against that to an extent because it can make you selfish and make people want to turn on things that they should be defending.”
“It does get my back up when I hear the NHS getting attacked. Being in America a lot, I always find it bizarre when I hear American politicians saying ‘We don't want our health system to end up like Britain’. The NHS is one of the greatest things about being British and an institution we should be proud of.
Compston recalls going to hospital following a minor car accident in Los Angeles a few years ago: “The doctor told me that I needed an MRI and it would cost two grand. I said ‘I’m not paying two grand for an MRI’ and the doctor replied ‘No, you get their insurance to pay for it’. And that’s when I realised that’s what it’s all about: an industry sustaining itself. It’s a bit of a racket. Which is quite depressing.”
“The BBC is a great institution. Of course it can be improved – of course it can! – but you look at the licence fee and if it was a Netflix, Apple or Amazon saying ‘you’re going to get all these channels, all these dramas and radio and podcasts’ and everything you get for the licence fee, you’d go ‘that is a great deal’. For me, the licence feel is very much worth it,” he says. “In relation to Red Eye, it’s on in that 9pm slot on ITV. That slot on both ITV and BBC1 is where you want to be as an actor because you feel as if you’re with the whole of the UK. It’s the crème de la crème.”
Speaking of which – and really it couldn’t have been a better segway if I, or a shadowy organisation, had planned it – I think this is my cue to ask Compston about the return of Line of Duty. After all, he once told Radio Times that it’d be a sad day when he wasn’t asked about Line of Duty - and who am I to make the 41-year-old actor glum? No danger of that as he breaks into a broad grin.
With it now official that the cop’n’corruption drama will return, dare I ask when AC-12 gets back together?
Is there anything he can say about the story?
Combative, perhaps. But Martin Compston is also feeling contented.
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