Posted in: TV | Tagged: Murder Most Puzzling, The Puzzle Lady

The Puzzle Lady Star Adam Best on Playing Against Type, Logan & More

The Puzzle Lady star Adam Best (Waking the Dead) spoke with us about playing against type, Phyllis Logan, Dominque Moloney, and much more.

Adam Best (Waking the Dead, Black Doves) has made a better part of his career playing tough, brutish villains, so when the opportunity came to play DCI Derek Hooper, part of a trio of hapless law enforcement who are stronger together than apart in PBS Masterpiece's The Puzzle Lady (aka Murder Most Puzzling), he went for it. The series follows Bakerbury's most famous resident, Cora Felton (Phyllis Logan), aka "The Puzzle Lady," who the local police recruits to help solve a girl's murder. But the eccentric Cora isn't who she claims to be: she's the fraudulent front-woman for her long-suffering niece Sherry (Charlotte Hope), a puzzle genius who came to town to escape her abusive ex-husband. Best spoke to Bleeding Cool about why he welcomed the change of pace in the roles he typically plays, whether he's familiar with the Parnell Hall works, which the series is based on, working with creator Dominque Moloney and director Tom Dalton, and how empathy helps drive his performance as Derek.

The Puzzle Lady Star Adam Best on Embracing Derek Hooper, and His "Grumpiness"

What intrigued you about The Puzzle Lady?

It's good to be working, Tom. It was good to have an opportunity to go and make a TV show in Ireland, where I'm from, and the part that I was in is not the kind of role I usually get cast as. I play a lot of Irish thugs. You can probably tell why [removes his cap] I've got sort of a stern face and a bald head, but secretly I'm a nice guy, and then so it was a chance to play against my regular type, which is generally people who knock people's heads together.

Well, as a cop, you could do the same, but…

Yeah, exactly, not "that" kind of cop.

How familiar are you with the Parnell Hall works? What was it like working with Dominique as a creative?

I didn't know that Parnell Hall works at all, if I'm totally honest. I'm sure you're aware of the world of TV; the turnaround times are really quick. Whenever I got the call that the job was happening and we started shooting, there's not enough time to even read the blurb on the back of a novel. I went straight into Dominique's scripts and trusted what she wrote, because they were good, fun scripts. As an actor, sometimes you just have to go on with instinct with what you have in front of you, and that's what I did with that. Dominique was cool; she was on set a bit and not all the time. I think she trusted Tom [Dalton], our director and producer, with her text and scripts. Dominique's cool, and hopefully, she's busy writing series two.

What did you like working with Phyllis in the way she carried herself on the screen?

Phyllis Logan is remarkable and was on set for the 12 weeks of shooting, maybe off for two days. She led from the front in some quite trying circumstances in that shoot. We had days off due to blizzards. We were up against time quite a bit, and shooting anything in Ireland, you're also against the weather a fair bit, and Phyllis led with a remarkable grace, and I learned a great deal from her. I even told her so, but Phyllis is not the kind of person who takes compliments particularly well. She was cool, man.

What is it about the murder mystery aspect that appealed to you? Was it something that challenged you as an actor that you wouldn't typically do in your roles aside from what we previously spoke about, being against type?

The thing about these scripts, and I'm not sure how this is a thing early in the United States, but there's a growing trend on this side of the Atlantic for what's called this genre of cozy crime. Sometimes it can feel a little bit twee. These scripts that we're doing, I think they were interesting about it, and this is the conversation that I had with Tom, our director, was about the tone of it. The tone of the piece is really interesting and sometimes a little bit weird.

It's a bit glitchy sometimes, because in that cozy world that people would know and understand from the genre, there's a little twist on it sometimes, and especially in Phyllis's character, Cora. She's not the tweed-wearing, Miss Marple-type. She's a boozy, smoking, foul-mouthed woman, and so that's what really makes that set The Puzzle Lady apart from other shows of the genre, because of Phyllis's character and how she's portrayed.

Nick [Danan] and Jack [Weise] play your associates. How was the rapport with them, and what did they add to that world?

With Nick and Jack, we were sort of something of a little threesome. We had our own little precinct, spent a lot of time on that set, and I'm sure you're familiar with how these things work. Once you've hired a location for the week or for two, you get everything fucking done in that location until it's done. Once we were in there, we shot a lot of dialogue in those rooms, and we were tied in there for quite a long time.

It was nice to hang out with guys that I got on with, and each of the characters, among the three characters, there's one good cop in there. Individually, we're all sort of useless in our own ways. The character Danny, whom Jack plays, is a loudmouth and spills a bit to the local journalist. The next character is probably the brains of the outfit, and dear Derek Hooper, whose suit I put on for the show, is well-meaning, but sometimes a little hot-headed. I think that was the fun. If you were to create a hybrid, like an alloy of us three, there would be one good cop in there.

Were there any elements aside from Dominique's writing that you brought into Derek, maybe from previous roles you played, or maybe someone in your life?

Yeah, I was told by Brett [Wilson], one of our producers, that they hadn't seen Derek Cooper quite as grumpy on the page as I managed to make him. Maybe that's just me, Tom, maybe I'm just a grumpy guy, and I am a part of Derek Cooper's makeup that is quite important, especially in the first two episodes. Derek Cooper is the father of a teenage girl, and I'm the father of a girl, so I was able to bring some of that protective element to it.

Maybe what was unexpected for the producers was that they gave me the role, because I think in my early auditions, I was a bit more serious-faced than they might have expected or hoped for Derek Hooper to be. Maybe it was I was feeding on the day, but it works, especially in a landscape where you have all these larger-than-life characters. It's a fairly jolly piece in a weird way, and it's good to have Derek Hooper being something of a mood hoover every now and then [laughs], just slightly dulling down the edges a little bit.

The Puzzle Lady, which also stars Alastair Brammer, Richard Croxton, Simon Haines, Amber Mendez-Martin, Conor Sánchez, and Yasmin Seky, PBS Masterpiece on Prime Video, PBS Passport, and local PBS listings.

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