Kris Marshall: ‘A Death in Paradise cruise with 5,000 fans? No thanks’
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Kris Marshall’s “brutal” first review still hurts. It was for a play, years before he would get his big break as gormless slacker Nick Harper in the BBC sitcom My Family. “It said something like ‘Kris Marshall tries hard – too hard,’” he recalls with a grimace.
It is a good thing he says he is immune to appraisals of his work today, because he has a habit of appearing in juggernauts that are beloved by the public and sneered at by the critics in equal measure.
Death in Paradise, in which he started playing Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman a decade ago, is similarly critic-proof. Currently in the middle of its 13th series, it celebrated its 100th episode last month, was the second highest-watched TV drama of last year (behind Happy Valley), is licensed to 230 international territories and has spawned a successful spin-off, Beyond Paradise – relocating DI Humphrey to Devon.
Yet it is regularly dismissed as “Miss Marple with coconuts”, while The Telegraph – reviewing the first episode in 2011 – described it as being “at times like a macabre advertisement for a tropical juice drink”.
“I can almost write certain critics’ criticisms before they write them themselves,” says Marshall, his 6ft 2in frame stretched out on a chair in a hotel room overlooking the Thames.
Instead, he speaks with pride of a format – British/Irish detective leads a police force investigating weekly murders on fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie – that evidently works. “To create something that is so cross-demographic is actually a very tricky thing to do, and I think that is sometimes overlooked by the more sniffy critics. To set up a world, send the audience down odd little dead ends and then resolve it in that one hour… I think that’s a form of alchemy.”
Marshall – who succeeded Ben Miller and was followed by Ardal O’Hanlon and incumbent Ralf Little – returned from the “unreal” idyll of Guadeloupe because half the year on a remote island was too much with two young children, Thomas, now 11, and Elsie, eight.
The 50-year-old has a soft-spot for the character he says is “an amalgamation of my favourite detectives”, from Columbo to Rockford and Monk. But he was still unsure about reinhabiting him for the crime drama Beyond Paradise, the second series of which – shot in both Devon and Cornwall – starts next week.
That was until he put on “an old crumpled jacket that they still had on the rail somewhere deep in the bowels of the BBC costume department. I put the hands in pockets” – his character’s trademark posture – “and some of my old notes were in there still. It was like a homecoming really.”
A homecoming in more ways than one; for a decade Marshall had a home in Polperro, Cornwall, which he ran as a holiday let – making £40,000 a year – before he sold it in 2017.
Marshall is remembered chiefly for his comic roles – he won a best newcomer British Comedy Award for Nick Harper, a 19-year-old character he started playing at 27. Does he not worry that his gift for slapstick has ruled him out of being considered for meatier roles? “Yeah, I’m an actor. There’s that old joke, ‘How many actors does it take to change a light bulb? One to change the light bulb and four to sit around saying, I could have done that.’”
On whether spending his career being perceived as much younger than he really is has been in any way restricting, he also simply shrugs. “No, it’s just my face. I’ve often played down [in age]. That’s starting to change a bit. I must be ageing now, I’m catching up with myself!”
Perhaps the reason Marshall is so reluctant to grumble is the seven years he spent in the wilderness after being thrown out of Wells Cathedral School just before his A-levels (which he “flunked”). He worked on travelling fairs, in a toothpaste factory and was fired from Iceland for wearing blue sunglasses on the till.
He remembers “hiding under the bed from landlords” while pestering the National Theatre with weekly faxes sent from his local library. It paid off. He has since starred in Love Actually, the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice – opposite Al Pacino – ITV’s Sanditon and seven years of ads for BT.
He has made time for theatre too, including Treats in 2007, when he witnessed co-stars Laurence Fox and Billie Piper falling in love.
Nine years ago, Marshall and Fox were both interviewed about their “joke-fuelled friendship”. Since then, Fox and Piper have divorced. And Fox has become a right-wing provocateur, posting pictures of pride flags in the shape of a swastika, losing a high court libel battle with two men he called paedophiles after they said he was a racist and being sacked from GB News after referring to a female journalist with the question: “Who’d want to shag that?”
I ask if they are still mates. “No. I haven’t seen Laurence for a long time,” he says impassively. When I mention that Fox said “I think around 95 per cent of our relationship is unprintable,” he clams up: “I mean, I don’t really have any comment about that.”
Last year, he covered all of today’s hot-button issues in a much more inquiring way when he appeared in “cancel-culture drama” Charlotte and Theodore at the Theatre Royal, Bath.
“There’s a feeling that certain people feel like they’re being passed over or not getting the opportunities, which is untrue,” he says of the play. “And because of that, they become righteous, that was a big part of the play – and that righteousness of toxic masculinity.”
When I ask if the industry has become a kinder, more supportive place to work over the past 25 years, he hesitates. “I’m not sure I’m the right person to ask about that,” he says. “As a white, middle-class man, I’ve always been served quite well.”
If Marshall feels supported by the industry, he also feels supported by the Death in Paradise superfans of whom he speaks with reverence. One nine-year-old devotee turned up in Devon dressed as Humphrey, complete with the scrap pieces of paper on which the detective scrawls his notes.
But there is one – unofficial – series spin-off that is a bridge too far. “They do Death in Paradise cruises now! I’ve been invited on one. I didn’t fancy it. I don’t think I’d like to be on a cruise ship with 5,000 fans.
“They’re amazing,” he is at pains to add. “But, no,” he says with a guffaw. “I think I’d go for a swim.”
Beyond Paradise begins on BBC One on March 22
