Damien Molony is sitting opposite me, punching his palm with increasing force. “You’ve got to get the impact right – the sound, the amount of give, you see?” he says. “You’re always sore, always hurt in some way after a fight scene.”
Apparently, it’s worse pretending to be on the receiving end of a fist rather than being the one to throw the punch. “Snapping your head back – hard and fast like this – can really take a toll,” he explains, an invisible force smacking his face so sharply to the right, I have the brief illusion that I’ve hit him myself. “Before those scenes you need to do a lot of warm-ups,” he grins, gripping the sides of his face and twisting his skull into all possible angles from the top of his spine.
The enthusiasm for faux-violence – which he also indulged in his role as a brutal vampire, Hal, in the BBC’s 2009 sci-fi series Being Human – is at odds with Molony’s gentle demeanour and Guinness-foam-soft ’n’ creamy Irish accent, which he recently deployed to full effect as the charming but adulterous Tyler in the hugely popular BBC drama The Split. But apparently we’ll see him get into some punishing screen scraps in his lead role in UKTV’s reboot of 1980s cop show classic: Bergerac.
Amazingly, 40-year-old Molony didn’t watch the original – starring John Nettles as the titular detective – until after he’d been cast. He wincingly admits that “the 80s crime show I grew up watching was MacGyver – you know, the American guy with the blow dry and the Swiss army knives?” But the series, which ran for nine series between 1981 and 1991, was an era-defining institution.
Bergerac was broadcast on Sunday nights after Songs of Praise, and an audience of 15 million regularly tuned in to watch Jim Bergerac slug it out with the bad guys menacing the island of Jersey. The picturesque locations gifted viewers two guilty pleasures for the price of one. We got to take a brief proxy-holiday on the island’s glass-box balconies and lush sandy beaches and we got a chance to poke our nosey beaks into the yacht-owning, burgundy swilling lifestyles of the Channel Islands’ tax exiles like series regular (and Bergerac’s father-in-law) Charlie Hungerford.
Hotel and restaurant owners claimed the series had boosted tourist numbers by 50 per cent and souvenir hunters snapped up merch (including a Bergerac-branded aftershave).
While the original Bergerac was a wham-bam-whodunnit show – with Nettles’s character solving a crime each Sunday – the reboot is a more complex, nuanced affair in which Molony’s detective takes six episodes to solve the opening episode’s murder of a wealthy young mother.
“I approached it more as a family drama,” says the actor. “Because my Bergerac is recovering from the death of his wife. We meet him at a point where he’s been numbing that grief with alcohol and losing the trust of his daughter. They’re both struggling to cope with the central pole of their family vanishing. Bergerac’s daughter wants to live with her grandmother” – Zoë Wanamaker as a gender-switched Charlie Hungerford – “and so he’s joined AA and is trying to rebuild his career with the police after a leave of absence.”
The new version is written by Toby Whithouse (who also wrote Being Human) and Molony praises the subtle ways in which the script shifts a few rules of the detective genre format. “Often the detective hero will get things wrong along the way to solving the crime, but usually the rest of the cast and the audience don’t know he’s wrong. This time, Whithouse has written a brilliant scene in which we all know Bergerac has made a mistake and some of his fictional colleagues are laughing at him.”
Ever the student, Molony says he read the late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s book about dying, When Breath Becomes Air, to understand bereavement. To help him embody the role of a detective “standing in front of a police team, trying to motivate his colleagues” he watched videos of Irish rugby coaches.
Nettles was invited back for a cameo, but declined, arguing that “at 80 I’d just get in the way”. The cosy crime veteran – who went on to star in Midsomer Murders – also doubted a reboot could work, because “the show belonged to Thatcherite Britain, to a time of fast money and beautiful girls.”
Times have certainly changed. The new Bergerac embraces none of the old version’s jaunty indulgence of loveable rogues. The hero isn’t constantly being invited onto yachts by flirty married women with bubble perms. “But the leather jacket is there,” says Molony. “And the car, which he sleeps in. And flickers of the famous original theme music seep into the soundtrack.”
Regularly shot in tight trousers and a battered leather jacket, or at the wheel of his shiny maroon 1949 Triumph Roadster, the series made a sex symbol of Nettles, who responded by saying that until he got the job he could “count my successes with women on the fingers of one hand”.
