“What, in older age?” No, I say, that’s not what I meant. I’m never concerned with making myself look good.” While Colman has done plenty of romantic parts, this is the most intense performance of love I’ve ever seen from Thewlis, as if all the hard edges that defined his early career have been chipped off. “You’re not so vain for a start,” he says, “and you play things a little bit grotesque. Thewlis is actually 58 and has no problem with getting older. I thought, ‘Really, is that all you’re going to do?’ I’ll never see 30 again.” “There were no attempts made to either cast younger actors or put dots over our faces for CGI,” says Thewlis. It’s as far from being a murder procedural as it could be, and much more like a love story: two damaged, fragile people finding dark sanctuary in one another, told from the moment of their exquisitely awkward first date. Violence against women just wasn’t what we talked about. “In the end,” says Thewlis, “what we’re asking the audience to decide is not whether they’re guilty, because they clearly are, but whether they deserve sympathy.” It’s very hard, on the bare bones of the events, to see how this sympathy could be generated, yet both Thewlis and Colman, with the sheer range of expressions on their desperate faces, demand the most human response. Despite amassing a total of £245,000, when they gave themselves up from their home in France, the couple had just one euro left. Then, bizarrely, they blew much of the cash on Hollywood memorabilia, including £20,000 on a signed photograph of Frank Sinatra. This (spoiler warning) is all the more surprising given their crimes: they didn’t just shoot Susan’s parents, they robbed their bank accounts and forged their signatures to get more money still.
HARRY POTTER FILM CELLS SERIES
He and Colman – whose husband, Ed Sinclair, wrote the Sky series – give such devastating, heart-wrenching performances as these lovelorn Nottinghamshire killers that you can’t help feeling for them. Photograph: Photographer: Stefania Rosini/Sky UK/HBO/Sister Heart-wrenching performances … in Landscapers with Olivia Colman. “But when I saw it, I thought of The Singing Detective – which I was in!” “I didn’t think of that while we were making it,” says Thewlis.
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It is vividly experimental yet recalls the golden age of British TV, specifically Dennis Potter and his dreamlike, restless theatricality. It jumps through time and genre, smashes the fourth wall then puts it back together as a jail cell. Yet it is absolutely nothing like true crime. Landscapers is true crime, in so far as the protagonists are Susan and Christopher Edwards, the so-called Mansfield Murderers convicted in 2014 of killing Susan’s parents and burying them in the garden 15 years before.
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Perhaps he’s one of those actors who doesn’t de-role until he’s on to the next character.
HARRY POTTER FILM CELLS TV
Nothing like what you’d expect, in other words – unless you had watched Landscapers, a new four-part TV drama in which Thewlis stars opposite Olivia Colman. His manner is equable, nerdy, eager to please. D avid Thewlis, speaking by Zoom from his home in the Berkshire village of Sunningdale, has set his screen at a jaunty angle.