This script has been lightly edited for clarity.

 

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

Despite being dead for eight years, Frank Parris’ pernicious presence looms large over Susan Ryeland’s world. Murdered at night in the Moonflower wing of Branlow Hall, Frank’s death sets in motion a series of rather unfortunate events, bringing Susan back to Britain.

 

CLIP

Lawrence: Did you ever read about the murder of a man called Frank Parris?

Susan: Frank Parris. Yes. Yes, I did read about that.

Pauline: At our hotel. Branlow Hall.

Susan: In Suffolk?

Lawrence: That’s right, yes. It was where our daughter got married in June eight years ago. We stayed open for the whole weekend and on the Friday evening, Frank Parris checked in.

 

We soon learn that it’s a little more than coincidence that Susan is aware of Frank Parris and the story of his death. In a flashback to a rainy day eight years earlier, Susan and late author Alan Conway meet in a small cafe to discuss Alan’s progress on his new Atticus Pünd novel. It’s been two years since Alan’s last book, and he’s been waiting for the right inspiration to strike. As if on cue, Alan spots a newspaper on a nearby table with a picture of his old acquaintance, Frank Parris.

 

CLIP

Alan: He was murdered.

Susan: Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Was he a friend of yours?

Alan: No, I hardly knew him. Killed in a hotel.

Susan: A hotel. That would be a good setting for a book.

Alan: Do you think so? At a wedding?

Susan: Oh, I like that. That would be a great opening.

 

If you’re familiar with fictional author Alan Conway’s fictional murder mysteries, you’ll know that he loves to infuse his books with references, characters, and parallels to his own life. In the story within the story, Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, Conway uses Frank Parris as inspiration for a character who is the antithesis of Frank, timid film producer Oscar Berlin. 

 

CLIP

Oscar: It is the work of almost three years, Melissa. I have the script, the director, the contract, I have the costumes. One thing I do not have, your signature. Why will you not sign the contract when production begins two months from now?

Melissa: I’ve decided not to do it.

Oscar: What?

Melissa: Well, I’m sorry Oscar, I’ve changed my mind.

 

Today, we talk with actor Mark Gatiss about playing Moonflower Murders’ Oscar Berlin and Frank Parris, his love of mysteries, and the complexities of being both a writer and an actor.

 

Jace Lacob: And this week we are joined by Moonflower Murders star, Mark Gatiss. Welcome.

Mark Gatiss: Thank you very much. Nice to be back, apparently.

Jace Lacob: Yes, nine years later, our first podcast guest. It’s great to have you back again.

Mark Gatiss: Look, I haven’t changed at all. You can see, by listening to me.

Jace Lacob: Nor have I, nor have I in these nine years, no. In Moonflower Murders, you play two vastly different roles, deeply unpleasant rogue Frank Parris and Eastern European film producer Oscar Berlin. Originally, you only had two scenes in Moonflower, though that soon ballooned into several. What was it about those initial two scenes that attracted you to the project?

Mark Gatiss: Oh, well, I saw Magpie Murders, and I loved it. I mean, I just thought the whole concept was so clever and so appealing, and a very, very clever way, I’m sure Anthony Horowitz will forgive me for saying, of having your cake and eating it, by having a sort of modern procedural, classic golden age murder mystery. I just thought it was delightful and I love the central conceit of playing people who existed in both worlds, as it were, with sort of slightly tweaked names, I thought was so wonderful.

So, when I was offered it, I was thrilled. And then, after the read through, Anthony said, I’ve got to write more for you, and so he did, which is very flattering. That’s how it came about, really. And I did love the idea of two separate identities. And weirdly enough, it rarely happens in television. The way we shot it, I was able to do the first part, clean shaven, and then come back with a beard to play the other one. So that worked out very well.

Jace Lacob: So, no prosthetics? No fake beard?

Mark Gatiss: No, no. No prosthetic chins.

