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YYou probably wouldn’t immediately recognize Anna Samson without her sun-drenched, sandy backdrop and her signature waistcoat. 35 year old actor Made British primetime telly debut last year As stony-faced Detective Mackenzie Clark, who solves the murders death in heaven by-product return to heavenLike the original cozy crime series, her show – set in Australia’s fictional Dolphin Cove – attracted millions of viewers for the BBC and established Samson as a “paraverse” star as well as its first leading lady. “Having a female lead hasn’t changed the DNA of the show at all,” she confirms, as the mystery series gears up for its second instalment. “And it didn’t reduce our viewership, thank God. death in heaven The audience is sophisticated.”
They are also deeply dedicated. death in heaven has been running for 14 seasons and counting, and has also spawned another spin-off, Beyond heaven. Some have criticized the franchise for its predictable plot lines, but that may be accurate Because It is so loved because of its formulaic, easy-to-follow nature. “You see, a lot of people say this show is like escapism for them,” Samson says. return to heavenPopularity of. “In the world at the moment, it’s quite rare that justice is served; that the bad guys get it – McKenzie always catches her villain and there’s something comforting about that, in a world that doesn’t offer us much easy access to justice.”
Inauguration return to heaven The series saw Samson’s DI Clark return to his hometown of Oz after being suspended by The Met for allegedly tampering with evidence. After flying back to Dolphin Cove, D.I. Clarke looks longingly at the weather camera in gray and windy London, feeling out of place in the picturesque seaside town she grew up in. British-born Samson identifies with this sense of displacement, having spent her early years living between West Sussex and Nigeria, where her father relocated for work, eventually moving to Australia at the age of 11. “I’m not going to say I never recovered because that sounds too dramatic,” she says of her family’s choice to leave. UK to Sydney. “But I’ve never stopped calling England home. I find it a very relevant part of the script.”
We’re chatting over Zoom on a rainy Thursday morning as London is plagued by Tube attacks. Samson makes sure she visits the city once a year and this year she has won the TfL lottery with travel time. The night before we spoke, she’d been out to dinner with two of her franchise co-stars – Lloyd Griffith, who plays kindly Detective Sergeant Colin Cartwright, and Tai Hara, who plays Clark’s ex-fiancé and pathologist Glenn Strong, whom the DI jilted at the altar before fleeing to the opposite hemisphere. In the absence of underground trains or any available taxis, the trio are forced to travel across central London in a pedicab decorated with fairy lights to the house. Instead, he called an Uber. “I was like, look, this is half my annual salary, whatever,” Samson jokes lightly, his Australian drawl giving an edge to his long English vowels.
Just as Samson travels to the UK annually, Clarke maintains her relationship with The Met through regular harassing phone calls. death in heaven Former lead detective DI Jack Mooney, played by Ardal O’Hanlon – a Paraverse darling who will also appear in season two of the spinoff. “His character starts to act like a fairy godmother,” says Samson. Of the Inspector’s input, she says, “Without his gentle intervention, Mackenzie’s life would have taken a different path. Very subtly, he’s trying to push her to be her best self.” “But on the surface it doesn’t seem like that, it’s just his boss telling him what to do. But Ardal is so sweet and he has this spark as a person, so he brings a bit of magic to the show.”
Filming as the lead detective in the Paraverse is hard work. While actors with smaller roles get a chance to kick back, have cocktails, and relax in the sun when the cameras aren’t rolling, the stars of the show spend all their free time learning their elaborate lines. o’hanlon had complained earlier About working “12 hours a day, six days a week” during your time off “*** death in heaven From 2017 to 2020, but Samson seems unperturbed by the workload. “I don’t find it hard to remind myself that I work hard but I’m incredibly lucky and it’s a beautiful life I live,” she says.
for each series of return to heavenThe star – who began his career on stage in plays including Simon Stephen Birdland and David Hare’s Skylight – Spends four months living on location in Illawarra, New South Wales. She films all day and studies her lines all night. The biggest challenge with each episode’s script is the multi-page monologue where DI Clark reveals the episode’s killer in an Agatha Christie-style gotcha spell. “If I get any downtime, I’ll learn one of those,” she says. “I’m very strict about my homework. I study the script. Follow the text. In theatre, the script is like the Bible.”
Artists from other popular tropical on-location programs such as HBO white lotus, has said that similar immersive shoots led him to go full meta for a portion of the filming. Does Samson ever blur the lines of fiction and reality? She says of her similarities with her character, “There’s a passion for Mackenzie that’s absolutely alive in Anna.” “It’s all a bummer. But I don’t suddenly wake up and think I’m a detective solving crimes around Sydney.”
Samson looked to Martin Freeman’s assistant Dr. John Watson in the BBC for inspiration on how to play a good detective. sherlockShe says, “I think Martin Freeman is an intelligent, transformative actor.” “He is one of our most remarkable actors.” Samson also observed his fellow Paraverse spies before filming. return to heaven‘s first season, and was noted for how far they push the edges of the crime genre in their performances. “It’s not a farce, it’s not a parody, but it’s a little bit exaggerated and humorous,” she says. “The show doesn’t take itself seriously – but it takes its audience seriously.”
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Mackenzie Clark – emotionally distant, shrewdly intelligent and quietly proud – is definitely serious about what she does. “It’s quite a rare thing to play a character who is not only good at what he does, but also knows it,” says Samson. “She loves compliments. It’s very human. That’s one of the things I love about her character because you don’t see that often in women on screen… She can be spunky, and she’s not particularly concerned about being liked, but she’s also human and concerned about finding love. I think she believes the world doesn’t want her, so she rejects the world at first. She believes she needs community, romance or There is no need for friendship. This is wrong.”
These assumptions will be challenged return to heaven Clarke’s historical feelings for Glenn continue to surface in season two, and her friendship with her DS Colin deepens. “Mackenzie would never say this, and she doesn’t realize it, but Colin is her best friend – and she has no idea,” says Samson. “She’d say, ‘This is that annoying guy I work with.’ But the way they behave, the way they care for each other, they are acting as best friends in the world. Our show is very kind. There’s a lot of love at the center of it. Despite Mackenzie’s desire to be removed and quiet, she cares about these people and they care about her. There are some beautiful, sensitive scenes.
Samson has similarly received kindness from Paraverse fans. The actor left her previous role of Mia Anderson home and away A year later in 2022, she was subjected to brutal body shaming by fans of the show. “People still feel they have the right to shame, comment, and harass women about their appearance,” she wrote to trolls on social media at the time. “It’s part of a culture of cowardice. Making cruel comments about our weight loss or gain, our face, our choices, our voice.” Thankfully, audience reactions to the first female detective in the paraverse were quite varied.
“Young women, ranging from 10 years old or younger to 15 or 16 years old, are saying that they love the show and they love Mackenzie because they also feel left out. They’re not sure they belong. They’re figuring out how to have friends and boyfriends,” Samson said of the overwhelmingly positive response. return to paradisee viewer. “I think having a female protagonist who doesn’t always have to be charming and pleasant or polite and presentable makes people feel less alone in the world, certainly young women, and I didn’t expect that reaction. I didn’t think it would be like that,” she reflects. “It makes it so worthwhile to go to work every day and wear that waistcoat.”