If you haven’t yet heard of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, you will have soon. The first novel in the detective series by Holly Jackson sold seven million copies and won Children’s Fiction Book Winner of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2020. Now the story is reaching a whole new audience. The TV series was released on iPlayer on 1 July and then to a wider international audience on Netflix from 1 August.
Emma Myers, best known for her role as the quirky werewolf Enid Sinclair in Wednesday, leads as a teenage detective called Pip. The 26-year-old Zain Iqbal stars as Ravi. He teams up with Pip to prove his brother didn’t kill a schoolgirl, and eventually becomes her boyfriend.
Ravi is beloved by book fans for being a different love interest from what’s usually seen on screen. The significance of this isn’t lost on Iqbal: “It’s so important that my character is an Asian boy who’s looked at as such a perfect, cool, handsome, sweet, humble boy,” says the actor.
“People like us are not seen like that. We’re represented quite badly on screen. Now it’s going on Netflix, it’ll be seen by a lot of people in South Asia and East Asia. It’s so good that people who look like me have someone to look up to.”
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder already has a loyal following, mostly of school-age and university-age girls. When I texted my teenage cousin that I was interviewing the actor who plays Ravi, she sent back a long list of questions she absolutely had to know about him.
Iqabl hopes that the TV adaptation of Ravi and Pip’s story will appeal to viewers of all ages and genders. The series goes deeper than a typical secondary school drama. “The show is snappier,” he notes. “There’s more action going on. It’s pretty dark and gritty. I think anyone can watch it.”
Like Agatha Christie adaptations or Hulu’s Only Murderers in the Building, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder can appeal to different generations. The show’s twisty plot is ideal viewing for big groups of friends or family who can speculate on the mystery together. Plus, teenage girls can have the satisfaction of already knowing the real ending while their parents guess incorrectly.
Film and TV is rooted in family for Iqbal. He grew up in a village called Cheadle, near Stockport in north-west England. His father is a film buff, and their house was filled with the stock sound effects of classic Westerns – cicadas and smoking guns and Wilhelm screams. The iconic theme of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was practically the soundtrack to his childhood. His dad first took Iqbal and his younger brother to the cinema to watch Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 2. Iqbal was hooked.
Pip and Ravi are high-achieving students who use their intellect to get to the bottom of mysteries. Pip gets caught up in a murder investigation because she takes her school EPQ project way too far. Iqbal was a less well-behaved student. “I hated school,” he admits, “I was always a quiet kid. I wouldn’t even open my mouth.” He was too shy to sign up for any school plays.
Iqbal made it to university to study economics. He joined in with a few student films, and completed the Young Company programme at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. Graphs and finances just didn’t excite him in the same way that movies did. Once his degree was over, he decided to be brave and move to London to give acting a shot.
Work came slowly and steadily – mostly short films for internal use within companies and charities. Iqbal has had so many roles as background schoolboys that they all blur together in his mind. He resents that the media are labelling him as a newcomer, because he has four years of professional, if unglamorous, experience under his belt. Commercial work allowed him to get to grips with the craft without worrying that large audiences would pick apart his performance.
Outfit by Nanushka
Iqbal didn’t know much about A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder until he googled it after his third or fourth audition. The size of the fandom on TikTok and Instagram blew him away. The author Holly Jackson has 280,000 followers on the latter. There are more than 55,000 videos tagged #agggtm.
Iqbal is relieved that he wasn’t aware of the fandom first. “It was a blessing in disguise. If I went in knowing the scale of it, it would have scared me away and I don’t think I would have auditioned as well.”
As soon as Iqbal landed the role, he rushed out to buy the book from the Waterstones on Tottenham Court Road and some wine and chocolates from Tesco to thank his agent. “I didn’t really celebrate. I was just relieved.” Landing a leading role in a TV show proved that pursuing acting was the right call.
A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder was shot over four months in the summer of 2023, mostly in Somerset. The crew redecorated the square in a small town called Axbridge to resemble the book’s setting. One June day shooting in a vintage hotel was so hot that the make-up team had to pour ice cubes down Iqbal and Myers’s necks.
Iqbal had to figure out how a TV set worked as he went along. On the first day of the table read, he wanted to appear organised and professional, so he printed out his own script double-sided. Iqbal quickly realised that there was a reason everybody else’s was single-sided – he lost his place mid-scene. Panicked, he grabbed a script from the actor on his left. Only afterwards, when people went, “Don’t you know who that is?” and “what were you thinking?”, did Iqbal realise that he’d stolen the script from Mathew Baynton, the star of the sitcom Ghosts, the 2023 film Wonka and the CBBC show Horrible Histories. Baynton plays Pip’s English teacher, alongside Motherland star Anna Maxwell Martin, who portrays Pip’s mum.
Full look by Canali
Iqbal feels grateful that he was working alongside Myers. The 22-year-old already had small roles in the TV shows The Glades and The Baker and the Beauty before she achieved acclaim for her performance in Netflix’s hit series Wednesday alongside Jenna Ortega.