Jace Lacob: Frank Parris’s arrival at Branlow Hall and subsequent murder in the hotel’s Moonflower wing is the inciting incident for Moonflower Murders, even though it happened eight years in the past. What did you make of the character of Frank Parris when you first read Anthony’s script?

Mark Gatiss: Well, I think it’s my first murder victim, which I thought was quite interesting, but in the sense, he’s the baddie as well, which is nice. I just thought he was very… I know the type, if you know what I mean. He’s rather sort of sneery, but a bit of a chess player, I think. There’s something slightly Iago-like about him. He’s sort of sizing people up and working out how he can set them against each other. And in a sort of golden age way, he’s a very familiar character; the sort of person who stirs things up and ends up with a bullet in the brain, as it were.

So, yeah, he was just a delicious character, I have to say. I knew he was going to be very well dressed, and he was. And I just love the idea of entering this world and just playing with these people, I suppose. That’s what he does. But I mean, he pays the ultimate price. So, it’s also a lesson not to mess around like that.

Jace Lacob: Don’t meddle. Don’t meddle.

Mark Gatiss: Yeah, yeah.

Jace Lacob: I love the description for him in Anthony’s script for Episode One, “Frank Parris gets out of the taxi. He’s a charismatic gay man in his 40s, smartly and expensively dressed, self-centered and far from likable. He has come to Suffolk from Australia and has the tan to prove it.” What sort of character work did you need to do during prep with Frank?

Mark Gatiss: Zero. Zero. That’s me. No, and I’m flattered by the 40s description. It was generally just a question of choosing the clothes and the look. And this is just the way it’s worked out, because I’d been playing John Gielgud at the National Theatre, so my head was shaved for that, and so in order to get a rebalanced head, I had to shave it all off. So, it was gone, like it is in the moment, and then I knew I’d have a beard for it.

Then I think I look a bit like Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, that’s what I was going for. A sort of groomed, bald man. It’s just about holding yourself, I suppose, in that kind of way. There are certain people who glide through life. I think that’s what I thought about Frank. You know, he’ll never really be troubled by anything. If he misses a plane, someone will sort it out for him. He just sort of steps out of taxis into other taxis. It’s that sort of life I think is what he’s led. I always remember that line in Superman III when Robert Vaughn says, “I’ve never worn the same pair of socks twice in my life.” He’s that kind of man.

Jace Lacob: That’s the perfect way of putting it, I think. I definitely get that with Frank Parris. He would just throw them away after wearing them, I think. He doesn’t have a ton of screen time in Moonflower Murders, having been murdered eight years earlier, but his malevolent presence hangs over the story all the same. How do you achieve that, becoming a larger-than-life villain in the matter of just a few flashbacks? Is it about imbuing him with an aura as much as with an inner life?

Mark Gatiss: It’s partly, of course, in a sort of Iceman Cometh, Godot kind of way, if people talk about you enough, you become a thing, you become a presence, don’t you? And particularly as a baleful presence as he is, he has shadowed people’s lives and then leading to his murder. So, I think for me, it was just about, let’s just say having that kind of cocksure-ness. He just arrives [and] expects things to be in a certain way.

Do you know there’s people who just immediately change their hotel room because they can? I’m too British to do that, I’ll take anything. But he’s clearly one of those people who just go, “No, it’s not good enough”, and he just does it because he can. And he belittles people, and he looks for weaknesses and then he obviously finds, without any spoilers, he finds something he can exploit, which then becomes the sort of engine of the plot really.

Jace Lacob: As you say, seconds after arriving, he does try to get a better room, and he delivers his request with a certain venom.

 

CLIP

Lawrence: Can I help you?

Frank: I very much hope so. I’m afraid I don’t much care for my room.

Lawrence: Oh, I’m sorry. May I ask what’s wrong with it?

Frank: It’s small, it looks out over the carpark. You call yourself a country hotel so a glimpse of the countryside might be nice.

Derek: He’s in #23 Mr. Treherne. I did say we were full.

Lawrence: Thanks Derek. I’m afraid that’s true. We have a wedding this weekend. It’s actually my daughter who is getting married tomorrow.

