Breakout star Jessica Barden digs into her surprising Netflix series, why she’s thrilled Alyssa stole that underwear, and what she hopes to see if there’s a second season.
Six years ago, Jessica Barden sauntered into a dance studio to audition for The End of the F***king World, a short film adapted from Charles Forsman’s graphic novel about two high-school oddballs who steal a car and get the hell out of their humdrum hometown. Barden was after the female lead, Alyssa, all outward confidence and bravado concealing a cache of confusion and vulnerability.
“I shaved my hair off the year before for another job, and I was in the process of growing it out. I had what I now lovingly refer to as a mullet,” Barden, now 25, tells Vanity Fair matter-of-factly by phone. Upon entering the room, she spotted a pole and broke out into impromptu dance in front of her potential employers. (“What else was I supposed to do? It felt very natural.“) She also shared an idea she’d been mulling for a movie, about a girl who grows up in a brothel and becomes a country music star. Of all the actresses director Jonathan Entwistle and producer Dominic Buchanan saw that day, Barden was the only to dance and discuss a feel-good movie involving prostitution during her audition.
If you were born in the late 80s or 90s, then Harry Enfield and Chums needs no introduction to you
It was the late night comedy show that gave us Kevin and Perry, The Scousers, and Julio Geordio. It spawned a disgusting but brilliant film – Kevin and Perry Go Large – as well as millions of schoolyard jokes.
Ben Dowell went on set in beautiful Suffolk to catch up with Crook and co-star Toby Jones from the BBC4 comedy
Detectorists is a gem of a series, a buddy tale of two men who are as far from being ‘lads’ as it is possible to imagine, all set in beautiful English countryside where the sun always seems to shine – or at least peak through the clouds.
Their constant search for treasure below ground has always carried symbolic weight: searching for a purpose in life and, perhaps above all, for love.
So what happens now, when Mackenzie Crook’s metal detecting enthusiast Andy has left with his young family to follow his dreams in Botswana, and Toby Jones’s character Lance has unearthed actual treasure?
Andy returned in the Detectorists Christmas special to find his best friend dealing with the fallout of finding buried gold; that was in 2015, and while the BBC has always left the door open for another series, creator Crook was initially unsure about whether he had another series in him.
“People point out to me – this wasn’t conscious – that the first series was about relationships,” says Crook. “And the second series was about parenthood, with Andy and Becky [played by Rachel Stirling] having a child. If that’s the case, then this third series is perhaps about where you belong, putting down roots and settling somewhere. If anything, by the end of this series, hopefully they will have have found a place, and we as an audience are happy to let them get on with it.”
Inspired by haunting song Magpie by The Unthanks, Crook has brought Andy and family back home to the UK, where he finds himself living with his dreaded mother in law (played by Diana Rigg, Stirling’s real life Mum).
Lance meanwhile is living with his teenage daughter, and his ghastly ex Maggie (Lucy Benjamin) is back on the scene, poor chap.
Crook, the former Office star who writes and directs, is certain that this will be the last series. He has always enjoyed creative freedom on this show, and has turned down lucrative work on Hollywood blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean for his passion project. So why end it now?
“I took a year off to figure out whether I wanted to do any more, whether there was any more in there; yes, it took a while to realise that I did want to do six more episodes to finish. I don’t want to make any sort of big, dramatic announcement that ‘never again’, but I can’t see myself going back to it.
“I’ve always sort of never quite bought it when actors and directors say that they are leaving behind some friends and that these characters have become friends, but honestly I think I’ll miss Lance. I’ll miss Toby obviously, but Lance won’t be around any more. We had a laugh, me and Lance.”
So, it seems, did actor Toby Jones. The two of them are seated in the The Crown pub, a lovely country house hostelry in the Suffolk town of Framlingham where Detectorists is set; they look like they have just taken a break from a holiday rather than an arduous day of filming.
“I’m having the time of my life, it is really like a country holiday,” smiles a sunburned Crook beneath a baseball cap. He has developed a love of the hobby in his spare time, which he indulges in where he can and in the wood he has bought for his family near Essex.
It’s harder to describe Jones as chilled out. There’s a more frantic energy to him, and he very definitely has not caught the sun. His character is pricklier too – in fact Lance was originally imagined as a more “mercenary” character he says, a flicker of which survived in episode one when he seemed to be encouraging Andy to sell his finds online. But while the 51-year old star doesn’t feel he is very like Lance, he does believe that his work as an actor is “similar to metal detecting”.
“If it wasn’t a project that I wanted to do, I wouldn’t do it, you know?” he says. “I’m not doing stuff that I have to do, you know?
“I really like my job, I really like doing Detectorists, and the jobs I am lucky enough to get offered, I stand by them – it’s not for a need to work. The show is one of the better decisions I’ve made in my life.”
Jones says that Crook has more of a “hinterland” – hobbies and interests outside his work – than anyone he knows. That includes metal detecting, something Jones has not got the hang of because he can’t get to grips with the technology, but which Crook is devoted to.
“What I like about Mackenzie in general is I think he is unique in the industry. There’s no one else working like Mackenzie works, and he’s not following any template.”
