Netflix's sweary Dept Q detective felt 'liberating' for Matthew Goode to play

Yahoo

5 days ago

Dept Q detective Carl Morck hasn't got many friends, in fact he probably hasn't got any because he's rude, prickly, and has a knack for rubbing people up the wrong way — but that's exactly what made him "liberating" to play for actor Matthew Goode, he tells Yahoo UK.
The Netflix crime drama centres on Goode's grizzly detective, who has recently returned to work after being shot in an attack that left his partner paralysed and another policeman dead. In a bid to keep him out of the way, Carl's boss sends him to the basement as the head of a new cold case unit where Carl is joined by fellow exiles Akram (Alexej Manvelov) and Rose (Leah Byrne) and they begin by looking into the odd disappearance of a civil servant four years earlier.
Carl is snarky, sarcastic, and full of rage, the kind of person you wouldn't want to cross because you wouldn't know how he'd react. It's a very different character to any Goode has played before, and that's why he enjoyed it so much: "Oh God, I mean [it was] so much fun, as long as it made sense. I mean, it's very rare that you get to behave in that kind of way in real life.
"So, it was quite liberating and I just had zingers left, right and centre. I was gonna say I was amazed they could actually cut a trailer together because obviously it's quite colourful language a lot of the time from Carl. But yeah, [it was] a lot of fun."
The series is based on Jussi Adler-Olsen's crime novels of the same name, but with a twist, as creator Scott Frank has transported the story from Denmark to Scotland in surprising ways.
"That was another thing was quite liberating," Goode reflects. "Scott said to me, he said because he's transposed it from Copenhagen to Edinburgh and he's made the original lead character English to make him an outsider he said 'most of it's not gonna work. So let's just discuss what Carl's history might be.'
"So I didn't know [where it would go next]. So you get these scripts through, and I didn't actually know what was going on until it was revealed."
"I did read them," Goode jokes. "Obviously! But it was the fact that there's a lot of [moving parts], it's a really intelligent, nuanced, there's so many strong characters, so many strong female characters."
It was setting the story in Scotland that appealed most to their co-star Chloe Pirrie, who plays prosecutor Merritt in the series, because Edinburgh feels like the perfect location for a dark crime drama of this nature.
"There's something that's Gothic and modern [about Scotland]," she explains. "It's a small place and there's a lot of crime, the High Court is in Edinburgh specifically and there's a lot of high profile cases that are tried.
"There's this dark underbelly in Edinburgh. It's a city that has this very like pretty edifice and a lot of people go there for tourism and Harry Potter, all the things that people love to see, but there is so much history, there's so much darkness... there's a city under a city.
"There's so much there and it's got such a rich history, so I think it's got this sense of they're in a basement, they're unearthing things and bringing them to the surface.
"And I think with Edinburgh it's quite delicious because Edinburgh has this contradiction — there's a big wealth but it's a very specific city, I think people don't necessarily always see its cool texture. And for that reason, the show was quite exciting."
Dept Q premieres on Netflix on Thursday, 29 May.