Killer style
Director Simon Hynd, costume designer Hayley Nebauer and hair and make-up designer James Spinks tell DQ about the “unique” prospect of making BBC comedy-drama Death Valley, which centres on an unlikely crime-solving partnership who must unravel a series of bizarre murders.
From a walking group and a wedding party to an amateur dramatics society and a school reunion, every episode of BBC comedy-drama Death Valley takes viewers into a new world and introduces a fresh cast of characters.
Starring Timothy Spall and Gwyneth Keyworth, the series centres on retired actor John Chapel (Spall), who is best known for his role as fictional TV detective Caesar and is now living in Wales. When his neighbour is murdered, he strikes up a friendship with disarming but ambitious detective sergeant Janie Mallowan (Keyworth) to help solve the case.
With a taste for real detective work, John soon becomes an integral part of cracking a number of puzzling murder mysteries that land on Janie’s desk. For director Simon Hynd, costume designer Hayley Nebauer and hair and make-up designer James Spinks, the challenge – and appeal – of working on the series was realising each of the different worlds that feature in the show.
“Because it’s six standalone episodes, there’s new locations and a new community in every story, and a whole new cast,” Hynd tells DQ during filming for episode five on location at Insole Court, a Grade II-listed Gothic mansion in Cardiff. “So it’s quite a big ensemble across the series. There was a lot of casting to do in prep, a lot of location finding. Every two weeks [of filming] we’re welcoming a new group of people into these new communities, and it’s been really lovely.”
“Lynchpins” Spall (The Sixth Commandment) and Keyworth (Craith) head a small band of actors who recur across the series, a group that also includes Steffan Rhodri (The Way) as DCI Clarke, Janie’s boss and so-called mentor, and Alexandria Riley (Baby Reindeer) as Baxter, a straight-talking pathologist and friend of Janie.
Meanwhile, guest actors include Kiell Smith-Bynoe (Ghosts), Sian Gibson (Peter Kay’s Car Share), Patricia Hodge (A Very English Scandal), Jim Howick (Ghosts), Karl Johnson (True Love), Colin McFarlane (The War Between the Land & the Sea), Vicki Pepperdine (Poor Things), Steve Speirs (Inside No 9) and Amy Trigg (Such Brave Girls).
“Tim and Gwyn have really nice arcs across the series. You’ve got episodic stories every week, but then you’ve got a more dramatic arcs where you’re learning about their pasts,” Hynd continues. “They’ve been just a real joy to work with and they’re so committed and so passionate about it. You can tell when they come into every scene they’ve really done their own work and they’re keeping me on my toes, which is nice.”
But with new characters to introduce in every episode of the series, which is created and written by Paul Doolan, the challenge for Hynd was to find the show’s tone as quickly as possible so everyone could ensure they were playing to the right level of humour or drama throughout. The director wouldn’t compare Death Valley to anything else on television, however.
“It is its own unique thing,” he remarks. “Obviously there’s been lots of other British murder-of-the-week shows but either they’re very serious or if there’s humour in them, it can be quite the low-hanging-fruit kind of humour. We wanted to do something that didn’t feel cosy crime, that felt more real and more naturalistic in the performances.”
That process is also helped by a familiar structure that runs through each episode, beginning with the introduction to a new group of characters and the discovery of a dead body. Janie then arrives as part of the official police investigation, before John finds one means or another by which to involve himself in cracking the case.
Behind the camera, Hynd (Ghosts, Motherland) describes the show’s visual style as “simple but elegant,” adding: “I mainly do comedy, and the thing about comedy is you don’t want it to look like you’re trying too hard. If you can see the workings, it stops being funny. So for me, [it’s about] keeping it natural, keeping what I’m doing as invisible as possible. That affects the lighting, it affects how I use the camera, and also going through to the edit, how we use music and stuff. It’s all got to be relatively invisible.
“It’s not like a sitcom in that way where your performances are being delivered in that broad comedic way. Trust the words and people will enjoy it. I guess my motto is if you empathise with the characters, they don’t have to be trying to be funny. If the words are funny, it’s funny.”
Making Death Valley is complicated, however, by the scenes featuring John’s television alter-ego Caesar, who appears at numerous points during the series along with his sidekick Atkins (played by Ghosts’ Howick).
On the day DQ visits the Cardiff set, none of the scenes from the Caesar TV show have been shot, but Hynd is looking forward to working with Spall in character as John playing Caesar to create the show-within-the-show.
“It is exactly that,” he agrees. “It was supposedly made in 2002 but set in the 50s. So we’re going to be filming that as if it was made in 2002. So it’s different lighting, different lenses we’ve got on the camera. For the rest of the show we’ve got these lovely anamorphic lenses, but for Caesar we’re using lenses more like what they would have used 20 years ago.
“It will affect the performance style as well because in these dramas 20-25 years ago you could feel the acting more. The acting was more ‘actorly.’ Now performances have become more natural, generally speaking, more invisible.”
The number of characters that appear in Death Valley – a BBC Studios Comedy Production distributed internationally by BBC Studios – similarly provided challenges for costume designer Hayley Nebauer (Doctor Who, Queen Charlotte) and hair and make-up designer James Spinks (Men Up, The Light in the Hall).
