Matthew Goode is not a posh boy actor – whatever Helen Mirren might say. Yes, he’s done Downton Abbey. Yes, he has the all-English charm and self-deprecating RP soundings of your Benedicts and your Eddies, but there is something unrehearsed about him, something a little higher voltage than an Eton drama lesson might permit. Case in point: when he picks up the phone, this actor of remarkable ubiquity (Brideshead Revisited! Watchmen! The Crown!) wearing a backwards baseball cap, a pile of laundry by the fireplace behind him, puffing on a vape.
He is a livewire conversationalist, freewheeling from Jack Nicholson impressions to an analysis of drama school socioeconomics via Waitrose’s bargain-basement claret (“perfectly acceptable for a Wednesday night”). He swears like a sailor, he drops some of the biggest names in the business with a mix of ease and awe, and he speaks with refreshing candour about how bloody difficult it is to find jobs right now. He says “obvs” with the same irony as he says “periglacial geomorphology”. He is, in short, great fun. I sense Goode will find that write-up a little grandstanding.
It couldn’t be further, really, from the character he plays in Department Q. Carl Morck is the gritty, decidedly unkind lead in The Queen’s Gambit director Scott Frank’s adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Scandi noir. Tasked, for various unheroic reasons, with reopening some of the force’s long-standing cold cases, he finds himself battling that classic mix of trauma, bureaucracy, and very nasty old ladies.
Netflix has transplanted the Danish bestsellers to Scotland, and Goode is joined by a host of some of Caledonia’s finest. Kelly Macdonald, Kate Dickie, and Shirley Henderson – “Ah, Shenderson” – are all players in this game, as a therapist, a jaded police chief, and a very suspicious carer, respectively. Detective Morck is a bit of a dick with each of them. You might forgive him for his shirtiness, though: Detective Morck was, shortly before the events of Department Q, shot point-blank in the face and left for dead.
I’ve got a friend who worked in the murder squad for real, and it’s pretty harrowing what they go through
Downton Abbey, this is not. And while Goode is the kind of actor that pretty much everyone with a medium interest in film and TV will recognise from somewhere (he did A Single Man with Colin Firth, Match Point with Scarlett Johansson, and Leap Year with Amy Adams), there was a time where he worried about getting typecast in the Cumberbatch mould. He did not, contrary to popular belief, go to Eton or Harrow. His parents, a nurse and a geologist, saved up for him to study at Exeter School.
“They sacrificed a lot for me to go to,” he explains, “but now people are just like: ‘Oh, there’s another posh bloke.’” One such person? Dame Helen Mirren, who (jokingly) shrugged him off as one before they had performed a scene together. Tough, from a woman who played the Queen.
But with the state of the industry as it is – “a pickle”, Goode says with pretty Sloaney understatement – typecasting is a privilege. “I’ll take anything!” he laughs, though there’s the slight anxiety underneath the levity that you hear with many actors post-strikes and potentially pre-tarriffs. It’s a reminder that even Hollywood veterans lack a sense of job security right now, but the man is being modest. As runs of good form go, Matthew Goode is hitting it in the screws.
Square mile: Department Q is based on a bestselling Scandi noir series – what do you think is behind our obsession with detective shows?
Matthew Goode: We hope that there is some sort of great denouement, we like a mystery. People like to be their own detectives. It’s also in some ways a slightly sad reflection of the stuff that we see going on in society. So it’s a compounding of both of those things. It’s obviously very, very popular, but every time one of these things comes around, they’re always different.
I’m no expert in the field, but this new set was one of my favourite ensembles of actors I’ve ever worked with. They’re so talented. Also, the fact that it’s Scott Frank who’s doing most of the writing will hopefully set it apart, or at least make it as interesting as some of the other great detective series that have come before us.
Scott kept saying to me, “Oh, I’ve got a stable of horses for you.” It’s people like Shirley Henderson and Kelly Macdonald and Kate Dickie. What a triumvirate of very strong Scottish actresses. And Leah Byrne, who was a total revelation to me, I think she’s staggeringly good in this. It was quite Shangri-La.
SM: Would you make a good detective?
MG: My wife is very good at losing her glasses, and I can just about find those, but it’s always a bit of a hunt, and I can never find the car keys. So, together, we’re both useless. I’ve got a friend who worked in the murder squad for real, and it’s pretty harrowing what they go through. That’s always why I’m hoping that this show becomes a series, because there are like ten books, and it can’t help but be a kind of love note to those real people.
This is just fiction, it’s not based on anything, but it’s a very harrowing job. It’s a job that we take for granted. It’s a bit like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men – “You want me on that hill, you need me on that hill” … whatever it is. We really do need them. But it comes at a massive cost to the person who’s doing it, it’s really detrimental to their mental health. So, I’m glad that I only have to be a fiction.
