Ready to run
James Nesbitt and Ruth Jones speak to DQ about teaming up for Run Away, Netflix’s newest Harlan Coben thriller, which follows a father’s desperate bid to find his missing daughter after she falls into a dangerous world of addiction and crime.
Having played several characters in law enforcement across his 40-year screen career, James Nesbitt jokes that he’s best known as the longest-serving policeman in Northern Ireland.
Those roles have come in such shows as Bloodlands, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, Babylon and Murphy’s Law, while he also played a police officer in Stay Close, Netflix’s 2021 adaptation of the novel of the same name by Harlan Coben. And now, his reunion with the author on Run Away, which debuted worldwide on the same streamer on New Year’s Day, has given Nesbitt a different kind of character to get to grips with.
Here he plays Simon, a man who had the perfect life: a loving wife and kids, a great job and a beautiful home. But when his eldest daughter Paige ran away, everything fell apart.
When he finds her vulnerable and strung out on drugs in a city park, he finally has the chance to bring his little girl home. But it turns out she’s not alone, and an argument escalates into shocking violence. In the aftermath, Simon loses his daughter all over again, and his search for her will take him into a dangerous underworld, revealing deep secrets that could tear his family apart forever.
“I was delighted not to be playing a cop,” Nesbitt tells DQ. “I love the character and I love the twists and turns. I love the extraordinary circumstances. It is one of those experiences where you can’t complain about the job we have. We actually go, ‘Do you know what? I’m lucky because I’m working, I’m being challenged, I’m having to use my brain, but fuck, it’s fun,’ and so that collision is really important and brilliant. I loved it.”
Starring alongside Nesbitt is Ruth Jones, who makes her debut in a Coben series as Elena Ravenscroft – a woman who viewers discover is a former firearms officer and now private detective who unexpectedly joins forces with Simon in episode three after their separate investigations collide. The eight-part series also features Minnie Driver, Alfred Enoch, Lucian Msamati and Tracy-Ann Oberman.
In fact, Run Away also marks the first time Jones – best known for her Bafta-winning role as Nessa in Gavin & Stacey, the BBC comedy she also co-created and wrote with James Corden – has ever played a police officer. But it’s a part of Elena’s character that only becomes apparent later in the series, after she is initially introduced as a very eccentric dog-napper.
“What’s lovely, and this is paying tribute to Harlan’s incredible mind, is that you are set off on a course of believing something about a character, and then you’re totally turned around and pushed into another direction,” Jones says. “So when we first meet Elena, we don’t know that she’s a former firearms officer. We don’t know she’s a private investigator. We just think she’s slightly deranged and she’s trying to steal a dog.
“There’s something so lovely when you are given a script if the first time you meet your character, you go, ‘Oh, wow, I love that’ – and that’s what happened to me. I just thought, ‘Why is she stealing a dog?’ Then when you realise why she’s doing it, that realisation is changed again. So all the time you’re being turned around, like you’re in a washing machine. It’s fantastic.”
Jones and Nesbitt’s first scene together during filming features the duo in a car, and Jones admits to being “really nervous” about acting opposite the Cold Feet star.
“I was like, ‘This is Jimmy Nesbitt,’ so I was like, ‘God, I’ve got to be so on it with my lines.’ It was in a car and it was raining and it was dark, and all I could think of was, ‘Don’t over-act. Don’t over-act.’ I felt that we clicked straight away,” she says. “What I love about the relationship is that it’s a friendship, an unlikely friendship, that comes together. They say you’re friends for a reason, a season or a lifetime, and I just love that they come together for that time.”
Jones also likes the fact their relationship is “not predictable” and doesn’t veer down a romantic route, “which is often a choice that’s made, and you go, ‘Why?’ It doesn’t have to be like that. It’s great that these two people have come together for this reason. Their paths have crossed completely out of the blue, and then they form this really good friendship.”
Though Elena is no longer a firearms officer in the series, one standout moment includes a flashback to her time in the police, when she leads a raid on a warehouse operated by a drugs gang. With the scene filmed early in production, Jones, best known for comic roles, wanted to throw herself into the action, and prepared by training with dummy guns.
