Amanda Donohoe – Murder City

Amanda Donohoe couldn’t wait to get her teeth into the character of DI Susan Alembic for a second time…

‘I really couldn’t wait to do the second series of Murder City. I felt we had only just started to explore and develop, not just my character, but all of the main characters [in the first series]. So to have the chance to do just that in this series has been great fun and very rewarding.’

Amanda has enjoyed not only the development of Alembic but also the rest of the team.

‘All of the main characters have blossomed. We wanted to develop a team, each with their own experience and downfalls and strong connections with one another, spiced up with a liberal scattering of rather dark humour.’

Dark humour included, Amanda feels that Murder City is in a league of its own in the detective genre.

‘The biggest challenge in this genre is to strike the right balance between character development and telling the crime story. Murder City is unique in that we tell two crime stories per episode and, somewhere along the line, they become interlinked. The fun is to figure out how, when and why they’re linked.’

‘The twists and turns in the plot always surprise me! Robert Murphy [the writer] is great at weaving a plot, or two, in this case.’

The only thing lacking for Alembic is physical stunts, something Amanda is rather grateful for!

‘The episodes open each week with a sort of abstract flash edit of the crimes we then try to solve. That’s where most of the action or stunts happened in this series but who knows – next year maybe I’ll have a high speed car chase through the streets of London shooting semi automatic weapons out the window and shouting ‘step on it Luke!’ Actually, no, I’d hate that, I’m much happier doing the detective work than the action stuff!’

If there were no genre or style constraints, Amanda would love to step back in time with Kris Marshall and her co-stars…

‘I’d like to take Alembic and Stone back in time to Georgian London in a lavish costume extravaganza to solve a murder involving the aristocracy and the underworld…a sort of Barry Lyndon meets CSI!’