Max Beesley: ‘Alcoholism is a very quick disease – you can soon get in trouble'

Telegraph

17-04-2025

At 8.30am, on the morning of 7 July 2005, Max Beesley was at a hotel in Marylebone participating in a read-through for a new BBC drama, Hotel Babylon. The producer had asked everyone to be in early and the actor – star at the time of Jed Mercurio's medical drama Bodies – had been there in good time. By 9am, as the cast were going over their lines, they heard multiple sirens screaming on the road outside.
Ten minutes earlier, suicide bombers had detonated improvised explosive devices on three underground trains. One was at Edgware Road Station, less than half a mile away. Another exploded on a Piccadilly Line train leaving King's Cross, two miles down the road. One hour later, a fourth bomb was detonated close by, on a double-decker bus. The blasts killed 52 people (not including the four Islamist suicide bombers), and the proximity of the bombers in enclosed spaces led to a horrifying 775 people being injured.
Today, I'm in a room with Beesley near King's Cross once more, talking about the new four-part Disney+ drama, Suspect: The Shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, which explores the killing of an innocent Brazilian man, 15 days later, by the Metropolitan Police. The 27-year-old electrician was on his way to work when he was followed onto a tube carriage in south London by specialist firearms officers and shot seven times in the head.
A report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) in 2006 concluded that his death had been 'caused by avoidable mistakes' – de Menezes had been wrongly identified as a suspect in a second set of attempted bombings when he left for work from his home in a block of flats linked to one of the would-be jihadists. The 2008 inquest ruled out a verdict of unlawful killing. Screenwriter Jeff Pope, whose credits include Appropriate Adult (as executive producer), Little Boy Blue and the 2023 Jimmy Savile drama The Reckoning, wrote earlier this month that the Met still has questions to answer about the shooting.
The strong cast includes Emily Mortimer as the future Met commissioner Cressida Dick, who was the commander in the control room of the surveillance operation that day; and Conleth Hill plays the serving Met commissioner Sir Ian Blair. Beesley, who appeared recently in Guy Ritchie's high-profile Netflix show The Gentlemen, plays Assistant Commissioner, and head of counterterrorism at the time, Andy Hayman, who was criticised in the IPCC's report for 'inaccurate public statements concerning the circumstances of the death'.
Beesley – who notes that taking on a real-life character represents a very different challenge for him – was an admirer of Pope's attention to detail in factual dramas such as 2019's A Confession, but says he asked the producers of Suspect if it was possible to talk to Hayman himself. He'd studied the book Hayman wrote in 2010 about his experiences on the force, The Terrorist Hunters – 'I read it a couple of times, making notes,' he says. 'I had a plethora of questions.' The former policeman 'was very generous and forthcoming with personal things I asked him, private things, you know, but that was invaluable. I got a real sense of him.'
He lauds 'the incredible work that [Hayman] did tracking those copycat bombers down' but says, 'I did want to get into some grey areas with him.' He notes that Hayman still vehemently denies 'that the Kratos order was not given' – this was the shoot-to-kill policy adopted by the Met after 9/11, which became a key point of contention in the inquest.
Cressida Dick denied ever giving a Kratos order as de Menezes was pursued into the tube station, stating that she only instructed officers to 'stop' de Menezes, not to shoot him. Beesley pegs himself as 'quite a good reader of people' but adds that 'it's difficult when there are two people and you've got two versions of events – we can't 100 per cent say, 'No, that's what happened'.' Pope employs multiple perspectives, he says. Beesley has strong views of his own about what happened, and adds – 'but I'm going to keep them to myself.'
He's similarly circumspect when I ask for his views on the political situation in his adopted home. Beesley has lived in America for the past two decades, and has brought up two daughters, Sabrina, 11, and Bella, 6, there with wife Jennifer Noelle. So what are his thoughts on the 47th US president? In light of 'what's happening to people at present, I think I'll take the Fifth on that,' he says. 'I'm a dual citizen, so it's tricky – my kids are Californian babies, my wife's from Minnesota.' He does, however, admit to having some savings invested in the S&P 500 stock index, which is being battered by Trump's tariffs on the day we meet.
He and his family had to evacuate their Encino home during the wildfires that engulfed parts of Los Angeles in January, he tells me. 'We know probably five families, a lot of folks that lost their homes. The environmental dynamic there is shifting dramatically, no doubt about it. You know, Los Angeles, '88, '89, '90, it was vibrant, it was bustling. It was just an incredible place to be, and it's a little different now. You drive along Sunset [Boulevard] on a Saturday night, it's quite quiet. A lot of folks are moving away from there, to [northern states, like] Oregon or Maine.' He's been thinking about returning to the UK, where he grew up in the working-class suburbs of Manchester (he's still an avid – and deeply concerned – Manchester United fan).
The 'gift of fatherhood,' he says, has been life-changing. 'They are unequivocally the most important thing in my life, those girls.' When we meet, he's with his own father, Maxton ('He's a great drummer,' he tells me later). Both his parents were musical. His father still plays in dance bands, and his late mother was a jazz singer. As a chorister at Manchester Cathedral, Beesley was given a scholarship to Chetham's School of Music, specialising in piano and percussion after his voice broke.
He went on to Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he met actors such as Daniel Craig and Ewan McGregor and began acting, though he has enjoyed something of a dual career, playing over the years with Paul Weller, Stevie Wonder, Roy Ayers, James Brown, George Michael and Robbie Williams. (Remarkably, he can be seen playing percussion on videos of Williams performing at Live 8 in Hyde Park on 2 July 2005 – five days before the bombings.) He has known Williams since he was 14 and the future Take That singer was 11.
When he first moved to LA in the early 2000s, he says, 'I bumped into Rob in a shop in a classic car sales room. I moved in with him for a couple of years, and we went on the road, touring.' What did he think of the 2023 Netflix documentary about the singer? 'I watched it and went, 'That's Rob'. There's no pretence. There's no acting. I thought it was really quite brave of him.'
Williams has talked about his problems with cocaine and heroin abuse. Beesley has had issues of his own, although not with hard drugs. 'Alcoholism is an incredibly quick, progressive disease that if you've not got your eyes on it, you can get in trouble very quickly,' he says. Society has something to answer for in the way that it pushes people towards drinking, he adds, especially in adverts. 'You know, it's Christmas, have a drink. It's a nice day, let's have a drink. It's a very serious drug.' He realised that the way he turned to booze had become habitual in June 2013, three months before the birth of his first daughter, and stopped. 'I don't like anything controlling me,' he says.
Beesley has been through some ups and downs in his career since he took the title role in the BBC adaptation of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones in 1997. He told a journalist in 2014 that when he first moved to the US, he'd had 67 auditions in one year without getting a job. He has 'had the thought, 'I might have to do something else' multiple times' since then, but has been sustained by shows such as Sky's Mad Dogs and his music. (He released the excellent jazz groove album Zeus as Max Beesley's High Vibes in 2023.) It's his musical ear that gives him a talent for accents, too, helping him to switch from his native Manc to Hayman's London-tinged Essex in Suspect.
He knows it's a drama that will draw attention: it's still a sensitive subject and the depiction of Hayman will be closely observed. Pope, he insists, 'encourages the audience to make up their own minds'.