Strike six
Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger return as private detective duo Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott for Strike – The Ink Black Heart, the sixth edition of the BBC drama based on the crime novels by JK Rowling. The stars come together to reveal why this story could be their toughest case yet.
When the latest novel featuring private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott arrives in bookshops, you can be sure that Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger are among the first to read it.
While some actors may refrain from picking up the source material behind their latest project, in this case the actors are keen to digest every page to better inform their performances in the BBC’s long-running Strike, based on the crime novels written by JK Rowling as Robert Galbraith.
That was certainly the case again for the sixth and latest instalment, The Ink Black Heart, which now debuts as a four-part miniseries on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Monday.
“I always read the books as soon as they come out,” Grainger tells DQ. “Everyone does try to stick as faithfully to them as possible. So my only input or questions are always just nosy, really. Who’s playing what? Why? Where are we shooting? What’s happening?
“There’s such a real effort all around to create the essence of the book, so even if plot-wise it needs to shift because there’s just not enough space because the books are so long – there’s a lot to fit into four episodes – there’s always a lot you can glean in terms of Robin and Strike’s inner world from the book that is always there in between the lines in the scripts. If anything I feel like the books just make my job easier as an actor because it’s all there in the book. I know what Robin’s thinking. I don’t have to create anything.”
“There’s always this large arc going on between them that picks up as each book left off,” notes Burke about the central protagonists. “It was [fourth novel] Lethal White where Strike’s nephew was very ill and it has a very big effect on him. We didn’t have time for that in that series, but it was very important to just remember that was there and that sense of something softening in him could be traced in another way.”
Picking up exactly where season five, Troubled Blood, left off, The Ink Black Heart sees the personal relationship between Strike and Robin hit a hurdle when she spurns his advances. Yet they are immediately thrust into a mysterious new case.
When frantic, desperate Edie Ledwell (Mirren Mack) appears in their central London office, she reveals she is the co-creator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, and is now being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie. Edie is desperate to uncover Anomie’s true identity.
But Robin informs Edie that the agency is too busy to take on her case and thinks nothing more of it until a few weeks later, when she reads the shocking news that Edie has been murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart.
Robin and her business partner, Strike, then become drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie’s true identity. But with a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts to navigate, the pair find themselves embroiled in a case that stretches them to their limit.
Writer Tom Edge (Troubled Blood, The Silkworm, Career of Evil, Lethal White) and director Sue Tully (Troubled Blood, Lethal White) both return, alongside cast members Ruth Sheen as office manager Pat, Jack Greenlees as Sam Barclay, Natasha O’Keeffe as Charlotte and Caitlin Innes Edwards as Isla. New faces include Mack, David Westhead, Christian McKay, Emma Fielding, Tupele Dorgu and James Nelson-Joyce.
Grainger describes The Ink Black Heart as “probably the hardest” Strike novel Edge has had to adapt yet, noting how much of the novel is spent with the character’s inner monologues or reading text from internet chat rooms.
“They always try and stay faithful as possible. But, particularly with The Ink Black Heart, I loved the book and as soon as I finished reading it, I was like, ‘I don’t know how they’re going to manage to do that,’ because it’s just predominantly set in internet chat rooms,” she remembers. “That is how you get to know most of the new characters, within this chat room. Tom has just done a brilliant job of managing to bring out the complexities of some of these characters without having to dive deep into text speak and they’ve created the visual game to help us see into that world.”
“I’d say Tom’s always incredibly creative,” Burke says. “Maybe on this one they’ve had to think out of the box more than ever before because so much of it was about stuff happening in chat rooms. That really needed to be solved and also how to just make those moments between the two characters very active and not just something’s going on inside [their heads].”
Comparing The Ink Black Heart to previous entries in the Strike series, Burke says: “It’s quite a haunting one. There’s often something quite haunting there, but it’s about the death of a very young person and the maiming of another – and the body count does rise as it goes on.
“It’s very beautifully shot. The stuff that they’ve shot in the cemetery is amazing. And again, it’s a really great cast and we’ve got some people, some of the younger ones, who it’s their second or even first TV job, so that was very exciting.
“And it is a slower burn. [The first story] The Cuckoo’s Calling was quite slow, actually, but when I watched it, that’s its strength. There’s nothing wrong with things taking their time. It needed to, to tell the story. The Silkworm was set in the literary world and this is a different bit of the literary world. This is much more to do with fandoms and stuff [happening] right now.”
Thematically, The Ink Black Heart confronts the dark side of the internet and the trolls who dwell there as they hunt down Edie’s killer through the eerie Ink Black Heart game where Anomie roams anonymously.