Iqbal has nothing but praise for his co-star. “She’s a f*cking magician,” he gushes. “She’ll go down as one of the greats. She taught me a lot about how to work the camera. I feel very lucky that she was very patient with me. She’s a one-take wonder, while sometimes I’ll need an extra take or two to get what I want across.”
A bonus of working with such a young cast was that somebody was always up for having fun at the end of the day. Iqbal and the other actors would play Mario Kart on Myers’s Nintendo Switch in between takes. He still goes out for dinner frequently with Raiko Gohara, who plays Pip’s neighbour.
Many of the male characters who date the heroines of bestselling books make for compelling reading, but if plucked from their literary context and plonked into reality these men might be seen as troublesome, or just plain sexist. Rhysand from Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series and Xaden from Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series behave in a controlling and possessive way.
This might be normal in fantasy realms with fairies and dragons, but in the modern world this behaviour would be labelled as a red flag or as toxic. Cardan Greenbriar in Holly Black’s The Folk of the Air series starts off as the heroine’s bully. It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover has been accused of romanticising abusive relationships. Books and social media tell young readers that the relationships in these books are romantic and aspirational.
Among all these domineering alpha males, Ravi from A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder sticks out for being just a genuinely nice guy. He’s the kind of boy that teenage readers actually should dream of dating.
Full look by Moschino
Iqbal was well cast as a character whose biggest virtue is his kindness. He helped lug camera equipment and suitcases full of clothes around his own photoshoot. He kept refastening a faulty button on a jumpsuit worn by the stylist who was supposed to be adjusting his clothes. He repeatedly apologises for having a sore throat which I can’t even hear. He takes every opportunity to thank other people – his younger brother for supporting him, his mates for inspiring his style, the author Holly Jackson for creating the role in the first place.
Iqbal spent a long time figuring out with the director and executive producer, Dolly Wells, how to make Ravi a positive role model for young men.
“The main thing was bringing a sense of vulnerability to the character,” Iqbal explains, “and making him a modern man. Because in today’s world, men don’t really talk about how they feel. Whereas when you watch the show, Ravi does talk about his feelings and there’s some very key scenes where he does open up to Pip. We wanted to make sure we got that right.”
Iqbal’s favourite scene is one of the most emotionally charged. In episode 5, Pip posts something online, Ravi comes round to her house, and the two open up to each other and bond. Iqbal hopes that if the show were renewed for more seasons – there are two further books, and a prequel – that fans will love looking back at these pivotal moments in Pip and Ravi’s relationship.
The actor is as much of a fan of Ravi as teenagers on TikTok are. Despite Iqbal’s enduring love for Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter series, he’d still pick to play Ravi out of any book character.
Ravi’s clothes are very laid-back – lots of check shirts and baggy jeans and beat-up trainers. “He’s a bit grungy. Chilled. Easy going.” Iqbal, however, is a self-proclaimed fashion obsessive. He lapped up every moment of the shoot at Bankside Yards, telling the team, “I feel like a million dollars” and “I feel f*cking amazing.”
Full look by Lanvin
Iqbal is delighted to describe his taste in clothes. “My style is British street mixed with minimalistic Scandi vibes. My favourite outfit would probably be wide jeans, timeless boots and a cropped jacket. Smart, casual, very British.”
He apologises that his look today isn’t up to his usual high standards, since he could only bear wearing shorts on a rare warm day in June – although his immaculate trainers and printed T-shirt look perfectly smart to me.
One of the most beloved moments from the book is when Ravi dons Pip’s mother’s purple flower-patterned gardening gloves so that he doesn’t leave fingerprints while they snoop around somebody’s house. Ravi quips, “Real men wear floral when trespassing.” Iqbal admits that his wardrobe does in fact include a floral shirt. Has he ever trespassed in it? “No comment.”
Iqbal has mixed feelings about the show premiering. After years of commercial work, Iqbal isn’t used to such wide audiences reviewing and criticising his performances.
“I’m a very private person,” he confesses, “I’ve already lost my privacy a bit. It’s scary that once it comes out, I’ll lose even more.”
Even before the show drops on the BBC, some fans who are obsessed with Ravi have made Instagram accounts devoted to sharing every single image of Iqbal which they can find. “I don’t really check them that much. People find pictures of me that my mates have posted, which is quite weird. And it’s only going to get worse.”
However, Iqbal is looking forward to sharing A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder with new audiences. He hopes that the show’s success might open up new paths for him.
“It’s also exciting, because hopefully I can get amazing opportunities after this. And I can go and have the career I want to have, and live my dream of being an actor.”
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A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is on BBC iPlayer
Bankside Yards is a new 5.5 acre regeneration project by Native Land on London’s South Bank. Master planned by PLP Architecture, Bankside Yards will feature 8 new buildings comprising workspace, apartments, independent shops, restaurants, cultural space and a Mandarin Oriental hotel - all centred around 14 restored Victorian railway arches.