Frank: Congratulations. But I have to say, if I had wanted to stay in a shoebox with a view of a carpark, I’d have stayed in Ipswich.

 

Jace Lacob: Is it just a case of Frank being someone who always gets what they want, regardless of the cost to those around him?

Mark Gatiss: Yes, I think so. And I think he’s well-traveled. I think he’s probably one of those British people who have learned from America. John Cleese always married Americans because he admired their openness and straightforwardness. And of course, the English, the British being so sort of strangulated about embarrassment, we’re very bad at that. So, Frank’s probably the sort of person who, I think he probably went to America quite early and thought, ah, I could do with a piece of this. And I think that becomes part of his personality.

Jace Lacob: He absorbs that.

Mark Gatiss: Yeah.

Jace Lacob: Frank Parris’s rather demanding nature gets turned on its head in Alan Conway’s Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, where he’s replaced by diffident, Eastern European film producer, Oscar Berlin. If Parris is all ego and malice, what do you make of Oscar Berlin? Is Parris’s mistreatment of others subverted here in a character who becomes largely a human doormat?

Mark Gatiss: He’s all wig. The funniest thing about this for me is that, because I knew my head was going to be shaved and I said, I’d like him to look like he has a bad toupee. And I think in that way, no one actually wanted it to look like it wasn’t good, but it does look like something terrible’s laid an egg on my head and it’s gone off.

But personality wise, yes, he’s totally different. He’s very put upon and he gambles the house on this film script, which is then not going to happen. So, yes, maybe what Alan Conway was doing in a sort of meta way, talking about him as if he’s real, but he sort of swaps Frank’s personality and makes him the total opposite, really. Whereas you could argue some other characters are sort of versions of their real life counterparts. I suppose he’s sort of flipping him, isn’t he, as you say?

Jace Lacob: Yeah, I mean, he becomes this sort of sad, just depressive character who’s being taken advantage of, instead of this manipulator that mistreats others. It’s like a little revenge, perhaps.

Mark Gatiss: Yes, you make them into the person you want them to be. I suppose he’s quite gentle because he doesn’t exact an actual revenge on him, he just fails professionally, I suppose. He doesn’t actually have him have his head cut off or anything, or his wig cut off.

Jace Lacob: His wig cut off. Oscar’s project with Melissa James is in jeopardy. She still hasn’t signed her contract to appear in his film, The Queen’s Ransom,

 

CLIP

Melissa: I’ve decided not to do it.

Oscar: What?

Melissa: Well, I’m sorry Oscar, I’ve changed my mind.

Oscar: What are you saying? We are friends, Melissa. We have an agreement. Everything I’ve done, the finance I have raised, without you I have nothing.

Melissa: We’re not friends, Oscar. This is a business arrangement and I’m sorry. I should never have let you talk me into it.

Oscar: If you back out now, do you have any idea? You will ruin me.

Melissa: Don’t be ridiculous. There are plenty of other actresses.

 

Jace Lacob: If Oscar is Frank’s reflection, then should we read that scene as an example of Frank being the type of person to ruin someone else?

Mark Gatiss: Well, yeah, maybe. Maybe that’s Alan’s thought process in that. It’s like projection, isn’t it? He’s projecting onto Oscar the sort of thing that Frank would casually do. He would casually let someone down like that, wouldn’t he, yes? He would just agree to something and then say, oh no, I’m not doing that. Too busy. And leaving the other person’s life in ruins, yes. So, yes, maybe.

 

MIDROLL 

 

Jace Lacob: In Episode Two, we learn why Frank was staying at Branlow Hall. He was selling his family home, one currently occupied by his sister Joanne and her husband Martin, out from underneath them. We see in flashback a vicious argument between Frank and Joanne in which she throws out, “…the disgusting life you led in London.” How did you read this moment and Joanne’s homophobia?