“I remember that we set up this huge scene – it took a massive team. There were so many people on set that day, setting up this incredible set piece,” she says. “They said ‘action,’ and all I had to do was run from behind this big crate over to the other side of the room. [But] I went a bit wrong – all these explosions were going off and I turned to the camera and went, ‘Oh, sorry. I forgot my line, didn’t I?’ Everybody was so kind to me, but I realised afterwards that that must have been a huge pain in the backside, because they had to reset this whole thing. But I really loved it. I loved doing something so different.”
Jones praises Coben and fellow executive producers Nicola Shindler and Richard Fee, from producer Quay Street Productions, for seeing beyond her previous roles and identifying her potential to step into a character such as Elena. “I was just excited more than anything. I was really excited to be offered a role in something so big, with these amazing production values, this incredible story,” Jones adds. “I was just over the moon, really.”
For Nesbitt, Run Away marks a third collaboration with Coben and Shindler after he starred in Stay Close and played a supporting role in Missing You, which debuted on Netflix at the start of 2025. And despite Run Away ostensibly being a thriller, he believes there always needs to be humour in a show that finds people “in the darkest of times.”
“It’s how you get through things a lot of the time,” he notes. “But also, the writing should take you in the right direction. Great actors can’t make bad writing work, but bad actors can make good writing work, sometimes, and so hopefully the writing is strong enough to take it into the dark places but also to try and find the human elements of the person, because you have to be able to smile at times in these situations. He [Simon] has to continue with the family he’s got. He has to be there for them. And sometimes that means trying to find humour and levity. But dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
Once again for a Netflix adaptation of a Coben novel, the action was transferred from the US to the UK, with filming taking place in Manchester, where Quay Street is based.
“What’s brilliant about them is they’re right on it,” says Nesbitt. “Nicola, terrifyingly in one sense but rather comfortingly in the other, is at the end of a phone all the time. She’s right across it. And also, she has such a brilliant understanding of the fact that this show isn’t just going out here [in the UK], it’s going out in 187 territories. It’s a big thing in America. So she is very across the different demographics and what is required, but she’s collaborative and fiercely loyal to Harlan and to her actors. Danny Brocklehurst, the writer, is the same. So it is a family. It’s an important community that you enter when you go into these things. That’s why they often repeat cast. I certainly hope to do more, because once they get the people they like working with, they want to work with them again. That’s rare.”
Nesbitt and Jones also worked closely with series producer Guy Hescott and producer Will McDonagh, with the latter available to steer the actors between emotions in a filming schedule that bounced between scenes from different episodes.
“One thing I find as an actor is you have to feel like the dialogue is real, and that you say the dialogue and really mean it,” says Jones. “The original source of this is Harlan’s novel, and it’s American and it’s an adaptation. There’d be certain phrases that you’d go, ‘That’s quite an American thing to say.’ But the producers and Will were always very open to you going, ‘Do you mind if I don’t say that?’ It’s all very nuanced, but it means a lot because you have to believe those characters. You have to believe what they’re saying. So it was great in that regard. It was very collaborative.”
Balancing acting roles with writing, Jones will spend much of 2026 in the writers room – she’s penning a new series, Apple TV comedy The Choir, with Gavin & Stacey collaborator Corden, and a project with fellow Welsh actor-writer Steve Spiers for the BBC about the unlikely friendship between two people who meet at a knee trauma clinic.
On screen, viewers will get to see her in upcoming BBC and BritBox period drama The Other Bennet Sister and BBC post-apocalyptic drama The Rapture. “To get to play this variety of roles, it’s fantastic,” Jones says.
“That’s the privilege of the job,” adds Nesbitt. “God, when I was at drama school, if I thought I’d be able to be playing roles like this when I’m 60, I wouldn’t have believed you, because that’s the privilege, and it’s a responsibility, but also it’s a joy. That’s the job.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Wayward: A newly arrived small-town cop starts probing a prestigious boarding school for troubled teens, where a formidable headmistress and a string of unexplained student disappearances suggest something far more sinister beneath the surface.
The Crow Girl: A driven detective and a brilliant but disturbed psychotherapist team up to hunt a sadistic killer dumping bodies around Bristol, uncovering a deeply psychological pattern of abuse and revenge.
The Chestnut Man: In Copenhagen, two detectives chase a serial killer who leaves handmade chestnut dolls at his crime scenes, each linked to the long-ago disappearance of a government minister’s daughter.
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tagged in: Harlan Coben, James Nesbitt, Netflix, Quay Street Productions, Run Away, Ruth Jones