“I live to play cops and robbers!” Martin Compston talks love, Las Vegas and the new Line of Duty | television

WAs we begin the inhumanly long wait for the new season of Line of Duty, which begins filming in January, you’ll see Martin Compston – the show’s hero and True North – a few times. Twice as you’ve never seen him before, and once, in Red Eye, as you know and love him: agile and taciturn, brave and quick, the man you trust to save the world when the druggies around him can’t even see he needs saving.

But first, the Revenge Club, where it was a revelation. The setting is a support group for divorced women, a ragtag gang united only by the fact that their husbands have summarily dismissed them. “There’s no other reason for these characters to be in each other’s lives,” Compston says from his home in Las Vegas (more on that later — much more). “They’re all desperate, lonely, and desperate for companionship. They’re all, in their own way, broken, which makes for this explosive combination.”

If this sounds dystopian, it’s not – even the scenes in a run-down community center are made exciting, strange, and full of possibility. The acts of revenge, which the entire group takes out on one ex at a time, start out pretty mild: rats down the chimney, remotely fiddling with a Spotify playlist, on this scale. When they start drinking, things get darker and I think it’s fair to say it threatens their lives. At first, it reminds me of Netflix’s “Russian Doll,” largely due to the chaotic charisma of Aimee-Fionn Edwards, the ultimate heroine of Compston’s hero; However, as it continued, it no longer looked like anything else. “He’s sitting in his own space,” he says. “It goes from intense, emotional scenes to an Ocean’s Eleven kind of movie. If you think you’re going down that road, you’re not. But as long as the cast sticks with it, the audience will buy into it.”

Compston says this is something he learned from Ken Loach and stayed with him throughout his career. “If you have excitement about what you do and enthusiasm for what you do, the audience will come with you.” This is an unofficial throwback but it staggers back to 2002, his first role, when he was scouted as a Greenock teenager, playing a Greenock teenager, in Loach’s Sweet Sixteen. Looking at the footage from this movie, it’s hard to believe he was once that kid; It feels clumsy, almost embodying the authentic, non-cinematic spirit of adolescence.

But back to the point. There are two surprising things about Compston’s casting in The Revenge Club. The first is that he’s playing for laughs, which he’s only done once before (in Sky’s Urban Myths – a magical realism retelling of Band Aid, where Compston was Midge Ure). This time, clever dialogue is the engine of the drama, and each actor is very smart, comedically speaking. “It was out of my comfort zone,” Compston says. “One of the terrifying moments I had was a very small scene with Meera Syal; we were improvising bits, and I remember sitting there thinking: ‘This is royal comedy.’ What if she thinks I’m worthless?” He refused to put himself on Cial’s side: “The way Mira and Sharon were [Rooney, who also stars – perhaps most memorable for her role as Lawyer Barbie in Greta Gerwig’s movie] I can play it, I don’t have it in me, it’s an art form. But I can play the grumpy Scot and be very funny.

Compston is also the romantic hero of The Revenge Club, a big fork in the road – his fictional love life, certainly as a cop, always has disaster written all over it. He and Edwards have a delightfully spiraling energy, prickly and passionate, and there’s a maturity to the storytelling insofar as they’re both – you think – a bit of a nightmare, but you root for it to happen anyway. Although, he says, that’s only because I didn’t see how it would turn out. “That’s one of the things I love about the show: We’re not just good people who have been wronged. Our loved ones might just be people who have moved on with their lives. We’ve all fallen down this rabbit hole because we had nothing to cling to, and suddenly we have this group, we’ve gone so far and we don’t know how to stop.”

Perhaps most unexpected is the real-life Compston in the upcoming film Living Las Vegas, a cheerful, old-fashioned tour de force about his life in the United States. He has been married to American actress Tiana Chanel Flynn “for nearly 10 years and we haven’t had a honeymoon yet,” and they split their time between Greenock and Las Vegas, which led him to present this three-part series for Channel 4. He explains this in part, on the show, by the fact that he doesn’t know many people in Vegas. So he thinks about making friends with the lady who runs the antique store and some people who teach him how to ride a horse. It’s incredibly cute – Chanel Flynn is likable and likable in the background – and it’s very strange, at this point, to not only describe the United States through its landscape and epic casinos, but also spend the morning with a drag queen, Lawrence (also from Greenock), without mentioning the political atmosphere, where drag is a fault line and the house always wins.

“A lot of people live their lives on social media,” he says diplomatically. “I’m not aware of the problems there, but we live on a nice street, and we have nice neighbors, regardless of politics; we all get on with our lives. My wife and her family are Democrats, which is my inclination, but I’m just a guest here. It’s gotten so angry now that I’m trying to keep quiet. But I still believe the same things, [when] When the time comes, I will still vote the same way.

Hours before we spoke, the BBC announced that Line of Duty would return for its seventh series. Seventeen million people watched the season six finale in 2021, making Jed Mercurio’s most-watched drama since recording began at the turn of the century. “Nine o’clock in the morning, whether it’s a Sunday night or during the holidays, is gold dust,” he says. “You feel like the country is in your hands if you have something good to offer them, and there is no feeling like that.” Compston believes Britain fell in love with Adrian Dunbar, or Controller Ted Hastings, to give him his proper name: “He became like the nation’s uncle. A man who wants to do the right thing. People want to support good people, and they know there are good people out there, especially in times like these.”

Between that and the endless speculation on social media, its popularity has become so intense that I forget that the first three seasons were completely uneventful. “Things didn’t really blow up until series five,” he recalls. “When Sweet Sixteen came out, I was 17. It was doing really well, but it became a monkey on my back because everyone thought: ‘This is what you are.’ Now if I was typecast, if they said ‘Line of Duty is the best thing you’ll ever do’, I’d be happy. I’m very comfortable in my own skin and my career.”

The second season of Red Eye, in which he plays the head of security at the US Embassy in London in the grip of a terrorist attack, relies on many of the qualities he brought to bear as D’Arnott: charismatic certainty, seriousness of purpose, and plenty of haste to make sense. He would work on anything from director Kieron Hawkes, who is one of his best friends – they are also working on a film together, which has just gotten financing. It’s just a happy coincidence that Red Eye involves a lot of “running and talking into your wrist and putting your hand to your ear like you have an earpiece, that’s just cops and robbers growing up. I love all that. I live for all that. Playing an ex-SAS agent, it’s great fun.”

Compston began to think about production, because otherwise, when he was not working, he could not relax: “If you feel working-class guilt, you need to do something.” However, he began to love it, and the different parts of the brain it required. “You suddenly think, ‘Should we shoot this on a train or a ferry? What’s cheaper?’ When you read the script as an actor, all you think about is: ‘Why would the character do that?’ You don’t think: ‘This is going to cost us two days.’”

He describes one project, a biography of “Allan Pinkerton, the Scottish fugitive who arrived in America and became the most powerful lawman in the United States. He started the Secret Service, worked on the Underground Railroad, invented the first photo con man’s gallery, hunted down Butch Cassidy and Jesse James – and he lived an incredible life. This little Gorbals guy.” Just when you thought that there was nothing more substantial than D’Arnott’s Compston, the idea of ​​a historical drama appears which, you must admit, seems very his.

The Revenge Club is now available on Paramount+; Red Eye is shown on ITV1 on New Year’s Day at 9pm.