Mark Gatiss: Well, I mean, this is a difficult one because I don’t want to retrospectively disapprove of Frank having a good time, and his sister is just a bigot. So, it’s difficult because he’s the baddie. You don’t want to side with his homophobic sister. But clearly, she regards it as sleazy and inappropriate. One might consider he was simply just having a healthy sex life.

But that’s interesting to play because it’s about having a character who’s actually complicated. He can be the villain of the piece and reprehensible in an awful lot of ways, and in other ways, he’s just being a gay man. And it’s for others to judge and his sister to judge very harshly.

Jace Lacob: In some ways he is the freest of all the characters we encounter. He seems at most home with himself.

Mark Gatiss: Yes, I think that’s true. There’s a kind of relaxation that comes from being that confident, isn’t there? And as I say, he’s a glider, he glides through life. So, it seems to me perfectly believable that he would just shrug that off. He’s going to sell that house from under them. He doesn’t give a monkey’s about what happens to them.

When he goes to see the lawyer, it’s exactly the same. He just says, this is what I’m going to do. He does them the courtesy of telling them, but that’s as far as it’s going to go. That’s just sticks and stones to him. Whatever she hurls after him, he’s just thinking, well, I’ve got a nice life, you haven’t. Good luck to you.

Jace Lacob: James reveals that Frank was a sort of sexual mentor to Alan Conway when he was struggling to come out of the closet. We get a flashback to 10 years earlier with Frank, Alan and James in a posh restaurant. How would you describe the relationship between Frank and Alan? How did he view Alan Conway?

Mark Gatiss: I think there is a sort of, let me show you how things work, and kind of, maybe it’s the gentlest Frank ever gets because he’s actually going, you can be happy, can make yourself happy if you want. But also, it’s inevitably tinged, I think, with a sort of slight manipulation. And he probably regards him with a certain amount of contempt because Alan is clearly very uncomfortable in his own skin. And when Frank is so confident and relaxed about it all, he must find that sort of irritating.

I think he probably starts out with the best intentions. It’s like, someone might come along, and you go, don’t worry, I’ll show you how this works. And then there’s a certain kind of pleasure in teaching someone. But then very quickly, if they don’t come up to speed, they can become irritating because they’re not up to speed or because they’re not willing to learn. I think there’s something about Alan’s closeted-ness that probably irks Frank. So, after a while, he probably just treats him with the same contempt as everybody else.

Jace Lacob: It is interesting because it is the rare moment where we see some glimmer of compassion to Frank Parris as he encourages Alan to be his true self.

 

CLIP

Frank: Alan, you’re gay, you like men. Why don’t you just admit it? 

Alan: I have a wife and son.

Frank: And you think they suspect that maybe something isn’t quite right? What do they think that daddy’s doing in London on his own half the time?

Alan: Well, it’s not just that. I work in a school.

Frank: Alan, there are hundreds of gay teachers out there. It doesn’t make them dangerous or predatory. You’re just scared and you’re making excuses. And you don’t see if but you’re harming your own life. Be what you are. Be happy.

 

Jace Lacob: How do you reconcile that side of Frank with his more predatory, destructive side?

Mark Gatiss: Because people are complex, that’s why. It’s a great testament to Anthony’s writing, but also the creation of any fully rounded character is that you can be all kinds of different things at once. You can. And people are.

Jace Lacob: And what I love about that is, in the same moment, he is cruel. He’s in the same moment, in the same scene, with James.

 

CLIP

Frank: Nice to see you again, James. Look after my friend.

James: I’m not just a commodity, you know.

Frank: Actually, that’s exactly what you are. But you’re a very nice one.

 

Mark Gatiss: You’re absolutely right, he’s doing both things at once. He’s telling Alan a real home truth and it’s celebratory he’s saying. He’s saying, I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, there’s a wonderful actor called John Fraser who played Lord Alfred Douglas in The Trials of Oscar Wilde with Peter Finch. Do you know the film?

Jace Lacob: Yes.

