Prime Video - first two eps available from Fri 2 Dec
Alfred Molina tells us all about his quirky new Canadian-set detective series...
Life can be murder in Three Pines – and it frequently is. It may be a picturesque village in a remote part of Quebec, with seemingly warm yet quirky characters, but dig deeper and there are killers around – with imaginative ways of getting rid of people!
No wonder Alfred Molina, who stars as Canadian cop Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, likens this eight-part series to Midsomer Murders.
‘Now I think of it, it’s more like if Twin Peaks and Inspector Morse had a baby,’ he tells us. ‘There is that introverted nature Morse had, which Gamache shares, with the almost supernatural quality of Twin Peaks.’
Adapted from a best-selling series of novels by Canadian author Louise Penny, and filmed in Montreal and rural Quebec, the story begins with Gamache investigating the disappearance of Blue Two-Rivers, a 16-year-old woman from the indigenous Mohawk community.
But he is then dispatched to Three Pines after the mysterious death of local author Madame CC de Poitiers (Simone-Élise Girard), who has been electrocuted while sitting in a metal chair watching an outdoor curling match. It’s murder, of course, and we follow Gamache as he endeavours to find the killer. He has his work cut out, because just about everyone had a reason to dislike her.
‘I hadn’t heard of the books when I was first asked if I was interested, so I bought some of them, and I got really intrigued by this character,’ says Alfred. ‘Gamache struck me as very different from the detectives we’ve become used to, these tortured men with dark pasts or some terrible demon they’re struggling with, which informs their work and relationships. This is a detective whose superpower seems to be empathy and a desire to understand.’