Between Berlin Station, all of those Harlan Coben shows and now Red Eye, you’ve been doing a lot of series in this genre lately. Have you caught the thriller bug?
I feel like I’m up to my neck in crime mysteries, psychological suspense thrillers . . . I’m not complaining. It’s the kind of stories that I love watching, reading, taking part in. I love a cliffhanger and I think Peter Dowling [Red Eye creator] is rivalling Harlan Coben for king of cliffhangers.
For you as an actor, is the experience of reading the script for a TV mystery akin to reading a mystery novel?
Yeah, I had three episodes — and experience taught me that sometimes you get the first three and it’s really, really exciting, and you can’t wait for the rest of it. And then it’s a little bit: “Oh, no. Is that it?” But with this, it was: “Oh, great! It’s better than I thought. It’s bigger and more complicated and more political.” This really surpassed every expectation.
Do you feel this particular story could’ve been told in a feature film?
I think Peter Dowling kind of dealt with that with Flightplan, the Jodie Foster movie. It was a great film; I feel like he had an itch to scratch, though, and was like, “I want a bit more time to tell it. I want an escalation of events that can last more than a 90-minute movie.” So, it’s definitely possible, but it’s nice to have six hours . . .
What do you think the airplane itself adds to this narrative?
The sort of claustrophobia of that locked room at 50,000 feet — or however high a plane flies [laughs] — it’s a brilliant device, because these people cannot get off, there’s a murderer onboard, there are people dropping like flies. What the hell do they do? How do they get out of this? . . . I think that makes it a pressure cooker that’s kind of irresistible.
The core relationship of the show is between Nolan and DC Hana Li (Jing Lusi), the British police officer escorting him. How does their tenuous bond evolve?
I like the fact that it’s not completely linear. They progress quite far, and then they take two steps back — even into episode five where she’s like, “Are you a spy?” because he’s gained her trust and then betrayed it . . . They start with the fact that she is this detective and he thinks, “She’s going to do everything she can to get me behind bars.” But by the end of it, there’s real friendship.
When you’re playing a character who’s shrouded in mystery, is it ever tough to exude shadiness while still remaining true to that character’s internal motivations?
I do sometimes quite like not knowing whether they are telling the truth or not. That can be quite fun. It’s interesting because if the choice is to lie, you have to decide how good a liar he is . . . [Nolan] doesn’t actually know if he is really telling the truth, because he has this blackout period. When this car crash happened, he was drugged. So he doesn’t really know if he is innocent, which I think is a quite interesting place to lead from.
Has this show changed your personal relationship with air travel?
It’s really weird, I was on a flight to ZÜrich recently just as the show was airing, and I was getting really funny looks from people on the airplane — like, double-taking. And I was offering them my vegan meal, but nobody wanted it!
Red Eye, streaming on Paramount+
MEMORABLE ROLES:
The British star of stage and screen is best known to film buffs as dwarvish king Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. Yet he’s been far more prolific on TV, from his breakout role in Victorian drama North & South to serial killer Francis Dolarhyde on NBC’s Hannibal to his recent work in adaptations of mystery author Harlan Coben’s The Stranger, Stay Close and Fool Me Once.
CURRENT GIG:
Armitage now leads this six-part thriller about Matthew Nolan, a U.K. doctor being extradited to Beijing on a red eye flight to face charges he claims are bogus. Once aboard, a meal specially prepared for Nolan is eaten by another passenger, who promptly dies — revealing a wild conspiracy that entangles China, MI5 and the CIA.