CHRISTOPHER STEVENS weekend TV overview: A feminine 007? The Capture’s Holliday Grainger can be my first selection…
The Capture (BBC1)
Some people are easily bored. Paapa Essiedu, it appears, really can’t be bothered with sequels. He stars in one series, then gets himself violently written out at the start of the next.
His character in Gangs Of London chucked himself off a rooftop terrace rather than hang around for the second season. Now, in The Capture, he plays ambitious politician Isaac Turner, but even the promise of becoming the ‘first black British PM’ isn’t enough to keep him in the show.
The manner of his exit was certainly dramatic — shot through the head at a press conference, seconds after directing a flirtatious smile at counter-terrorism heroine Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger). That’ll teach him not to indulge in casual workplace sexism.
Essiedu has been cast as the disdainful Potions master Severus Snape at Hogwarts, in the forthcoming Harry Potter remake for U.S. cable channel HBO. We have to hope he won’t Expelliarmus himself after the first year.
Luckily, The Capture isn’t short of charisma in its cast. This convoluted conspiracy fantasy, set in a Britain where AI can instantly replace live TV and surveillance footage with deep fake videos, is compulsively watchable, not for its devious plotlines but because of its stars.
Grainger has an exceptional ability to convey a wealth of emotion with barely a flicker of her face. She rarely shouts and never resorts to dramatic gestures, even when others are gunned down around her or she’s staring down the barrel of a pistol herself.
Holliday Grainger has an exceptional ability to convey a wealth of emotion with barely a flicker of her face
Grainger plays Rachel Carey alongside co-star Paapa Esssiedu as Isaac Turner in The Capture
Without this talent, her character might seem too cold, too icily competent. Grainger lets us know that, behind the snap decisions and callous jokes, Acting Commander Carey is prey to moments of self-doubt, weakness and traumatised grief.
If Amazon, who have bought the James Bond franchise, do decide it’s time for a female 007, she’d be my first choice.
Ben Miles plays her predecessor, a smarmy villain with a lethal line in ironic grins, and Ron Perlman is back as an insufferable CIA agent with a taste for single malt whisky and death threats.
Special mention, too, for Adrian Rawlins, as the head of a public inquiry. He’s one of those character actors who make you sit up and say, ‘I’ve seen him in something!’ He specialises in cameos that always leave an impression.
All this star power is enough to make us suspend disbelief in a premise that is patently ridiculous. In the opening scene, a Russian assassin with plastic cheekbones was intercepted as he tried to evade facial recognition cameras at Heathrow by hacking them from his phone.
Why would he take the trouble? If he wants to enter the UK illegally, all he has to do is get in a dinghy at Calais, and Border Force will escort him across before booking him into a hotel. Saves the Kremlin a lot of hassle.
