Ray of light
DI Ray star Parminder Nagra joins creator and writer Maya Sondhi to uncover the secrets behind the second season of this ITV crime drama in which personal and professional challenges collide for the titular detective as she investigates a high-profile murder.
As the title star of ITV crime drama DI Ray, Parminder Nagra was in almost every scene of a series that first aired in 2022. So when it was renewed for an expanded second season, the actor could have been forgiven for expecting a lighter filming schedule as more supporting characters took their place in the spotlight.
“I hadn’t got Covid up until that point, so I’d lasted a good few years,” the actor tells DQ about returning to the set of the Birmingham-set drama last year. “Then, as soon as we started season two, I got Covid. I was just falling apart. That’s before anything was even shot. Maya this year had even tried to help me out with everyone else’s storylines…”
“We had scenes without her in them,” creator and writer Maya Sondhi quips.
“…but then it [her schedule] got truncated again because I had to isolate. It wasn’t great,” the actor says.
“We had such an amazing crew, who just got on with it,” Sondhi continues. “It was such a happy set to walk on because I wasn’t there all the time as I was writing and stuff. But when I came to set, it just seemed like they were not only getting the work done, but getting it done with humour.”
In season one, detective inspector Rachita Ray (Nagra) secures her dream promotion when she is asked to join a homicide investigation, only to suspect she is a token appointment for this ‘culturally specific’ case. The story then sinks her into the world of organised crime as she contends with a personal battle between her British identity and South Asian heritage.
Now in S2, which begins on Sunday, she must deal with sensitive ethnic issues relating to a murder case that threaten to ignite racial tensions, causing a personal conflict for Rachita, both as a British Asian woman and as a police officer, which she must fight to prevent a turf war erupting on the streets of the city.
Returning alongside Nagra are Gemma Whelan as DCI Kerry Henderson, Ian Puleston-Davies as Superintendent Ross Beardsmore, Steve Oram as DS Clive Bottomley, Peter Bankole as DS Kwesi Edmund and Sam Baker-Jones as DC Liam Payne.
Promising to “go deeper, darker and more explosive” than S1, the new run continues to blend a thrilling crime story with an exploration of contemporary Britain through the eyes of Rachita as she contends with her identity inside and outside the force.
But when ITV gave S2 the green light, “I didn’t really have the crime story,” Sondhi admits. “What we did do was a lot of discussion about how are we going to get her back into work so that people go with it, because it looks like a very final exit in the first season. So how are we going to get her back so people believe in her? Well, because she’s a really good copper, but she’s still got the trauma of what’s happened [in S1]. She’s still got issues with the institution, but we can’t make it all about that. And it’s about bringing the microaggressions and the race stuff in, but not at the forefront.”
That element of the show is what Sondhi describes as DI Ray’s unique selling point, and what separates it from other ITV crime shows. “It’s just part of the texture of the show, so we needed to keep that,” she says. “The biggest discussion we sweated over was how do we bring her back? Once we got back in, we just hit the ground running with the murder investigation and what we tried to do was make it look like one thing and, ultimately, when you get to the end, it’s actually a very domestic crime that is bigger than you think it is.”
With the series extended from four to six episodes for S2, which is directed by Nirpal Bhogal (Endeavour) and Nicole Volavka (The Pact), Sondhi also found she had more time to develop the show’s characters away from crime scenes or their office desks.
“My regret with the first year was we had to suddenly career to an end and rush and cram everything into episode four,” she admits. “Whereas with season two, we don’t have to rush. We can really give everything; we can actually finish storylines within the series.”
“You’re really getting to know her as well, and what makes her tick,” Nagra adds of Rachita.
Reuniting with producer HTM Productions and executive producer Jed Mercurio (Line of Duty, Bodyguard), Sondhi partnered with Sarah Deane (Compulsion, Granite Harbour) to write the new episodes. Sondhi wrote episodes one, two, four and six.
“We did a writers’ room, but then we also did a lot of checking in over voice notes. I’m a big voice note fan,” she jokes. “But also, Sarah’s a Liverpudlian, and I think Birmingham and Liverpool have got a lot of similarities. We had a bit of a shorthand in terms of people’s backgrounds, in terms of class and that kind of stuff. Sarah’s also coming from a script editing and producing background, and she’s got a really good story brain. I’m still learning and I’m in safe hands with Jed, because his brain is all plot, plot, plot. Sarah was a good balance between than. She’s still about character but also, ‘What if we did this?’”
