Matthew Macfadyen has been tempted back to a major TV series for the first time since the long-running Spooks ended two years ago, in which he played a very modern role as counter-terrorism chief.
Now he has re-emerged as Detective Inspector Edmund Reid, a late 19th-century policeman whose beat is London’s East End, haunt of the notorious Jack The Ripper.
The time is April 1889, six months after the Ripper has claimed his last victim, hacking a fifth young woman to death - and people are beginning to venture out after dark again, in the cautious hope that his murderous reign of terror is over.
But is it? After all, the series is called Ripper Street.
The famously buttoned-up Macfadyen reacts with mock horror: ‘I couldn’t possibly give anything away’, he says. ‘But I will say that Inspector Reid is a very modern policeman, and what he investigates takes him beyond the Ripper’s crimes.
'He is beginning to see huge new advances in forensics and pathology as for the first time police work becomes truly scientific, and he can see that this is the future’.
I watched the opening scene as Macfadyen as Reid – tall, imposing, well-dressed in a long heavy coat and a black bowler hat, and sporting distinctively fashionable sideburns - sips his beer in Whitechapel’s packed Brown Bear tavern.
He smiles as his fellow drinkers cheer on a brutal bare-knuckle fight. It’s all good fun - or what passed for fun in the late 19th century - but Reid’s off-duty moments are numbered.
Suddenly, a scream echoes through the fog-shrouded warren of streets. The naked body of a young prostitute has been found with her throat cut. The murder has all the Ripper’s hallmarks, and panic once again grips the East End.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2254341/Matthew-Macfadyen-shares-gory-details-new-TV-series-Ripper-Street.html#ixzz2GNrw2erg
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