“I think it’s an inherently violent medium. There’s no eye contact, there’s no body language. It’s just words, and they can only be taken as they’re read,” Burke says about social media and online bullying. “When you have an argument with somebody that is a big part of your life, you’re in the room with them and at some point you put all of that to one side and grow things back from zero, like ‘Hang on, I love you. You love me. Let’s get that straight.’ You can’t do that when it’s just words on the screen.”
Grainger admits she doesn’t read or look at any social media. “I could be quite blissfully ignorant of any kind of online trolling, but I distance myself from it because I think it’s quite dangerous,” she says. “That’s why I was so intrigued by The Ink Black Heart when I read it. Just that idea of people being able to have the freedom to say the things they might not necessarily feel, putting on a different persona and allowing the darker side of humanity to escape is quite insidious and can be quite dangerous.”
As a result, the case at hand, which Burke compares to a Sudoku puzzle, brings Strike and Robin numerous challenges, not least ruling out a number of potential suspects while trying to expose Anomie’s identity through The Ink Black Heart computer game. Then there’s the emotional toll the investigation takes, particularly on Robin after she initially turned down the case when she first met Edie.
“At the beginning, they literally couldn’t take the case because they didn’t have the capacity, but there’s this massive sense of guilt,” Grainger observes about her character. “Even if they could have taken it on, I don’t know if it would have made a difference to [Edie’s] death. But for Robin, to have seen another woman in trouble and to not have done what she could to be there for her, I think she really feels that. So there’s an element of she’s going to make sure she goes the extra mile for Edie, because she really feels that emotional connection with her.”
Strike, then, is “very aware how Robin is impacted by the death and that sense of regret, so he wants to back her up on it,” Burke says. “Maybe subliminally there’s a sense that’s going to bring them together in some sense, having kind of retreated [from each other].”
It’s the fallout from that opening scene that leaves them both feeling awkward, embarrassed and unsure of how their personal relationship might change as they attempt to keep their business partnership intact and solve the mystery together.
“It’s like one step forward and 10 steps backwards,” says Burke of Strike and Robin’s will-they-won’t-they romance. “They are even less communicative than they have been for the last three books. They just shrink with each other. But certainly, by the end he’s being much more honest with himself, partly because of everything that happens.”
“Relationship-wise, it’s almost like a great grenade. They’re getting too close and then a grenade goes off and pushes them apart,” Grainger says. “For Robin, anyway, she realises in that moment her own feelings for Strike because it actually is like she’s pushing him away with a fear of rejection, fear that he might not mean it, and then it’s only afterwards that there is all this big regret and the realisation of what that might have meant. There’s the fear of the repercussions of it for the business and for their friendship. But also I think it allows her to acknowledge her own feelings for him a little bit more.”
Returning for the four-parter also allowed Burke and Grainger to continue their partnership off screen as well as on, seven years after The Cuckoo’s Calling first aired.
“Sometimes it’s hard not to giggle,” Burke jokes. “It’s always the most worthy stuff, and we’re both as knackered as we can be and then it just can go into hysteria.”
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Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger are back on set for the sixth instalment of the BBC’s detective drama Strike.
Grainger continues: “There is something about being in the office [where the final scenes are shot in Strike’s agency]. I always seem to be in the office with these big, long, lengthy dialogue things towards the end and it’s so much easier to go into hysteria now because we were literally stood on that spot [in the office] two years ago having hysterics and all of a sudden it feels like just a second ago. You’re not quite sure which dimension you’re in. But apart from that, everything is seamless now.”
But as soon as the pair are back on set, it is those scenes where they’re back together that also serve to ground them back into the characters they have come to know so well. As part of her undercover role in the show, Robin also gets to play ‘Jessica’ in The Ink Black Heart – an element of the show Grainger particularly enjoys.
“Well, I loved it,” the actor says. “I’ve been enjoying wearing her coat, actually. Tom and I were talking about not ever wearing Robin and Strike’s clothes in our own personal life. I did get Jessica’s coat, and I have really been enjoying wearing it. But it’s going to have a shelf life because as soon as the show comes out I won’t be able to wear it anymore. It’s always quite fun to play a different character within this, and I get the sense that Robin enjoys it. It’s quite fun to enjoy her enjoying it.”
Yet it is Jessica who has a key role trying to infiltrate the home of many of the potential suspects behind Edie’s death – and Anomie’s identity – which means The Ink Black Heart could be Strike and Robin’s toughest case yet.
“It’s like a masked ball and they’re spinning plates in terms of working out who’s online when they’re talking to them and who isn’t,” Burke says. “It’s as complicated as a normal case, but then it’s like a magician’s trick going on while they’re doing it.”
tagged in: BBC, BBC iPlayer, BBC One, Holliday Grainger, JK Rowling, Mirren Mack, Strike, Strike – The Ink Black Heart, Sue Tully, Tom Burke, Tom Edge