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While we embark on the inhumanly long wait for the new season of Line of Duty, which starts shooting in January, you’ll see Martin Compston – the show’s hero and true north – a number of times. Twice as you’ve never seen him before, and once, in Red Eye, in the form that you’ve come to know and love him: brisk and taciturn, brave and speedy, the man you’d trust to save the world while the dopes all around him can’t even see it needs saving.
But first, The Revenge Club, in which he is a revelation. The setting is a support group for divorcees, a ragtag gang united by nothing but the fact that they’ve been summarily dismissed by their spouses. “There’s no other reason for these characters to be in each other’s lives,” Compston says from his home in Las Vegas (more on that later – much more). “They’re all desperate and lonely and in dire need of companionship. They’re all, in their own ways, broken, which makes for this explosive mix.”
If that sounds miserable, it is anything but – even the scenes in a beat-up community centre are heightened, exotic and alive with possibility. The acts of revenge, undertaken by the whole group against one ex at a time, start off pretty mild: rats down the chimney, remote messing with a Spotify playlist, that order of magnitude. When they get into spiking a drink, though, things turn darker and I think it’s fair to say, life-threateningly so. At first it reminds me of Netflix’s Russian Doll, largely due to the chaotic charisma of Aimee-Ffion Edwards, the heroine-divorcee to Compston’s hero; as it goes on, though, it ceases to resemble anything else. “It sits in its own space,” he says. “It goes from intense, emotional scenes into a sort of Ocean’s Eleven caper. You think you’re going down this path, then you’re not. But as long as a cast commits to that, the audience will go along with it.”
This is something he learned from Ken Loach and has stayed with him his whole career, Compston says. “If you’ve got an excitement about what you’re doing and enthusiasm for what you’re doing, the audience will come with you.” This is a casual but lurching pull back to 2002, his first role, when he was discovered as a teenager in Greenock, to play a teenager in Greenock, for Loach’s Sweet Sixteen. Looking at the stills from that movie, it’s hard to believe he was once that kid; he looks so unactorly, almost embodies the spirit of authentic, uncinematic adolescence.
But back to the point. There are two surprising things about casting Compston in The Revenge Club. The first is that he’s playing for laughs, which he’s only done once before (in Sky’s Urban Myths – a magic-realist retelling of Band Aid, in which Compston was Midge Ure). This time round, the witty dialogue is the engine of the drama, and every actor is pin sharp, comically speaking. “It was outside my comfort zone,” says Compston. “One terrifying moment I had was such a tiny little scene with Meera Syal; we were improvising little bits, and I remember sitting there thinking: ‘She’s comedy royalty. What if she thinks I’m shit?’” He point blank refuses to put himself in Syal’s class: “The way Meera and Sharon [Rooney, who also stars – perhaps most memorable for her role as Lawyer Barbie in Greta Gerwig’s movie] can turn it on, I don’t have that in me, it’s an artform. But I can play the angry Scotsman and be quite funny.”
Compston is also the romantic lead in The Revenge Club, which is a major fork in the road – his fictional love life, definitely as a cop, always has disaster written all over it. He and Edwards have a delightful screwball energy, spiky and passionate, and there’s a maturity to the storytelling in so far as they’re both – you suspect – a bit of a nightmare, but you’re rooting for it to happen anyway. Although that, he says, is just because I haven’t seen how it ends. “That’s one of the things I love about the show: we’re not just good guys who have been wronged. Our exes might just be people who’ve moved on with their lives. We’ve all gone down this rabbit hole because we had nothing to cling on to, and all of a sudden we have this group, we’ve taken it too far and we don’t know how to stop.”
Perhaps even more unexpected is the real-life Compston in the upcoming Living Las Vegas, a delightfully old-school travelogue about his life in the US. He married American actor Tianna Chanel Flynn “nearly 10 years ago and we still haven’t had a honeymoon”, and they split their time between Greenock and Las Vegas, prompting him to make this three-parter for Channel 4. He partly explains it, in the show, by the fact that he doesn’t know that many people in Vegas. So he bods about, making friends with the lady who runs the vintage shop and some people who teach him how to ride a horse. It’s incredibly cute – Chanel Flynn is adorable, and adoring, in the background – and quite strange, at this juncture, to not only describe the US by its epic landscapes and casinos, but to spend a morning with a drag queen, Lawrence (also from Greenock), without mentioning the political ambience, in which drag is a faultline and the house always wins.
“A lot of people live their lives on social media,” he says, diplomatically. “I’m not unaware of the problems out there, but we live on a lovely street, we’ve got nice neighbours, politics aside; we’re all just getting on with our lives. My wife and her family are Democrats, that would be my leaning, but I’m just a guest here. It’s become such an angry space right now that I try to keep quiet. But I still believe the same things, and [when] the time comes, I’ll still vote the same way.”
Hours before we speak, the BBC announced the return of Line of Duty, for its seventh series. Seventeen million people watched the finale of season six, in 2021, making Jed Mercurio’s the most-watched drama since records began at the start of the century. “That 9 o’clock slot, whether it be on a Sunday night or over the holidays, it’s gold dust,” he says. “You feel like you’ve got the country in the palm of your hand if you’ve got something good to show them, and there’s no feeling like it.” Compston thinks Britain has fallen for Adrian Dunbar, or Supt Ted Hastings to give him his proper name: “He’s become like the nation’s uncle. A guy who wants to do right. People want to root for the good guys, and know there are good guys out there, especially in times like these.”
Between that and the endless fanfic speculation on social media, its popularity is so intense I’d forgotten that the first three seasons landed quite quietly. “It wasn’t until series five that things really blew up,” he remembers. “When Sweet Sixteen came out, I was 17. It did really well, but it became a monkey on my back because everyone thought: ‘That’s who you are.’ Now if I’m typecast, if they say ‘Line of Duty is the best thing you’ll ever do’, I’m happy. I’m very comfortable in my own skin and career.”
The second season of Red Eye, in which he plays the head of security at the American embassy in London in the grip of a terrorist attack, draws on many of the qualities he conjured as DI Arnott: a charismatic certitude, a seriousness of purpose, a lot of rushing around meaning business. He would have worked on anything from director Kieron Hawkes, who’s one of his best friends – they’re also working up a film together, which has just got funding. It’s just happy coincidence that Red Eye involves so much “running about, talking into your wrist, hand on the ear like you’ve got an earpiece, that’s just cops and robbers grown up. I love all that. I live for all that. Getting to play this kick-ass, ex-SAS agent, it’s brilliant fun.”
Compston is starting to think about producing, because otherwise, when he’s not working he can’t relax: “You get that working-class guilt, you need to do something.” He’s started to love it, though, and the different bits of brain it requires. “You’re suddenly thinking, should we be filming this on a train or a ferry? What’s cheaper? When you’re reading a script as an actor, all you’re thinking is: ‘Why is the character doing that?’ You’re not thinking: ‘That’s going to cost us two days’.”
He describes one project, a biopic of “Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish guy on the run who landed in America and became the most powerful law man in the US. He started the secret service, worked on the Underground Railroad, invented the first rogues gallery with mug shots, chased down Butch Cassidy, Jesse James – had an incredible life. This little guy from the Gorbals.” Just when you thought there was nothing more quintessentially Compston than DI Arnott, a period drama idea appears that does, you must admit, sound extremely him.
The Revenge Club is out now on Paramount+; Red Eye is on ITV1 on New Year’s Day at 9pm.
