Tom Burke plays Cormoran Strike:
“One of the things about Strike I particularly find endearing is his humanity and even when confronting killers he takes a big brother approach and he’s always shocked when they spin around and lash out at him.
“In that scene I was thinking about what expectations he would have of Creed but inevitably when somebody is a certified serial killer you would be on your guard. He was very aware of Creed’s vanity and his ego before they met so I was mindful of the flow of communication between the two characters. There’s the cadence and rhythm in reflecting the person and it’s also about knowing when to confront them as well. “
Private detective Cormoran Strike (Tom Burke) is visiting his family in Cornwall when he’s approached by a woman, Anna Phipps (Sophie Ward) asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough (Abigail Lawrie), who went missing under mysterious circumstances in 1974.
Strike’s never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old, but despite the slim chance of success, he’s intrigued and takes it on, adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency Robin Ellacott (Holliday Grainger) are currently working on. Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
Holliday Grainger plays Robin Ellacott:
“Troubled Blood focuses on a cold case, Robin and Strike are investigating the disappearance of a doctor in the 1970s. A lot of the witnesses and the people involved are old or dead now, so it’s a case of tracking people down and slowly putting together the notes of two different police detectives. For Robin and Strike this case is quite different from the others, in that it’s digging into the past and trying to trace people that are hard to track down.”
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot’s disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. They learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly.
Director Sue Tully:
“The biggest challenge with Troubled Blood was the crime story happened 43 years ago, so it’s a cold case about a woman who went missing in 1974. It was presumed that she was murdered but no body was ever found, she literally disappeared. Her daughter, who was a very small child at the time has spent her lifetime trying to find out what happened to her mum. She bumps into Strike down in Cornwall, and just seizes the opportunity to ask him to help her. The story flashes in and out of flashbacks, with contemporary and then we go back, as we follow the story of Margot Bamborough, this woman who went missing. And so, the challenge was how do we tell that story and make it visually interesting, but ensure it still feels like part of the world that we know with Strike and Robin.”