Crook chips in: “Sometimes I’ve been asked about how ambitious I am, and I don’t think I’m ambitious. This is almost like another one of my hobbies, I enjoy it that much. But yes, it’s as important as my woodland or my garden or my coin collection.”
The locals, incidentally, are very proud of Detectorists, but remain at a respectful distance as the crew pootle around town. You can even walk round key locations – the municipal hut where the fictional Danebury Metal Detecting Society meet was unlocked when the day I visited and I popped in. It had just the smell of mildew and tea that I was hoping for.
“There something about a small project like this that everybody is involved in for the right reasons, and those reasons aren’t money,” says Crook, who is talking to the BBC about making a film next year, an “evolution” of Detectorists with “a rural setting”.
As he prepares to say goodbye, it’s clear Crook has found something beautiful in the show, and a hobby he loves. And then he tells me something rather lovely.
“I’ve got better, yes. I’ve found more stuff; I found my first gold at the beginning of this year,” he says, head bent shyly down. “I don’t know quite what it is – it’s in the British Museum being researched at the moment.”
This may be the last Detectorists, but one thing’s for sure: Crook and Jones will keep on coming up with precious things.
Carey Mulligan gets a smart, tough-as-nails contemporary Netflix showcase in this four-hour British procedural from David Hare.
A pizza delivery man is shot in the opening scene of Collateral, a new procedural drama from Netflix and BBC Two in the U.K. The detective on call is Kip Glaspie (Carey Mulligan), relatively new to the job but quickly able to tell that the crime appears to have a precision and a lack of immediate financial motive and that the victim had a Middle Eastern name.
What follows over four hours is a circle of coincidences, compromises and complicity that radiates outward and indicts a core group of British institutions from the government to the media to the military to the Church of England, and then even further outward to the consequences of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Scripted by acclaimed playwright David Hare, the challenge of Collateral for both Detective Glaspie and for viewers is parsing out which of the show’s details and characters and themes are directly connected to the murder and which are merely collateral damage swept up in either the crime’s intimate tragedy or the bigger-picture societal tragedies of 2018 Great Britain. Whether Collateral is an insightful treatise on current events that happens to have a mystery at its heart or a mystery that happens to pay lip service to current events may end up being in the eye of the beholder, but I’m inclined to lean toward the latter, which isn’t such a bad thing when you have a cast this good.
The story’s center is Mulligan’s Kip, pregnant and also a former champion pole vaulter — two pieces of information that are basically unconnected but, like nearly everything else in the show, maybe could be linked on some level. Hollywood has spent so much time making Mulligan play various stages of weepy and yearning in both the past and indeterminate future that it’s tremendously satisfying to see her being clever, tough-as-nails and frequently snarky and, mostly, entirely contemporary. My major note for the first two hours of Collateral was “Not nearly enough Carey Mulligan,” though she becomes more central and more exceptional as the series progresses.
There’s reason to expect that Collateral will become the first of a series of occasional visits and investigations featuring Kip, and maybe future installments will find a way to reconcile her age with the different details from her past that feel less like traits and more like a writer thinking, “And wouldn’t it be interesting if she were also…,” though I’ll say that the payoff for her pole vaulting was small yet satisfying (and not what you’re now thinking). Additional seasons might some use of the mentioned-but-not-really-explored clash of class backgrounds between Kip and her partner Nathan Bilk (a fine Nathaniel Martello-White).
This season also features John Simm as David Mars, an opposition party member of Parliament with a particular interest in immigration policy, whose troubled ex-wife (Billy Piper) ordered the ill-fated, instigating pizza. That’s either meaningful to the plot, like David’s vote in an upcoming referendum on unchecked government surveillance, or it’s yet another weird coincidence, like the star of Life on Mars playing a character with the last name “Mars.” Piper is underused, and Simm is mostly a mouthpiece for ideology we assume to be Hare’s. Plus, when you put John Simm in a politics-meets-crime genre piece like this, I’m instinctively going to think of State of Play and Collateral is, on no level, State of Play.
Used more effectively are Nicola Walker as Reverend Jane Oliver, who just happens to have a past with David Mars and just happens to be in a relationship with Linh (Kae Alexander), the only witness to the main murder and an immigrant of questionable legal status, and if that also sounds like a lot of coincidences, you’re beginning to see the blurry line Hare is walking between a butterfly effect-style web of interconnectivity and contrived to the point at which the protagonist’s investigation is moot.
Fortunately, Collateral isn’t really a whodunit for long. Kip wants to catch the killer, while the show wants to capture the mindset of the killer and the circumstances that led to the crime. They relate to misguided war and especially to what the series is viewing as a misapplied approach to immigration policy and how it relates to British waves of racism and xenophobia. Expect to know the difference between “asylum seeker” and “economic migrant” by the end of the four hours. What are the compromises we make to live safely? What are the compromises the police make to solve crimes? What are the compromises the Church makes in an increasingly secular world? The ideology is all familiarly Hare-ian for those who have seen his plays or the BBC telefilm Page Eightand its two follow-up projects. It’s smart and immediate, rather than revelatory and introspective.
