Matthew Goode had no idea that writer-director Scott Frank—cocreator of The Queen’s Gambit and creator of Godless—had written the lead of a new series, Dept. Q, with Goode in mind. Though the pair had kept in touch since Goode played a Kansas City thug in Frank’s 2007 film The Lookout—and they also shared an agent—Goode also wasn’t aware that Frank had been working on the show, an adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Danish novels, until their shared rep gave him a call.
“They were gleaning my interest, which piqued very quickly,” Goode says of the character-driven police drama in which he stars as Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck, a snarky English cop with a superiority complex. Morck is contemptuous of everyone in his adopted home of Edinburgh—except, perhaps, his Scottish partner, DCI James Hardy (Jamie Sives). “It’s quite worrying, really, when Scott says he thought of me to play the part. Maybe it’s because he thinks I’ve been working in the British film industry for 20-odd years and that I’ll bring that good sense of jadedness to it.”
Nevertheless, Goode—who’s known for such films as The Imitation Game and Brideshead Revisited, and TV series including The Good Wife and Downton Abbey—wasn’t a shoo-in for the role. “Scott had to go to bat for me because I’m not, you know, Tom Hardy or Zendaya,” he jokes during a late-afternoon Zoom interview from the UK in “the snug room”—a.k.a. his wife Sophie Dymoke’s Surrey home office—as one of their three kids (Matilda is 16, Teddy, 11, and Ralph, nine) sometimes sets off the car alarm, and another runs in and out of the space that doubles as the family’s screening room.
“The folks at Netflix I’m sure wanted a bigger ‘name,’ as the cost of the show was going to be high for their British division,” Frank explains via email. “But when I pointed out the range of roles Matthew had played, as well as the fact that today, it’s more often than not the show that makes the star, rather than vice versa, they gave their approval and then expressed nothing but white-hot enthusiasm for his performance.”
Clean-shaven and affable in conversation, Goode sports a white tee and baseball cap, and occasionally pulls on a vape pen. He’s infinitely more laid-back and self-effacing than the brittle, bearded single father whose life implodes when Dept. Q opens. As the first detectives to arrive on the scene where a dead body sits in a chair, the partners walk into what may be an ambush. The attack leaves a young constable dead, Hardy partially paralyzed, and Morck, having survived a bullet to the face, now guilt-ridden and ordered to see a shrink.
“I had problems with other human beings long before I was shot,” he tells Dr. Rachel Irving (Kelly Macdonald) when she suggests that PTSD may make interacting with people difficult. Visiting Hardy in the hospital after his return to work, he reports that “nothing’s changed. All fucking morons. I think I’m just gonna put my time in and be done with it.” But his boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie), has other ideas. To get him out of her hair (“Do you ever stop and wonder why people hate you?” she asks), he’s assigned to a newly created cold-case unit that’s really just a PR stunt, and stashed in the station basement’s former shower room.
Soon, Goode’s malcontent has assembled a team that includes Akram (Alexej Manvelov), an enigmatic Syrian émigré (“He comes dressed as a geography teacher, but it might turn out that he’s actually Batman,” Goode says), and Rose (Leah Byrne), a plucky, sidelined detective who’s itching to get back to work. Morck even enlists Hardy from his hospital bed as they investigate the mysterious disappearance of a prosecutor (Chloe Pirrie) with a complicated past.
Frank—who wrote or cowrote all nine episodes of the series, and directed six—relocated the story from Copenhagen to Edinburgh, and told his star not to bother reading Adler-Olsen’s books. “Considering I’ve done quite a few adaptations in my time, I found that so freeing,” Goode says. Instead, the actor recently seen as a vampire in A Discovery of Witches, Hollywood producer Robert Evans in The Offer, and C.S. Lewis (opposite Anthony Hopkins) in Freud’s Last Session, got under the prickly cop’s skin by reading up on police procedures, talking to a former cop acquaintance who worked murders, and recalling confidences shared by military-veteran mates who suffered with PTSD.
He told Frank that one friend used a stress ball to relieve tension. The anecdote inspired the container of tennis balls found in Rachel’s borrowed office. Though Morck initially scoffs at using them, he then changes his mind. Ultimately, Goode absorbed the essence of his tightly wound detective—“There is a great kindness to him, but it requires mining to get to”—during hot soaks. “I spent a lot of time in my bathtub, really, just daydreaming and popping in memories…just to bolster all the sort of literal evidence that you can find in and around you.”
Whether he’ll watch his performance is another story. Goode still hasn’t fully checked out his Emmy-nominated turn as Anthony Armstrong-Jones in The Crown, except for the episode in which Lord Snowden takes Princess Margaret’s picture. “I watch a lot of sport. I’m not mad keen to see stuff that I’m in always. And I knew that show was gonna get difficult to watch the closer it got up to date. But I’ve heard it’s great.”
Talk to him a bit, and it’s clear that Goode—“Goody” to his wife, and other intimates—has a refreshingly frank take on life in the entertainment industry. Don’t get him started on awards shows; ask about which actors he’s close to, and he says, “I only really see my kids and my wife. That’s it. I’m a bit of a shut-in, really. I quite like it. I don’t really do anything showbizzy.”
When he does get together with people like Matthew Rhys, with whom he did The Wine Show, they don’t talk shop. “He’s a fine actor [and] hysterically funny. But no, we would never talk about work. We’d be far too busy giggling and, um, drinking.”
Goode did send Hopkins a note after the Oscar winner lost his Pacific Palisades home in the recent LA fires. “It was such a joy to work with him, and I wasn’t afraid, which I thought I was going to be. He was so warm and welcoming, and I had him to myself for three weeks…. He was everything I wanted him to be, and I hope he had a nice time with me. I’m pretty sure he didn’t. But, no, we’re not best buds. You do your work and then you move on.”
One upcoming project that he won’t be a part of is the third Downton Abbey movie. Goode’s Henry Talbot wasn’t by Lady Mary’s side in the franchise’s second feature film because he was busy shooting The Offer. He just told Radio Times that a “buggered” knee and an ensuing surgery kept him from the third picture. “And let’s face it,” Goode told the outlet of his Downton character—“he was edging towards becoming a bit of a wet lettuce.”
The same cannot be said of Morck, whose bad humor began rubbing off on Goode while filming the series over six months. “I don’t really bring work home with me that much. But there was a bit of osmosis. I did become a little bit short-tempered,” he chuckles. “Not with people on set…. I don’t even know how to explain it. I got infected by a bit of Morck.” Still, Goode hopes viewers like his cop enough to warrant a second season. “Well, that would be something new for me.”
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