Bertie Carvel on Dalgliesh Season 3 and sitting in the director’s chair

AcornTV recently premiered the third season of Dalgliesh starring Bertie Carvel (Sherlock). The series is an adaptation and expansion of P.D. James’ period mystery novels featuring police commander — and published poet — Adam Dalgliesh. Season 1 of Dalgliesh overlaps in time with the final seasons of Endeavour, and the main difference between the two shows is that Dalgliesh is a Commander with the Metropolitan Police in London.

Season 3 is six episodes long and spotlights the beginning of Margaret Thatcher’s administration in 1979. Each of the three cases explores the wider political and social implications of the murders themselves. The first two episodes of Season 3 revisit the story “Death In Holy Orders” which was previously adapted as a standalone miniseries on MASTERPIECE in 2005 starring Martin Shaw. Episodes 3 and 4 are an adaptation of “Cover Her Face” and the last episodes adapt “Devices and Desires”. While Dalgliesh and his associates interview witnesses and suspects, he also faces a personal crossroads.

GBH Drama interviewed Bertie Carvel on what motivates Dalgliesh this season, why the series changed the timeline of the novels, and taking on the double roles of actor and director for “Cover Her Face”.

GBH DRAMA: Where do we find Dalgliesh at the beginning of Season 3?
BERTIE CARVEL: The first season of the show began when he’d just lost his wife in childbirth. We never meet the wife. All three seasons of the show have been about the very slow process of grieving, from the perspective of somebody who spends all of his time with dead people and thinking about murder. There’s this kind of short-form story going on, of him trying to get to the truth of: who was this person who’s been murdered. What was the story of their life? What were the circumstances of their death? Then there’s a longer form story of Dalgliesh thinking about death and mortality itself.

In this series specifically, I think he’s far enough away from that source of his grief that the sliver of ice in his heart that P.D. James so poetically describes is just starting to thaw. He’s starting to see some sort of sunlight on the horizon and think about what the next phase of his life might be. But does he dare? I think you’re witnessing the slow, slow coming of spring through the process of these six episodes.

Speaking of P.D.​​ James, have you read all of the novels, or do you find them a distraction in creating the character?
I’ve read every page, and I love the richness that you get when you’re working from source material. I wouldn’t go and watch other versions of Dalgliesh in the same medium, of which I know there have been some notable examples, but reading something that’s the story told in a different mode, I think, is wonderful. I feel the same about research of any kind. The more three-dimensional my picture of the world can be… you never quite know what details are going to come from, and whether consciously or unconsciously they’re going to enrich the kind of fabric of the tapestry that you are weaving as a storyteller. I love all of that, particularly with directing head-on. It’s not like I would sort of read each page and try and recreate that exactly, but having a deep familiarity with the tone of the underlying source material is as important as having a deep familiarity with the scripts themselves because it means everybody on set is drawing from the same well. I think it really gives that unity of tone that I was talking about apropos the theater, but of course, it’s true in filmmaking as well. You want to make sure that everybody is in the same piece, and that the world feels real, credible, and three-dimensional.

This season also draws a lot from the history of the early 1980s with the Thatcher administration coming in, and some of the cases involved elements of the politics at the time. How do you balance historical fact versus crime fiction?
“Cover Her Face” was originally published in 1962, so it isn’t about Thatcher’s Britain. Helen Edmondson, the lead screenwriter and Executive Producer has found a way to delicately frame these stories in a different era. She’s pulled all of these stories into quite a different order to the one in which they originally composed and found a throughline that was not necessarily there. It’s not really about the period, but I think the emotional landscape of the characters is framed better in the period in which she set it, and she chooses very carefully when you get little subtle harmonics of what’s happening in the wider world outside. I think the effect is quite poetic in the same way that when you read a poem, you can suddenly feel placed exactly in a time and place, but you are thinking about something very specific and very close up. The poem might be talking about, I don’t know, a potato peeler, but you are very clearly a potato peeler in 1979, or you’d have a clear sense of who’s holding it, what the temperature is outside, and so on. I suppose it’s much more about the fictional world of these characters and their psychology, but I think Helen Edmondson and all of us as actors and directors and creatives, are using that wider world, that richer world, and the lived experience of, in my case, I was an infant in that era. But you’re sort of drawing on that to give it the ring of truth, and to give it some grain.

