‘Espresso.” Craig Parkinson has reluctantly revealed his trick for making perfect chilli, to divert my attention away from the endgame in BBC2’s all-conquering Line of Duty, because he is “shit at keeping secrets”. He throws me another minor indiscretion: the character he plays, Matthew “Dot” Cottan, was called Matthew “Babs” Windsor “for a looooong time” in early drafts of the show. But will Dot be back for the already-commissioned fourth series? Parkinson consults the invisible notes on his hand, then the very visible BBC publicist in the corner of the room. “No comment.”
Well-kept secrets have turned a tightly written, impeccably performed police thriller, which debuted in 2012, into one of 2016’s most talked-about shows. After the premature death of putative third-series star Danny Waldron (played by Daniel Mays), then the shock return and equally shocking demise of series two mainstay Lindsay Denton (Keeley Hawes), Parkinson promises that series creator Jed Mercurio hasn’t finished surprising viewers.
In person, “the scariest man on TV” is affability personified. The smile is warm rather than wolfish, the gaze steady rather than furtive. He’s very tall (6ft 4in), but not as imposingly angular. When he laughs, which is often, I don’t feel queasy. In short, he’s downright approachable.
“I was on holiday last week in Donegal,” he says, “and these two women in their late 50s collared me in a supermarket and said, ‘It’s you – you’re that bad man.’ Then they immediately said, ‘Don’t tell us what happens!’ People don’t want to know, even in this world where everything’s so accessible.”
What we do know is that Cottan – “that bad man” – has wormed his way to the heart of the show. A corrupt copper working for anti-corruption unit AC-12, he has long hovered on the fringes, but now been forced to take centre stage as the net tightens and his scheming gets ever more desperate. “I have mastered the art of lurking and slurping my tea,” says Parkinson of two of Dot’s sinister trademark moves.
Has he ever had a run-in with the police? After a pause comes a confession of base criminality that gives me a little of that AC-12 buzz. “I stole a boat when I was 13. Just a bloody pedalo, on a boating lake in Blackpool. Hardly joyriding, is it? They cordoned us off like we’d robbed Bond Street.”
These days, Parkinson and his cast members share an apartment block during filming. This allowed Parkinson to try out that chilli recipe the night before a key scene in which Cottan attempts to seduce his colleague Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure). “I made a big pot for everyone and we all had seconds, which was a stupid error. Me and Vicky were shovelling down leftovers the next day on screen – which isn’t what you want at 7.45 in the morning.”
Parkinson refers more than once to “the Line of Duty family”, and has known his co-star Martin Compston (who plays Steve Arnott) for years. The memory of working together on prison drama Ghosted prompts a shudder. “It wasn’t a great day when my cat had died, and I had to go to work and pretend to rape one of my best friends, then wrestle naked with my brother-in-law [actor John Lynch]. Still, it’s a living … ”
A quiet, unacademic child from Blackpool, Parkinson was encouraged into acting by a sympathetic teacher “when I thought it was a good idea not to turn up to lessons”. In defiance of his exam results, he “begged and battered the door down” to win a grant to Blackpool and The Fylde College, alma mater of John Simm and David Thewlis. It’s a route that has since been closed down, he reports, his gaze hardening for the first time. “If only the privileged can afford to go to drama school, then what’s going to come out of that? It needs to be addressed. Lower the fees, for one. Should it be that expensive to go to drama school?”
After graduation, he left for London and a career that has brought projects with everyone from Mike Leigh (Ecstasy) and Chris Morris (Four Lions) to Samantha Morton (The Unloved) and Martin McDonagh (Hangmen). He says they have inspired him to take up writing himself. “I’m tinkering with a couple of projects for television,” he says, “but it’s finding the time to get them done … ”
Not that he’d be able to watch them: his Cotswolds home doesn’t have a TV. “We’ve got an open fire and a nice record collection,” he says when I ask, incredulously, about his living room layout. “My wife [actor Susan Lynch, last seen shooting her serial-killer son in Happy Valley] and I were watching some shit like I’m a Celebrity in our flat in Camden, and realised we hadn’t spoken to each other for ages. We decided to get rid, then we moved out of London. We’ve never looked back.”
Parkinson seems to have the happy knack of getting the big decisions right, from house move to career choice. “I never had a back-up plan,” he says. “If you do have one, probably go and do that instead. Do you know what I mean?”
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