Dept. Q's Chloe Pirrie was left a ‘human husk' by dark new Netflix role

Yahoo

3 days ago

Netflix's new crime series Dept. Q centres on one profound mystery: who took Merritt Lingard? The prosecutor rattled cages and was not well liked because of it, which is why she's been hardly missed for the last four years. But that doesn't mean detective Carl Morck (Matthew Goode) won't try to find her.
Merritt, it turns out, is being kept in a pressurised container, and time is running out on her survival, with Chloe Pirrie performing almost all her scenes in the confined space. The actor tells Yahoo UK how six months in the challenging role did take its toll, with her saying she felt like a "human husk" by the time they finished shooting.
When asked how easy it was to leave her character behind, Pirrie looks back with a laugh as she says: "I started out so well, [I was] being so like, 'I'm fine. I go in and I like it doesn't touch the sides. It's fine, I can switch it.' And then by the end of the shoot I was like a human husk.
"Like I just have nothing and I've completely lost that [ability to detach]. I wasn't trying to, but it just inevitably happens and on a six month series. It's really hard to exit.
"You have to really be like 'I need to make tell myself this isn't real and actively do stuff to counter this', but at the beginning I was really good [at brushing it off] like 'I'm fine.' Someone would ask 'are you okay?' I'd be like, 'yeah. It's a bit weird but okay', being very Scottish about it. But it can be a bit of a hazard and it definitely was on this."
Pirrie found it "interesting" to perform so many of her scenes alone, saying it made her feel like Merritt's "problems were my problems".
"I didn't have anyone to kind of work off or listen to," she reflects. "Well, I was listening to people at times but it's like her issues are my issues, her unknowns are kind of mine as well. And so [I was] trying to use that a little bit. But the camera's there and you do enter into a very lovely relationship with the camera when you're doing that kind of work.
"It's very responsive and that's actually kind of lovely. But also there were so many days where and I was warned, Scott was like, 'it's gonna be here [in your face]'. The camera is so close to my face so much of the time and it's sort of amazing, and also terrifying when you think about it too much when you're doing it. It was an amazing thing to do."
Pirrie worked inside a specially-designed container that could have different pieces taken out and moved depending where the cameras needed to be at any one time. The actors admits it was "very claustrophobic for the crew, quite hard going for them" because of how small the space was, but that they developed a great friendship on set through the experience.
"In a way because it was such a small space and you were so limited in how many people could be in at a time sometimes when you're filming you'll be doing something quite small and there's not many people there," she says. "Actually the chamber is great because nobody could fit, so I got a lot of intimacy with the camera. I suppose it was helpful for the work I had to do."
However there was a hazard with filming so many scenes in the indoor space: "I actually did come back with a legit Vitamin D deficiency. But it's also because I was living in a flat where I was on the ground floor and so I'd had to put the stuff you put on windows so people can't see in, so I basically didn't get much natural light during the six months I was there."
Though Pirrie is quick to add: "I can't claim to have had it really bad. It was fine."
Dept. Q takes some surprising turns over the course of the story, with it being revealed that Merritt was taken by the mother and brother of her teen boyfriend as revenge. They blamed her for his death decades earlier, and meticulously planned the kidnapping to the point where the brother, Lyle, posed as a journalist to gain her trust before taking her.
The actor admits that she "had some idea" of where the story would go before she read the scripts as she was familiar with Jussi Adler-Olsen's crime novel series of the same name.
"There are aspects of the book that are similar in the show," she says. "And so I had some idea, but actually that area of the story is quite different and I didn't really know where it was going so it wasn't until quite late on that I started to cotton on. It wasn't really 'til I read the scripts that I knew exactly what was happening."
"It kind of just forces you to play everything as it is at the time and commit," she adds. "So yeah it was interesting doing something where you don't have all the information but you kind of have to get on with it."
When Merritt learns of her character's identity she doesn't take the news lying down.Instead she's angry. Angry that she's being blamed for her boyfriend's death when he was running from police after he attacked, and seriously harmed, her brother, and angry for being seen as the reason he went down the wrong path to begin with.
"I love the fact that her responses are so unfiltered," Pirrie says of her character's bluntness in that moment. "I think something the show does is show people's true response, the response we wish we could all let out at times in our lives, to go full throttle.
"So instead of what you might expect, given what she's been through, she's lost all hope that she will actually emerge from this, so she's like 'what's the point' and I think the rage, being allowed to kind of let that out, was really surprising. But in a good way, being allowed to let that out."
One thing that Pirrie enjoyed most about Merritt was how similar she is to Goode's Carl. Both are outspoken, unafraid of getting on people's nerves or being seen as prickly or rude by speaking their mind. It was an aspect of the character that Pirrie found "super freeing".
"It feels like you're getting to exercise a part of you that you don't get to do," she admits. "I'm definitely more for people pleaser than Merritt, I wish I could be like that. Maybe not for all of it, but it's always freeing to play people who don't care what other people think, or at least for a part of it.
"But often there's a journey where they start to change in some way, but playing someone who isn't concerned with pleasing other people or contorting themselves to work out what someone else wants of them is so freeing. As a woman, it's really freeing thing to do."
It's all about female rage, something Merritt is free to let fly over the course of the series which Pirrie enjoyed: "It's very cathartic and I felt so safe on set to let those choices fly. You know that you're in the hands of someone who's gonna use what works and what doesn't work, and so you can kind of fail it.
"I am a terrible perfectionist so I find it really hard to feel like I'm not doing it right, but you have to make mistakes — you have to.
"We make weird choices that might not work in order to find the way, and Scott [Frank, the show's creator] is so good at letting people do that and guiding you through so that you find it. A lot of those moments I was just able to leave it all on the set."
Dept. Q is out now on Netflix.