Being Human's Damien Molony on Suspects: 'Just brilliant craic'

Damien Molony plays Detective Sergeant Jack Weston in the new Channel 5 police drama Suspects [CHANNEL 5]

Suspects has been the surprise drama hit of the year. It returns next week for the second half of its first series with a second season already shooting. Set in a London police station, it involves very gritty, powerful story lines played by actors improvising their dialogue.

The result is one of the more interesting police dramas you will watch. It also has a documentary feel, which makes the stories seem much more believable. What it doesn’t have is the soap feel of something like The Bill, as we tend to learn little about the backgrounds of any of the characters. In this drama, we concentrate on the crimes, and it doesn’t avoid the telling details either.

It’s an impressive cast, which includes Cold Feet’s Fay Ripley, and Damien Molony, who found fame as vampire Hal in BBC3’s Being Human. The Irish actor is riding high as they return for filming the second series.

He says: “They’ve again found some strong story lines for my character Jack Weston to investigate in series two. And there are subtle elements, too, which reveal a little about his character, and some of these have quite an emotional impact on Jack, that’s all I can say.”

Filming has been very intense, he reveals: “It is, but it’s also an exciting way to work. You do it so quickly. We shoot an episode every two and a half days. One week, we read an episode over lunch, then starting shooting it in the afternoon. It has tested us all to the limit, but you don’t get to work like this on any other show. Yes, it’s works very fast but the freedom that we have with that, to do whatever we want, to say what we want, means it’s just brilliant craic.”

Second time around, Molony says he feels much more comfortable with the process. “100 per cent, definitely. Seven or eight months ago when we shot the first series it was an unknown quantity. The story team weren’t sure what was going to happen, the camera team, sound team, actors, even catering weren’t sure! No one even knew what a daily schedule was going to be like. It simply hadn’t been done before. Now, after all the lovely things people said about the show, we’re a lot more confident and we can plan a bit. No need for a warm-up period, like the last series. We can now just go for it.”

Reactions to the show were largely positive. “We weren’t surprised, just really delighted about it. Everyone worked so hard, and pushed themselves to the absolute limit. At the end of series, many of us were traumatised. We were shooting 45 scenes a day.”

Rape, drug abuse, euthanasia, the show doesn’t avoid difficult stories. Says Molony: “The second series is very similar in that regard. The stories are exciting, thought-provoking, and worrying, but these things happen all the time. They don’t shy away from that in series two. It’s not science fiction. It’s reality. It’s a great thing to play a police officer who is dealing with it every day, but not being shocked by it. I come out of these scenes, and say, “where’s my coffee?’!”

He’s not so sure, however, whether other dramas should be done this way. “This is just one way of doing police drama, and it’s quite refreshing. It’s gritty, it’s violent, and it’s about real people, and they do a great job. But there’s also Scott & Bailey, True Detective, Life on Mars, who do it another way.”

Being Human, he agrees, was his TV break. “It’s only about two and a half years ago since I started Being Human. I will be forever grateful to them, to BBC3 and the people involved, for casting me. I sure wouldn’t be here without them, but you learn so much on jobs.”

Would he like to return to fantasy drama? “I think I might leave it while before I go back to playing a vampire! But you never know.

“It was a clever, funny dark series, and a privilege to be a part of it. I didn’t get too involved in the genre to be honest. I’ve never seen Twilight, or True Blood. I stayed away from them. I went back to the original stories, like Dracula. I was playing a traditional, 500-year-old vampire. In order to put it into a modern setting, I looked at day to day addictions.”

Will we ever see the like of Being Human again when BBC3 goes online? “It’s hard to say, but it’s very important to herald new drama like Channel 5 have done with Suspects. We will have to wait and see what happens with BBC3.”

Suspects airs Wednesdays on Channel 5 at 10pm