Peter Capaldi on Britain’s Real-Life Institutional Disorder Behind Apple’s ‘Criminal Record’

When Peter Capaldi flickers into view on the Zoom call, I half expect him to tell me to “F** Off!”

For TV viewers of a certain age, the 65-year-old Scottish actor will forever be Malcolm Tucker, the supremely sweary spin doctor in Armando Iannucci’s pre-Veep Brit political satire The Thick of It.

“It’s The Thick of It and Doctor Who,” says a charming (and clean-mouthed) Capaldi, about the roles he’s most recognized for (he played the twelfth incarnation of the Doctor in the cult sci-fi series from 2013 to 2017). “Surprisingly, The Thick of It is still incredibly popular [the series wrapped in 2012]. People, generally very cool, smart young people, recognize me from that a lot. They generally just ask me to swear at them.”

Of course, there’s a lot more to Capaldi than Tucker and the Doctor. His scores of film and TV appearances include playing alongside Burt Lancaster in Bill Forsyth’s 1983 classic Local Hero, starring as Rory McHoan in the BAFTA-winning TV adaptation of Iain Banks’ Scots drama The Crow Road (1996), giving a delightful turn as the grumpy Mr Curry in the Paddington movies, and donning a spikey electrode skull cap to play DC comic-book villain The Thinker in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad (2021). Behind the camera, Capaldi won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film for his 1993 short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, wrote and helmed the 2001 feature Strictly Sinatra starring Ian Hart, Kelly Macdonald and Brian Cox, and directed multiple episodes of the BBC 4 sitcom Getting On.

What Capaldi has never done, in his decades on screen, is play a cop. His role as Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty in Criminal Record, the new crime thriller, which drops on Apple TV+ on January 10, is his first time impersonating a police officer.

The series sees Capaldi re-team with his Torchwood co-star Cush Jumbo, best known stateside for playing Lucca Quinn in The Good Wife and spin-off The Good Fight. Hegarty is a veteran cop, one of the most decorated and respected members of the London Metropolitan police, the Met. Jumbo plays DS June Lenker, a newbie detective eager to prove herself. When an anonymous phone call raises questions about one of Hegarty’s old murder cases, the two are drawn into a confrontation, with Lenker doggedly questioning every aspect of Hegarty’s investigation, and the old vet determined to protect his legacy. While it has plenty of elements of the classic cop show, Criminal Record is no by-the-book procedural. The cold case investigation is the plot driver for a series more interested in examining issues of race, gender and institutional disorder in a politically polarized Britain.

“I’m a big fan of crime shows, but often, the leading characters at the end of the episode just revert to the way they were at the start, events have no consequences, they don’t change them in any way,” says Capaldi. “Here we wanted to show characters that are changed, where what’s happening in the course of the show has a real impact on their lives.”

Capaldi also produced Criminal Record together with his wife Elaine Collins (Vera, Shetland). Written by BAFTA-nominee Paul Rutman (The Virgin Queen), the series co-stars Charlie Creed-Miles, Dionne Brown, Shaun Dooley, Stephen Campbell-Moore and Zoë Wanamaker.

The Institutional disorder at the center of the series — in her investigation, Lenker is shown constantly battling bullying, misogyny and racism within the Met — is no invention. An independent government report released last year found London’s police force to be “institutionally sexist, misogynistic, racist and homophobic.” The report came after a police officer stalked and killed a woman in 2021 and another officer was sentenced to life in prison for a series of rapes and sexual assaults. The report said the Met must completely transform if it doesn’t want to be dismantled.

“There clearly are a number of problems, [the police] are unfortunately, recruiting people who are not suitable for that kind of work, and, clearly, there’s a funding issue as well,” says Capaldi. “[The issues] had a direct influence on how the show developed, because you can’t do a show about the police in London without engaging to some degree with those problems.”

But Criminal Record is more film noir than kitchen sink docudrama. The opening scene sets the mood. Hegarty, moonlighting as a limo driver/security detail, is chauffeuring a couple of VIPs. When the passengers ask him about his life, he begins to recount old cases of murder and mayhem in the mean streets of London.

“That actually happened to me and my wife,” says Capaldi. “We were going to some awards thing, the BAFTAs or something. You’ll get a lot of detectives doing the driving for these events because they’re trained in defensive driving and they’re security conscious. I often fall into conversation with the drivers. I asked him about himself and he revealed that he was a detective. And as we passed through these neighborhoods, he’d tell us what murder happened here, what crime went on on this corner or that. I just thought: ‘That’s a great opener for a series.’”

DCI Hegarty, a taciturn and withdrawn man of few words and many meaningful silences, is a new kind of character for Capaldi, who has become accustomed to doing more “front-foot” performances with figures like Malcolm Tucker and Doctor Who.

“I’m usually out there all over the place, trying to get people’s attention shouting and jumping up and down or whatever.,” he says, “As Doctor Who you’re giving these great long speeches about comic this and electronics that and you have to keep dancing all over the place to keep people interested. And with The Think of It, well, if Malcolm was angry, you knew about it. [Hegarty] is a very veiled character and it was very important to not let the audience really in to him. I hadn’t consciously done that before.”

Rutman’s Criminal Record script has plenty of twists and surprises but the show’s real tension comes from the cat-and-mouse game played between Capaldi and Jumbo and in the slow reveal of their characters, who are both fallible and flawed in their own ways. Their scenes together throw real sparks.

“We sort of mutually decided not to rehearse,” says Capaldi. “We didn’t improvise or anything because the scripts were really good and the words were important, they had to be delivered clearly. But whatever we did together we did for the first time on camera. That allowed us to respond in situ as opposed to practicing responses, which kept things tense. I loved doing those scenes, but they were exhausting because I wouldn’t know what Cush was going to do. And vice versa.”

The show’s cold case gets wrapped up in the 8-episodes of Criminal Record but a final scene leaves an opening for a possible second season. Capaldi refused to be drawn on whether this is the last we’ll see of DCI Hegarty.

“Who knows? We’re just excited that we’ve done it and it’s out there, it’s been a real journey getting it to the screen. Working with Apple has been great but it’s a whole new world,” he says. “When I was working with BBC or ITV, a show might get sold to Australia or Hong Kong or whatever. Now Apple just presses a button, and 130 countries all over the world get the show. Instantly. It’s a whole different ballgame for me. But I’m delighted, at my age, to still be part of it.”

Check out the trailer for Criminal Record below.