Mark Gatiss: It’s a wonderful film. It’s just wonderful. And John Fraser was one of the most beautiful men of his generation and he wrote this brilliant book called Close Up, a Memoir. It’s incredibly salacious and funny, but there’s an amazing bit where he was in therapy for years and he had aversion therapy, all the things, drugs to make him vomit, all sorts of terrible things. And he was, around about 1961 or something, he was about to start the whole process again and his psychiatrist just said, or, you could just be happy, John.

And that was it. And then he said, it was like someone gave him permission to live and he did. And as I say, Frank is doing that, he’s saying, this is good advice, just be happy with who you are, love yourself, but he can’t help, then on the way out as you say, waspishly say to James, well, you are a commodity, but you’re terribly pretty.

Jace Lacob: Do you find that honesty chilling or refreshing or both?

Mark Gatiss: Both, because you’re allowed to feel both. You can see why people hate him, but also going back to that American bluntness, he’s saying it how it is. There’s a version of that scene where he could say, I know you think I’m a bastard, but I’ll tell you the truth, you could be happy if you want to. There you go. I’ll give you some real advice. But of course, he also enjoys playing with people and manipulating them. So, as a final grenade over the shoulder, he throws a little barbed comment backwards.

Jace Lacob: We touched on the fact that Frank Parris is the character who I think is the most authentically themselves in Moonflower Murders. He doesn’t pretend to be anything he isn’t, he lives his life on his own terms and unfortunately dies because of it. Would you say there’s more thematic overlap between you and Frank Parris or you and Oscar Berlin?

Mark Gatiss: No comment. Oh no, I’m definitely more on the Oscar side, I think, fortunately. Well, you know, again, talking about the complexities of people, one can have moments of amazing self-confidence and take pleasure in that, but mostly everyone has massive insecurities, don’t they? I think that’s how I feel most of the time.

I find people like Frank fascinating, but obviously slightly hateful, and sometimes that kind of confidence, it gets you a long way in life, but ultimately, it bespeaks of an inner hollowness, I think. Because really, those kinds of people are also terribly ambitious. It means it’s never enough. Whatever it is will never be enough. I remember talking to a very famous friend, an actor friend, who said, I spent all my life trying to get to the party. When I got there, I found there was nothing there. And there’s a lot of that in Frank, I think. As I say, he gets off on the power trip of manipulating people, but all he does is, he just pushes people away. Maybe he can’t find it within himself to be vulnerable enough to actually let someone in.

Jace Lacob: Oscar Berlin is coded as Jewish. Frank Parris isn’t coded as anything, he’s an out gay man in the present day. Do you see it as progress within the entertainment industry that Frank would be presented as simply a gay villain rather than some sort of paragon of model behavior?

Mark Gatiss: Absolutely. I always used to say, true progress is when being gay is the most incidental part of the character. And there’s still to this day a terrible burden on any minority character to be everything at once. It’s terribly difficult because people want to read so much into it. But then if you have a great panoply of incidentally gay characters, they can be good, bad, indifferent.

Gay people should be allowed to be boring on screen, or vicious, or self-loathing, or very funny, or not funny at all, or everything that everyone else is allowed to be. So, yes, I think there’s great progress in that. And I think weirdly, villainy is a big part of it. Because he’s not a bad gay villain in the sense of maybe something in the ‘50s or something, he would have been very heavily coded as gay, and that would be seen as part of his problem. In fact, probably the animus of his problem would be that he had an overbearing mother, and all those sorts of things that you always see in films of the period. And it would be like, yes, he’s evil because he’s gay. It’s an equation of the two. But that’s not the case anymore. I think he’s enjoying being who he is, he just happens to be not a very nice person.

Jace Lacob: You are no stranger to Golden Age crime dramas. You’ve acted in and written several adaptations of Agatha Christie. A 2007 Guardian piece on you ran with the headline, “Agatha Christie with Attitude”. Moonflower Murders celebrates and deconstructs Christie style mysteries. Why do you think audiences are still so rapturous over Christie so many years after her death?

