Matthew Goode had no idea that writer-director Scott Frank—cocreator of The Queen’s Gambit and creator of Godless—had written the lead of a recent se
Matthew Goode had no idea that writer-director Scott Frank—cocreator of The Queen’s Gambit and creator of Godless—had written the lead of a recent series, Dept. Q, with Goode in mind. Though the pair had kept in touch since Goode played a Kansas City thug in Frank’s 2007 film The Lookout—and they also shared an agent—Goode also wasn’t aware that Frank had been working on the show, an adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Danish novels, until their shared rep gave him a call.
“They were gleaning my interest, which piqued very quickly,” Goode says of the character-driven police drama in which he stars as Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck, a snarky English cop with a superiority sophisticated. Morck is contemptuous of everyone in his adopted home of Edinburgh—except, perhaps, his Scottish partner, DCI James Hardy (Jamie Sives). “It’s quite worrying, really, when Scott says he thought of me to play the part. Maybe it’s because he thinks I’ve been working in the British film industry for 20-odd years and that I’ll bring that good sense of jadedness to it.”
Nevertheless, Goode—who’s known for such films as The Imitation Game and Brideshead Revisited, and TV series including The Good Wife and Downton Abbey—wasn’t a shoo-in for the role. “Scott had to go to bat for me because I’m not, you know, Tom Hardy or Zendaya,” he jokes during a late-afternoon Zoom interview from the UK in “the snug room”—a.k.a. his wife Sophie Dymoke’s Surrey home office—as one of their three kids (Matilda is 16, Teddy, 11, and Ralph, nine) sometimes sets off the car alarm, and another runs in and out of the space that doubles as the family’s screening room.
“The folks at Netflix I’m sure wanted a bigger ‘name,’ as the cost of the show was going to be high for their British division,” Frank explains via email. “But when I pointed out the range of roles Matthew had played, as well as the fact that today, it’s more often than not the show that makes the star, rather than vice versa, they gave their approval and then expressed nothing but white-hot enthusiasm for his performance.”
Clean-shaven and affable in conversation, Goode sports a white tee and baseball cap, and occasionally pulls on a vape pen. He’s infinitely more laid-back and self-effacing than the brittle, bearded single father whose life implodes when Dept. Q opens. As the first detectives to arrive on the scene where a dead body sits in a chair, the partners walk into what may be an ambush. The attack leaves a youthful constable dead, Hardy partially paralyzed, and Morck, having survived a bullet to the face, now guilt-ridden and ordered to see a shrink.
“I had problems with other human beings long before I was shot,” he tells Dr. Rachel Irving (Kelly Macdonald) when she suggests that PTSD may make interacting with people tough. Visiting Hardy in the hospital after his return to work, he reports that “nothing’s changed. All fucking morons. I think I’m just gonna put my time in and be done with it.” But his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie), has other ideas. To get him out of her hair (“Do you ever stop and wonder why people hate you?” she asks), he’s assigned to a newly created cold-case unit that’s really just a PR stunt, and stashed in the station basement’s former shower room.
Soon, Goode’s malcontent has assembled a team that includes Akram (Alexej Manvelov), an enigmatic Syrian émigré (“He comes dressed as a geography teacher, but it might turn out that he’s actually Batman,” Goode says), and Rose (Leah Byrne), a plucky, sidelined detective who’s itching to get back to work. Morck even enlists Hardy from his hospital bed as they investigate the mysterious disappearance of a prosecutor (Chloe Pirrie) with a complicated past.
Frank—who wrote or cowrote all nine episodes of the series, and directed six—relocated the story from Copenhagen to Edinburgh, and told his star not to bother reading Adler-Olsen’s books. “Considering I’ve done quite a few adaptations in my time, I found that so freeing,” Goode says. Instead, the actor recently seen as a vampire in A Discovery of Witches, Hollywood producer Robert Evans in The Offer, and C.S. Lewis (opposite Anthony Hopkins) in Freud’s Last Session, got under the prickly cop’s skin by reading up on police procedures, talking to a former cop acquaintance who worked murders, and recalling confidences shared by military-veteran mates who suffered with PTSD.
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