TV viewers will have another seven weeks to wait to discover
the identity of the killer in the new ITV drama series Broadchurch. However, even during filming the cast and crew were
kept in the dark until the very last hours before the crucial final scenes were
shot.
Broadchurch follows
the investigation into the murder of an eleven year old boy in a picturesque
seaside town. It’s a small, close knit community, and the next few weeks will find
the finger of suspicion being pointed at a number of key residents. The
producers are keen to keep audiences guessing right till the very end of the series, even eschewing the usual ‘Next Week’ trailers at the end of
each episode. And as writer and
executive producer Chris Chibnall tells the Daily Mail, he also kept the secret
from his cast over five months of filming, prompting an on set sweepstake among
the actors and crew.
He said: “We adopted the kind of security you’d normally
associate with a massive Hollywood movie. All of the scripts on set were kept in
a safe, watermarked so they couldn’t be copied, and there were only five
people, including myself, who knew the full story.
“For 85 per cent of filming, no one had any idea who
was guilty. The cast and crew set up a rogues’ gallery and took bets on who
they thought it was, but I was determined that secrecy was the key to the
drama’s success.”
He had planned a group meeting to reveal the answers decided
against it at the last minute.
“As we were coming to the point where we had to give people
final scripts, I organised for everyone to meet at the beach so that I could
tell them,” he explained. “But on set the night before, so many people admitted
they liked the suspense and didn’t want to know who it was that when I arrived
I told them I’d changed my mind.
“Olivia Colman, who plays one of the investigating police
officers, looked like she was ready to murder me, while David Tennant grabbed
hold of me and said he couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to tell him. But then he
admitted he was actually glad.”
In the end the actors were told on a ‘need-to-know’ basis only hours before they were due on set. David himself has said that not knowing the outcome was of great benefit to his performance:
“If you are playing someone who is investigating a crime and
the crime is actually unfolding as you go from an acting point of view, that’s
very helpful as you can’t second guess. When you’re playing those initial
interviews with characters and you genuinely don’t know what the truth is you
can’t load those scenes with ‘actorly’ tricks; you have to play it for what it
is which can only make it more real. You can be as exasperated about the
mystery of the characters as the audience will be.”
Broadchurch is an eight part ITV drama starring David Tennant as DI Alec Hardy and Olivia Colman as DS Ellie Miller, two police
detectives who are thrown together to solve a boy’s murder. Other cast
includes Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan as the boy’s parents, Arthur Darvill
as the trendy footballing vicar, Vicky McClure as a snooping national
journalist, Pauline Quirke as a mysterious loner and Will Mellor as a
suspicious telephone engineer.
The series continues at 9pm on ITV on Monday 11th
March
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