After collaborating on gripping true crime series The Long Shadow, depicting the years-long manhunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, David Morrissey and writer George Kay have reteamed for a procedural told partially from the main suspect’s perspective.
Morrissey stars in ITV’s Gone as inscrutable private school headmaster Michael Polly, who shares many of the same behavioural traits as your typical serial killer. He appears emotionally withdrawn, driven entirely by self-imposed markers for success – it's little surprise that when his wife disappears, the detective assigned to the case (Eve Myles) wastes little time in naming him as the chief suspect.
“Whilst making The Long Shadow, we’d chat around the topics of that series and he mentioned this idea”, Morrissey told Zavvi. “We swapped stories about similar cases that we’d seen in the media like this, which was a conversation that ended up happening for a long time before the show came together, and he’d already had this idea on the back burner for a while.
“I was fascinated by the idea of a man who couldn’t express the emotions he needed to, couldn’t allow himself to feel grief and loss, or the catharsis that comes after that. He just can’t mentally go there, and that alone makes him a suspect, but is also a greater tell that something is wrong with this man that predates this situation and hasn’t allowed him to open up.
“It’s a psychological thriller, for sure, but also one that subverts those expectations. It’s about the wider perspective of cases like these and challenges the presumptions we make as a society when we first read about these stories.”
Although a fictional tale drawn from several cases, a key inspiration for the miniseries is the non-fiction tome To Hunt a Killer, written by Julie MacKay and Robert Murphy, a former detective superintendent for Gloucestershire Police and ITV crime correspondent respectively. Despite this, Myles’ protagonist Annie Cassidy isn’t inspired by the author, and the former Torchwood star explained to us that her investigative methods are hardly the typically accepted ones.
She said: “I don’t think Annie really works like a detective, because she’s never really been accepted as one; she follows her own path because she’s been sidelined and underestimated from the outset. I think there’s a steeliness and an internal strength to her that’s come from the fact she must sort it out herself and doesn’t rely on anybody else.
“She is a team player nonetheless, but I think she's learned to really lean on her instinct, and in this case, that’s telling her something isn’t right here. You see in another storyline, where she’s developed a friendship with the mother of a long-missing daughter, that she unrelentingly follows that instinct – there's an extraordinary strength to her resilience in believing that she can still crack the case, years after it’s been all but closed.”
The opening episode sees Annie moved from investigating to a less exciting role as the Family Liaison Officer (or FLO), getting to know Michael better as the case continues to unfold in the background. Annie isn’t a character who can ever shut off the inquisitive part of her brain, and as Myles explained, this is true for many of the FLO’s she spoke to whilst researching the part.
“I asked a myriad of questions, but I was particularly fascinated by the process of transition as you moved from a DI to an FLO, and how difficult that can be mentally. They told me exactly what I wanted to hear for this character, which is that even when you move roles, you’re never not a detective, and they were a great help to me in getting to grips with that mindset.”