SM: Did that make Carl Morck a difficult role to research?
MG: There’s always challenging research, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, because you’re always going to have to create a history for yourself. You’ve still got to flesh everything out – I mean, that’s if you really care about your job. There are certain things that needed more investigation, like PTSD and the procedural parts of how one goes about the job. I had to chat to a few people, but one doesn’t want to be a parasite.
I spoke to the producer and asked whether they were going to try to find someone for me to shadow, but I said it didn’t feel like it was needed in this particular series. So I did a lot of research online. I had friends in the armed forces who suffered a little from PTSD, so I’ve gleaned a lot from them over the years, because they still suffer occasional relapses.
SM: When did you find out that you’d got the part?
MG: A couple of months before we started. There’s a guy called Joel Lubin, he’s my American agent. I think I might have been one of his very first clients, and he now represents Tom Cruise. So, he’s got quite a roster and then this little English guy clinging on for dear life. But he’s a brilliant man. And so somewhere over that time, he’s also picked up Scott [Frank].
So that’s how the scripts came to me. I think Joel and Scott may have been hatching a plan, but I didn’t know – it wasn’t offered to me at all. I just got sent these scripts and I was like “fucking hell, Joel. This script is unbelievable.” A couple of weeks later, Joel says “Scott is very much considering you for it.” And I was like, get out. How do I not balls this up?
SM: Did you have to audition?
MG: I suppose I did, in a way, but it wasn’t for Scott. He liked me, but he said he had to take it to Left Bank and convince them that they didn’t need a giant star.
This is the second time that Scott has effectively gone to bat for me. The first time [in 2007’s The Lookout] because I was nobody. And he gave me a part that nobody else would give me, the chance to play a criminal bank robber from Kansas. And now Carl Morck. I’m very fortunate that Left Bank went with Scott and said “OK, we trust in you.”
Netflix
SM: No spoilers, but there’s a pretty high pressure situation going on for much of Department Q. What’s the most high pressure environment you’ve ever been in?
MG: Good God, well, I’ve got three children. So we’ve had our moments. Not to sound like a sportsman, but there is a slight analogy between sports and acting. It’s like: right, this is the moment, and as the Americans say [cue accent] ‘You’ve gotta execute.’ It’s true! The clock is ticking and we’ve got to get this shot. I had that on Brideshead Revisited: “Don’t tell this kid, but there’s a Lancaster Bomber coming overhead and we’ve only got one shot at this, otherwise you don’t have an end to the movie.” I suppose after 20 years, it really helps you concentrate a little bit more when there’s more on the line.
But we’re still learning, you never stop learning, it’s one of the great things about the job. You’re always jumping from ship to ship with somebody else in control. And it’s a completely different part, if you’re lucky. The older I get, the more I am trying to find stuff that’s not what people would pigeonhole me into. But you never know what’s going to come up.
The whole industry is in a bit of a pickle at the moment. I haven’t worked, and I’ve had a couple of films go down this year due to financials. It’s quite disconcerting. I need to pay the bills, so I will take whatever comes my way. Therein lies the difference between someone who’s more of a … what’s the sporting analogy here… not a travelling salesman…
SM: A journeyman?
MG: A journeyman. A journeyman pro on the European Tour, as opposed to Tom Holland, or one of those big stars. But even they are probably finding things difficult at the moment. Goodness knows what’s going to happen if the tariffs come in. I just adore the job. I don’t take it lightly anymore. I don’t think I took it lightly, but I was just so naive for such a long time. Now it’s like “Oh, a job! Brilliant!”
SM: Well, your Hollywood big break was in Chasing Liberty, so you started off in the industry as a bit of a teen heartthrob…
MG: Let’s not be silly.
SM: That’s what the internet calls you!
MG: And that’s never wrong.
SM: What was your experience with Chasing Liberty?
MG: You don’t choose what you get first. Some people might go into some big Oscar-winning epic, or whatever, but mine was this film with Mandy Moore. I couldn’t believe it. At the time I was like, “You’re fucking kidding me!” It was with Jeremy Piven and Mark Harmon. I actually haven’t thought about it in a long time. We shot it in Prague, we went to Venice. I mean, it was insane. My agent [Simon Beresford] said “I can’t believe they’ve given it to you.” I’m still with him, God bless him.
SM: You mentioned being pigeonholed. Have you ever felt typecast?
MG: Everyone gets typecast, and you’re bloody lucky to, in some ways. I’m always sort of rammed into the same places as a Benedict or an Eddie, you know, the Harrow or Eton thing. But I’m always quick to tell people, Exeter’s not quite the same school.