The floppy-haired, soft-eyed Molony has more form as a heartthrob. Two female actor-scriptwriters have cast him as their on-screen romantic partner in their own shows: Phoebe Waller-Bridge gave him the role of her friend with potential benefits in 2016 sitcom Crashing, and Roisin Conaty cast him as her character’s will-they-won’t-they driving instructor in 2017-19 comedy GameFace. He also donned a Levis 501 T-shirt as hunky (possibly mother-seducing) plumber Gabriel in the third season of Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls. He seems embarrassed when I mention his heartthrob status today, wincing then hiding his face behind both hands.
For all his swoonsome, fist-swinging screen roles, Molony is clearly a shy guy. Born in 1983, the son of a doctor and a solicitor-turned-travel guide, he is briefly lost for words when I ask what kind of child he was. Eventually he offers: “I played a lot of football.” What position? “Right-back.”
But his imagination was sparking when off the pitch. He’d prowl the countryside on the hunt for ghosts (from which he believed he could protect himself with a stick) then come home to watch WWE on TV. “I think that’s where I fell in love with the idea of performance,” he grins. Because that was all acting? “Oh yeah. But also I loved to hear the roar of the crowd. Pure entertainment.”
But Molony says he didn’t do any acting as a kid. “I didn’t join drama groups. But when we were in our teens I did make a horror film with my friends in the woods. This was just after the Blair Witch Project had come out. I found myself really fascinated by the tricks you could play with a camera – the way that the monster only has to exist in the mind of the audience and it’s actually more frightening that way.”
Because he was also a sensible kid with middle-class parents, Molony first studied business and politics at Trinity College Dublin before “spending a lot of money” studying drama at London’s Drama Centre (alumni include Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy). For his audition monologue he chose a speech from Martin McDonagh’s black comedy, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, in which his character – a member of the Irish National Liberation Army – is pulling out the toenails of a Belfast drug dealer when he learns that his beloved cat, Wee Thomas, is not well. More violence then? “Oh… yeah! But it’s very funny.”
“At drama school, being 24 is almost like being geriatric,” he says. “But that meant I got my head down and focused on learning every day.” He also fell in love with the research. That meant that when he was cast as Hal in Being Human he found his way under the vampire’s skin by imaging him as “an addict” and read up on alcoholism and drug addiction. “It made human sense of Hal trying to fit into society while feeling like an outsider.”
Molony has managed to maintain a stellar theatrical career alongside his screen work. WShile filming Being Human, he was on stage at the Royal Court opposite Meera Syal in Andrea Lustgarten’s exposé of capitalism If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep. In 2014, he followed his turn as a Victorian detective in the second series of Ripper Street by treading the boards with Sir Ian McKellen in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land.
Early in the run, Molony recalls being invited to McKellen’s dressing room, where the great Shakespearean actor “asked me, ‘What are you going to do differently tonight?’ I don’t think I knew what he meant. Then he said, ‘Tonight I’m going to pretend my character has lost his glasses somewhere on the stage.’ That didn’t change the play in an obvious way. But it meant we were watching him differently. Every now and then his gaze would drift or he’d lift something up and look underneath. I realised that made the performance so much more alive, because all of us – cast and audience – were seeing something that had never happened before.”
He shakes his head in amused wonder. “I do performances differently every time now. If I do six takes of a scene in something like Bergerac, the director has six different options to choose from.”
While Molony and his family – a wife, a son and a daughter – live in London, they all spent the summer on the “beautiful” island of Jersey – which he stresses is as big a character as it ever was – when Bergerac was filming. “They went to play on the beach every day. We took a boat trip out to a tiny island where you get to swim for 20 minutes before the tide covers the beach and we saw dolphins dancing around us. In the evenings we’d swing by the farm shop where a fridge was stocked up every way with delicious home cooked meals of curry and lasagna and you just left money in an honesty box.”
I wonder if Molony has any choice when it comes to talking up the tax haven – apparently the Jersey government contributed £1.2m gerto the show in the hope it would boost tourism revenue. “That’s true,” nods Molony. “But honestly, the scenery is so stunning I can’t believe more films aren’t shot there.”
‘Bergerac’ starts on Thursday 27 February at 9pm on U&Drama
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