Mark Gatiss: Christie’s plots are amazing. She had more brilliant ideas than anyone who’s ever written a detective novel, and the books are much better than people give them credit for, but they are essentially puzzles, and they’re great puzzles, and that’s why they survive. They’re endlessly re-readable because she’s just so clever. She’s like a brilliant magician. She was a brilliant magician. And there’s a letter in her papers, Graham Greene wrote to her asking to buy plots off her. That’s how good she was. He was sitting there staring at the wall, like every writer, and he thought, she thinks of three plots before breakfast. How does it happen? She’s just, endlessly brilliant, I think, and inventive, and that’s what people constantly respond to.

And then, of course, what’s happened in a kind of posthumous way is that Christie as a brand has become its own thing. And I think what people think of as Agatha Christie is probably Peter Ustinov’s Poirots, which are the most entertaining things in the world. They’re not quite Agatha Christie, but they’re a brilliant combination of Anthony Shaffer’s wit and Christie’s plots. And so, I think a bit like the cinema version of James Bond is James Bond, I think what we have made Agatha Christie into, at its best, is the perfect summation of all those things.

Jace Lacob: You appear in one episode of MASTERPIECE’s Nolly as performer Larry Grayson, playing the gay best friend to Helena Bonham Carter’s diva. And there is such an incredible sense of intimacy, of tenderness between Noele Gordon and Larry, one that’s really beautifully depicted by you and Helena. What was it like filming the dressing room scene with Helena?

Mark Gatiss: It was a joy, and I’m not saying this hyperbolically. The first thing we shot was the This is Your Life section. And you know, Helena is about three months older than me, and it’s very odd this, because I had a poster of A Room With a View on my wall when I was at college, and I’ve known of her all my life. I’ve never worked with her before and then we were suddenly playing best friends. And we got on like Larry and Noele. We did. It just worked. It was just one of those things and we had such a good time. And that lovely, lovely scene, it’s a beautifully written scene, was just like, even though we’d only been doing it for a week or so, it was a sort of summation of all that. It was really a joy to play.

Jace Lacob: “When I was a boy,” you once said in an interview, “I wanted to be a whiskery man in a white coat saying, look, it’s a pterodactyl.” Your earliest days show a fascination for Doctor Who, Sherlock Holmes, and fossils. Not many writers can say that they achieved their childhood dreams, and while you didn’t get to be that whiskery man saying, look, it’s a pterodactyl…

Mark Gatiss: Not yet!

Jace Lacob: Not yet! Not yet. How does it feel to have written for both the Doctor and Holmes, to have adapted Christie, Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells, do you feel a sense of accomplishment of which your younger self would be in awe?

Mark Gatiss: Absolutely. And I pinch myself constantly. Sometimes it seems to me ridiculous that all these things have happened. But I’m a great believer in persistence and hard work. And it’s an easy thing to say if it’s worked out for you, and it has, thank God, but to get to play in all those different areas is quite remarkable to me. Sometimes I look at the sort of checklist and go, well, there’s not much left that I didn’t want to do, so I’ve been very, very fortunate to get to play in all these things.

And what’s interesting, I remember Steven Moffat saying, when we first started Sherlock, he said, just for a brief time, we’ve got the keys to Baker Street. And that’s a very good way of thinking about it. There’s another version coming along now, I think a young Sherlock coming, and you get your go, and you do what you can with it, but then the brilliant thing about these great characters is they constantly reinvent themselves and are reinvented by others. So, to get to play for a brief while is a privilege.

Jace Lacob: Mark Gatiss, thank you so very much.

Mark Gatiss: Thank you very much. Thank you.

 

Next time, both Susan Ryeland and Atticus Pünd get some long-awaited answers as Moonflower Murders comes to a close. But first, more questions. 

 

CLIP

Chubb: Come on, Mr. Pünd. What were you talking about back there? You didn’t kill John Spencer. We all know that.

 

Tune in next week as we’re joined once again by Moonflower Murders writer and creator Anthony Horowitz to discuss the finale of this byzantine mystery series.