“It’s not been one of those shows where you can prescriptively proceed with designing one episode the same as the one before,” Nebauer says. “Every episode is different and that made it constantly busy and constantly fun. It’s never a dull day, but that’s a good thing. I’m not getting bored.”
After previously dressing Holliday Grainger for BBC conspiracy drama The Capture, Nebauer learned that there aren’t a lot of rules about the clothes female detectives wear, compared with men, who are governed by a “prescriptive” dress code featuring the traditional combination of suit, shirt and tie.
With Janey, she wanted to “strike the right note of authenticity,” while reflecting the character’s offbeat, slightly quirky and sometimes awkward personality.
“The style wasn’t trying to make her look perfect and fashionable all the time. We weren’t trying to make her look like a cop,” she explains. “But we had to believe that while she was maybe not getting all the right style notes perfect all the time, there was a continuity in the choices she made that resonated with what she was trying to say about herself.
“In her head she’s dressing professionally, but there’s something a little bit awkward about her style that works with the slight clumsiness and the real physical comedy way that Gwyn plays it in places. So connecting all those pieces together I suppose to give her a style which is quite fun.”
For John, Nebauer was able to see how Spall was planning to play his character early on in read-throughs and rehearsals, which gave her time to piece together a suitable wardrobe that would, in turn, reflect Spall’s performance on camera.
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“Tim literally gives consideration to everything – to the costume, the hair and the make-up and the props, and he’ll talk about who that character was and why they have this kind of prop,” she says. “The rationale I was thinking with his wardrobe was that John Chappell had been a well-known actor. He’d been very successful and probably like real-world counterparts, he would have probably kept pieces of costume as I often give them to people at the end of shows. He probably had been donated things to wear to premieres and events and he’d probably have quite a nice eclectic wardrobe filled with stylish pieces he’d collected over decades of work.
“But as the character’s wife had died a number of years ago, we decided there was a point at which, after his wife had died, nothing in his wardrobe is new. So everything is a little bit worn down, lived in, but everything is a very high quality, nice pieces that he just grabs and throws them on together.”
For John’s alter ego, Caesar, the character needed a trademark outfit, like so many other TV detectives, and Nebauer found the perfect piece in a long-checked coat from Belgian designer Dries Van Noten.
“In the script for Caesar, it’s meant to be set in 1959 and he’s meant to be a meticulous and eccentric detective, so the first one that would come to mind for a lot of people is Poirot, but we didn’t want to match that aesthetic,” Nebauer notes. The coat has got “a lovely terracotta orange tonic sheen to it, so it really catches the light in the eye quite nicely. We wanted it to be something that feels quintessentially British. It has to be something that when you see it, you’ll recognise it, so it can’t be too generic or muted.”
Elsewhere, Nebauer had to create an “Instagram-worthy wedding” for episode three, while episode four called for “industrial chic” costumes for the members of an amateur dramatics theatre company staging a “post-apocalyptic” version of Hamlet.
“It’s a huge amount of fun,” she adds. “It’s definitely not straightforward, and for costume, it’s kept us busy as hell. But I love it.”
Spinks was equally busy leading the hair and make-up department, with 75 characters across the series to prepare. “But it doesn’t matter whether [they are] in one scene or if they’re in the whole episode. The same amount of work goes into the one-scene character as the whole-episode character, which is a lot of work but it’s what we do and it’s really important that you push boundaries and creativity.”
Janey’s hair was cut into a “beautiful bob,” which is refined and varied through the series. “But she doesn’t come across as a character that maybe would be full glam,” Spinks says. “She’s quite practical, she’s meticulous in her work and she’s very dedicated to that so it doesn’t feel that there was a huge amount of time spent [getting ready], but she’s got a gorgeous make-up and nice interesting variations on the theme of her hair, so every other episode we see a different hairstyle so it keeps it visually interesting but not distracting.”
John begins the series as a recluse, complete with straggly hair and an unkempt beard – a piece that was made by London-based The Beard Makers especially for Spall.
“He looks a little bit bedraggled and then we lose the beard in the first quarter of episode one,” Spinks says. “So he shaves it off and then he has a tidier hairstyle. Then that travels through the episodes because he’s spending more time around people, making more of an effort on his appearance and how he wanted other people to see him. There’s been a bit of a hair journey with John Chapel, so that’s a really good example of different looks for one character on screen.”
Spall also wears a wig and a moustache to play Caesar in the 1950s-set scenes, while there’s also a moment where the actor, as John, gives an acting masterclass in the 1990s. “So we put a long wig on him with lots of texture and he’s got these wonderful glasses that he snaps back and forth. It was just a great another visual, really, for the character.”
With Death Valley debuting on BBC One and BBC iPlayer this Sunday, Nebauer describes working on the show as one of the “nicest” jobs she’s ever worked on.
“Everyone’s been genuinely nice and gone out of their way to accommodate each other. That shouldn’t be a unique thing but it’s been the nicest one I’ve ever known for that – and I’ve been doing this for 24 years,” she says. “To have a job which, from start to finish, everybody’s getting along and there’s no big upsets in the crew or cast or anything, no personalities that make everybody else miserable, that’s wonderful.”
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tagged in: BBC, Death Valley, Gwyneth Keyworth, Hayley Nebauer, James Spinks, Janie Mallowan, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Patricia Hodge, Paul Doolan, Sian Gibson, Simon Hynd, Tim Spall, Vicki Pepperdine