My mum was a nurse and my dad was a geologist, so they were aspirational. They sacrificed a lot for me to go to that school, but now people are just like: “Oh, there’s another posh bloke.” Even Helen Mirren went “Oh, god, another posh one.” I was like “Well, it’s lovely to meet you, too. Looking forward to doing the scene!” She was only teasing, of course; this wasn’t all-out slander. Yeah, you’re just lucky to get anything really, these days.
SM: Did you ever consider following your father into geology?
MG: You know, when your dad’s banging on about periglacial geomorphology from the age of… whatever it was, I probably could have taken my Physical Geography A-Level pretty young. You know, basket of eggs topography, all that stuff about chalk and granite, it would have been easy. But, no, it wasn’t really my bag.
I came to the idea of acting pretty late. I did drama and theatre arts, because my parents were like, “you really need to get a degree.” I studied at the University of Birmingham, so it was a very practical course and we learnt a lot. We had Cicely Berry come in, who’s a very famous vocal coach from the RSC. Our resident playwright was David Edgar, for goodness’ sake! It was pretty amazing, but I didn’t know I was going to be an actor until a friend of mine went into drama school and said I should go for it.
I thought “I’m only going to be one of those blokes sitting in a bar going, ‘Ah, that could have been me.’” Then, things just snowballed a bit. I couldn’t afford to go to drama school, so I had to get a career development loan – because I’m so posh.
I got a job, and luckily, my parents helped me out with my rent. I got to do a year. It was wonderful, I met a lot of wonderful people. I was very lucky that Simon Beresford had links to Carol Ziegler, who was my vocal coach, and, unbeknownst to me, she put a good word in for me. I met him after he came to see us do our monologue, duologue, and song.
SM: Do you remember what your monologue was?
MG: It was so inappropriate. Not as in the language, but it was something Nick Lyndhurst had just done in a play. Some bizarre speech that was sort of funny. I had actually learned In the Name of the Father, which Daniel Day-Lewis had done, and – ah, God, who’s that wonderful director? He told me to do it. He became a famous, famous director. I’m going to kick myself!
[He begins a seven degrees of separation Googling exercise on his phone]. Look at my sieve of a brain. I have to go to Jerry Maguire first, then via Renée Zellweger… I met her fella at the airport once. He came over and said to me, “I’m watching you on the TV with my missus.” And I was like “Oh, really. Who’s your missus?” and it was Renée Zellweger. I remember going like: “Fucking hell, really?”
Rupert Goold! It was Rupert Goold, with the greatest hair known in the Western Hemisphere. I’d love to work with him someday, and you can put that in print. He tried to get me to do In the Name of the Father, but everyone said: “Well, you’re not going to work as a Northern Irishman, so what’s the fucking point?”
SM: You’ve said that the secret to a good marriage is having a good wine cellar…
MG: I haven’t changed my mind. If you can keep anything in the bastard! We are always dropless around here.
SM: In your time on The Wine Show, you tried some impressive plonk. What was the last great glass of wine you had?
MG: I’ve got to that point where I just refuse to spend big money on wine. We never did. We’re not that kind of people, really. There’s a Tempranillo I can get from my local, which comes in at about a tenner. I’m happy with that. I’ll tell you what, Waitrose do their own claret, which is perfectly acceptable of a Wednesday night. It was on offer the other day at £6.50. I was like, ‘Well, that is a fucking bargain.’ They even do a cheeky half bottle, just in case you think you should be sensible. Restraint. One glass, just sip it very, very slowly. We are no longer in our twenties, dear boy.
SM: Downstairs at Downton or downstairs at Department Q?
MG: Downstairs at Department Q, because I had a lot more to do. But also the company that I kept was just exceptional, like Leah Byrne and Alexei Manvalov. They are a dream couple of people to work with. Leah brings a huge amount of, not comedy per se, but she does her character so spectacularly well that she cannot help but be amusing. And some of the time we’re not meant to be laughing…
Some actors, I wouldn’t name any, they just do their thing and don’t have contact [with the rest of the cast]. But I’m a big believer that if you can be great mates with somebody off camera, it can only but help the relationship on screen, even if it’s by minutiae. So I said, “Lex, can we please go for lunch? Would that be OK?”
He came back in the car with me and it was pissing down with rain. We found this really lovely little French place with student prices and popped in. It was really busy. We were still there five hours later, probably on our fifth bottle of wine.
SM: What’s your perfect Sunday?
MG: Well, every day starts with a dog walk. We have a Romanian rescue dog called Suki. It’s one of the reasons I’ve lost my bloody weight. I’d meant to for one of my jobs, but now I’m just walking the dog. That dog is more happy than she was during the pandemic. Five walks a day. We’re regularly smashing 20,000 steps.
If I can, I’d get my mates and my wife and all our kids together for a roast lunch. A smorgasbord of roast lunch – pork, beef, chicken – and a load of wine and laughs. Friends and family and food – a proper Anglo-Italian feast in the sun. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Department Q is streaming now on Netflix