To write the series, Sondhi – who is also a familiar face on screen thanks to roles in shows such as Line of Duty – put her acting career on hold for a year as she balanced DI Ray with looking after her children. “That’s a whole job in itself, firefighting them,” she jokes. “I just did the odd voiceover and stuff and was totally focused [on DI Ray]. You have to be – and no episode is ever really finished. They change as you go along so you have to constantly change things. Then you’re watching the assemblies every day and the rushes, and you’re giving comments for the edit. It never really ends, even when you think it has. But when it was done, I was like, ‘I’m bored now.’ You can never win.”
Nagra’s breakout role came in Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 coming-of-age comedy Bend It Like Beckham, before she headed stateside and appeared in more than 100 episodes of medical drama ER. She has also been seen in Alcatraz and The Blacklist, as well as shows such as Fortitude, 13 Reasons Why and another ITV series, Maternal.
She landed the part of Rachita after a meeting with Sondhi and Mercurio over Zoom and was inspired to appear in a crime drama with a South Indian woman at the helm. “Just to be given the chance to explore that, yes please,” she says. “It’s set in the Midlands, it’s close to where my real family lives. It just ticked a bunch of boxes.”
Returning for S2, she was happy to follow Sondhi’s lead in terms of the direction of her character. “One thing we talked about was the race element, of not hitting people over the head [with it], and that was very important to me,” she notes. “I didn’t want to alienate people. They should get to know the character and root for her on her own merit. I didn’t want to watch that show.”
“And I don’t want to write that,” Sondhi agrees. ITV wanted to retain some element of DI Ray’s focus on race and Rachita’s heritage. “But they let us do what we wanted to do. We were just left to do the crime stuff a bit more and explore her as a woman who’s had some trauma. We also didn’t want to do that classic, ‘She’s a childless single woman in her 40s.’ We didn’t want to do any of that stuff. She’s more interesting than that.”
That means we get to see more of Rachita’s homelife, and from the outset it’s clear she’s still looking for companionship despite being betrayed at the end of S1.
“She wants to feel something because she’s just numb at the end,” Nagra says. “The person she loved and trusted has so royally betrayed her that who on Earth does she trust?
“She just wants to feel something, and even that just feels a bit shit as well. It’s getting back to her own sense of self and what that means. Then when she goes into the case, that’s where she finds her sense of self, but it takes her a minute because there’s no one she can confide in. She’s quite isolated as a character.”
Playing Rachita, a character who very much relies on her instincts and isn’t afraid to push the boundaries of her job, Nagra tends to play each scene as it comes by imagining what the detective would do in each situation.
“There’s not an overt process I go through. It’s just like, what is the scene? What am I playing in the scene? What is the intention of the scene and what is the conflict for her in that scene?” she says.
In season one, rehearsals were limited to choreography for big set pieces. One such scene in S2 sees Rachita behind the wheel as she’s chasing down a suspect.
“I really enjoyed the car,” the actor admits. “The rig looks like a go-kart on top of a normal car. You don’t have any control. The guy above is controlling it, which was a little bit scary because he has all the power. But I was at the maybe enjoying it more than I probably should have done. Steve [Oram, in the passenger seat as DS Bottomley] was properly horrified.”
Unlike the US crime series she has appeared in, Nagra doesn’t get to go chasing after anyone with a gun in her hand, and Rachita is often instructed to wait for back-up – a command she frequently chooses to ignore. Yet Nagra did get to kick down a couple of doors at different times.
“As an Asian woman actress, you never get to do that stuff,” Sondhi says. “Over the years, I never got to do stuff like that, so you just crave that kind of excitement. You crave sexy scenes, action scenes. I don’t want to be cooking or someone’s best friend or their lawyer. It’s boring.”
Nagra adds: “One of my other favourite scenes is when I go into [Rachita’s] flat and I think someone is there, so I grab the Mace, but it’s actually my mum cooking dinner. It’s told with such a thriller vibe because the music’s really loud and then it’s like, ‘Mum?’”
Sondhi promises “more Birmingham, more twists and more Brummie character” in S2 of DI Ray, which is distributed by Hat Trick International and Anton Corp, while keeping the drama’s unique identity in a line-up of numerous other crime series. “People who may not feel seen in life feel seen because of the representation and the things we’re dealing with,” she says. “
“It also looks very different,” Nagra says. “It’s almost like a brand new show. It’s more noir, more gritty. You almost don’t need to watch the first season. I didn’t feel that at all.”
Sondhi is now looking forward to more screenwriting, with ideas for a potential third season of DI Ray already forming. “But I still love acting,” she says. “Every time I think I could give it up, I do a job like I just did with Grace and I had the best time ever and realise I still really love this. It’s my happy place.”
tagged in: DI Ray, Gemma Whelan, HTM Productions, Ian Puleston-Davies, ITV, Jed Mercurio, Maya Sondhi, Nirpal Bhogal, Parminder Nagra, Sarah Deane