David Tennant Talks About The BBC’s Inside Man

When Worlds Collide

David Tennant stars in the BBC drama Inside Man and here he is talking about it…

David, what’s the premise of Inside Man?

Very hard to sum up, because there are two separate worlds going side by side. Part of the joy of watching the show is wondering if these worlds are ever going to collide. But from my character’s point of view, it’s a story about a man who, in pursuit of doing the right thing, makes a series of catastrophically bad decisions.

Tell us a bit about your character Harry.

Harry is a vicar in a rather picturesque English village. He seems to have a very happy life, secure in himself, popular with his parishioners and quite a modern vicar. He’s not afraid to use the odd swear word and talk about the world as it is. He has a wife and a teenage son and they seem to be living a fairly normal, happy life.

How does Harry’s family dynamic shift?

Quite early on in our story, something pretty awful occurs and the family dynamic can never be the same again after that.

What attracted you to the project?

I just read the script and wanted to be part of it, it’s very particular to Steven Moffat’s brain. When you read that first episode it’s hugely intriguing. These two very distinct storylines are both entirely plausible, textured and fascinating in themselves and they are running side by side. It’s very difficult I think to immediately imagine how they will ever come together on different sides of the world, for these characters living entirely separate existence, they couldn’t seem to be more different.

Yet as an audience we assume there must be some link but really we’re quite far into the story before those links start to appear. It’s part of the set- up of the sort of puzzle of that along with the almost breath-taking awfulness of what occurs, the incremental steps to doom that Harry takes, the unravelling of normality. Steven described it as a sitcom that goes terribly wrong.