Kris Marshall on the mystery man who gave him his big break, why family TV is hard to make – and his dinner dates with Al Pacino
Beyond Paradise
Friday 8.00pm BBC1
WHEN KRIS MARSHALL says he’s “peacefully happy”, I’m inclined to believe him. He has, after all, starred in one of the most popular sitcoms of recent times (My Family), one of the most watched BBC dramas of recent times (Death in Paradise) and has even had a role in one of the most beloved romantic comedies of all time (Love Actually).
When he decided to leave Death in Paradise – where he played the linen-suited detective Humphrey Goodman – the BBC commissioned a spin-of that they agreed to film near his home, so he could be close to his family. Beyond Paradise – which swapped the Caribbean for Cornwall but retained the escapist charm – began last year and was watched by nearly nine million people in its first 30 days. “It was the BBC’s biggest new drama last year,” Marshall says over cofee in a hotel overlooking the Thames. “When I started seeing the ratings coming in, I was like, ‘OK, this is good… this is pretty good. To have the new show become a success was a real validation of the character and people’s love of it.”
Beyond Paradise depicts an England that vaguely resembles the real world but is prettier, with crimes solved in less than an hour. “It’s a show that harks back to a world that we still wish Britain was,” suggests Marshall, “a place where the world doesn’t take itself quite so seriously. The world has got too binary. It’s less nuanced. The world today takes itself so f ***ing seriously.”
Marshall is 51 and grew up in a military family in Bath – his father was a navigator in the RAF during the Falklands conflict. “I had a very bucolic childhood in the south Cotswolds,” he says, “and then my folks sent me to boarding school.” He did well in his GCSEs but by the time he was meant to be studying for his A-levels he had discovered a passion for drama. “My school would put on six or seven plays a year and so I was very involved in that, to the detriment of my studies.”
How different might Marshall’s life have turned out, I wonder, if his parents hadn’t been able to send him to Wells Cathedral School in Somerset – where the current fee for boarders is £36,000 a year. Does he think he would have had the same opportunities to pursue his love of drama had he gone to his local comprehensive? “I wouldn’t have done,” he says honestly. “I’m sure of it because they don’t have the facilities to do that. I was given a great free reign with the facilities that were available to me at Wells.”
But that free reign meant he paid less attention to study