What made you decide to sit in the Director’s Chair?
Directing is something I love to do, and have long wanted to do more of. I guess my day job’s going really pretty well, which doesn’t leave an awful lot of room for my side hustle. But now and again I have to make space for that, because I feel as though directing is the same job, really, the job of a storyteller, but you get to play with different toys and to use different tools. And so it’s great now and again to kind of come at things from a slightly different angle. And then in this case, to be able to do both at the same time was kind of a unique experience.

I suppose I know this character so well now, and what we’re doing is to some extent each week or each story is of course a kind of discrete story in and of itself, but there’s also a longer form bit of storytelling going on, which is very quiet and very patient, and requires quite a lot of empathy from our audience. It’s wonderful to be in the center of that as a storyteller, as an actor, and then to be able to kind of direct it. I think I was able to bring all of that depth of field into the episodes that I directed. I feel as though directing is about projecting your taste as much as anything else. That’s really what the job is.

Did you have a directing role model, inspiration, or mentor?
I’ve worked with some extraordinary filmmakers, so I feel very, very blessed to have done that. I was sort of borrowing from the masters, and then able to bring something fresh because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ve seen no formal training as a director, except for 25 years of working with the best in the world. My inspirations were nearly every director I’ve worked with. One of the advantages I have as someone with 25 years of acting under their belt is that I’ve often heard directors say that early in your career as a director, you might shadow, you might assist for a while, and as soon as you kind of start directing things yourself, that’s pretty much it. You are then either in rehearsal rooms or on film sets on your own, and it becomes an extremely solitary practice. Whereas actors, we get to experience so many different ways of skinning a cat, and I’ve drawn and stolen and borrowed and learned from the best.

I’m spoiled for choice of who to name, but I’ll name some who are sadly no longer with us. Roger Michelle, the late great director was an absolute genius and a wonderful, wonderful person to work for and with. I would think, “What would Roger do?” I also thought of Howard Davis while directing. “What would Howard Davis do?” Even before I was thinking about directing it, I wanted Dalgliesh to have a quality gaze a bit like him. It felt that he changed you simply by looking at you, this deeply penetrating gaze.

Can you describe your directing style? 
I don’t know if I would dare to describe my directing style. I’m not sure I have a style yet. I’ve only directed twice, the only other time being a play I directed some years ago. In the theater, the actors are the delivery mechanism for everybody’s work. All departments’ work kind of passes through the actors. So the huge challenge of a director in the theater is to make sure that everybody’s in the same piece, and delivering something that’s singing kind of in the same direction. As a filmmaker, you can kind of capture lots of atomized elements and then you assemble them afterward. And so I feel like the rhythm of it is very, very different. But essentially they’re very, very similar. I mean, you just have to have a clear sense of where you think you are going, and then try to be as relaxed as possible about where you end up. Because it’s usually, hopefully somewhere better than where you thought.

What was the most difficult part of directing “Cover Her Face?”
I would say the scheduling aspect. Although it’s the middle story in this series, we shot it first to allow me to prep. I had a couple of months prepping with the tech team, and then we shot it… of course, I was also acting in it; doing two jobs that required all of you and doing them at the same time. After that, the editing phase was extremely challenging from a logistical point of view, because I went straight on into shooting the second block, which is the first two episodes of Season 3. I had to manage editing at the same time as shooting a whole block, and that continued through the third block of the last two episodes. I was working through the night and weekends and unfortunately, barely seeing my family for several months. However, it was an exhilarating thing to do and it gave the work a certain intensity. I do believe the decisions I made in post-production editing are probably purer to my instinct than might otherwise be the case if I wasn’t so fully wired into Dalgliesh.

After your experience directing, are you willing to give it another shot?
For sure. Yeah, I love it, and I’m thrilled to find that it’s something I can hold up to the light, and I find it sparkles. I’m proud of the achievement. I certainly look forward to directing a film I’m not in, because much as that was, in some ways, a time-saving gesture. It meant I took the notes quickly. I hugely enjoyed the days on set when I wasn’t acting and was able to give my full focus to working with the amazing cast and the amazing crew. I can’t wait to do that again.

If you were to write an entire episode of Dalgliesh, what would you do?
Panic. I’ve come from a family of writers. My father was a journalist, his father was a journalist, and his father was a journalist. I’m the one that got away, and I kind of leave that well alone. I choose another mode to tell my stories. I’ll leave it to the experts for now. You couldn’t want Dalgliesh to have better writers than who we have now.

Episodes 1-4 of Dalgliesh Season 3 are currently streaming on AcornTV with Episodes 5 and 6 debuting Monday, December 16th.