Here at Principle, we sat down with Stephen to talk about his latest and future projects, from breathing new life into a literary classic to exploring the psychology of an art detective to his love for creating character playlists, the joy of collaboration, and what show he is currently binge-watching. Most importantly, we kick off the chat by celebrating his newest additions to his family: two puppies and two kittens, which firmly earn him the title of dad of the year.

Coat, shirt and trousers Kent & Curwen / Boots Walk London / Rings The Ouze, Phira London, Paul Magen

Let’s dive right into it – apart from being dad of the year with getting those puppies and kittens, you have a few different projects that you are working on at the moment, such as Forsytes…

Yes, Forsytes. They are based on the saga, a group of novels from over 100 years ago by John Goldsworthy. I think he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The art of narration takes its highest form in The Forsyte Saga. There’s a very famous 60s adaptation of it, and a very famous turn-of-the-century adaptation with Damien Lewis. This is a 2025 adaptation where Debbie Horsfield, who was the writer behind Poldark, has created a take on the books where we find them and then rewind. It’s like she’s put a pencil into the cassette and rewound it to work out how some of the characters who are in the books, but don’t necessarily feature in the way the novels are told, actually meet. One of the things that’s interesting is, if you’re going to do it, how do you do it differently again?

So for Soames and Irene, who are a huge part of the story, we don’t see them meet in the books, but we see them know each other. This is about seeing how they first come together. And also June, who’s my granddaughter in the books. How does she come to meet Phil Bosinney, who is the young architect that she meets? How do they come together? We get to learn that. Debbie has also resurrected, quite literally, a character called Frances, who is Jolyon’s wife. In the books, she has died, but Debbie brings her to life. It’s a really good device because it creates a wonderful, powerful female character that’s played masterfully by Tuppence Middleton, and it creates agency for the female characters; they have power within the household and the social structure of society in a modern way.

In the books, she’s already gone, and so when Jolyon has a relationship with this lady’s maid, it is scandalous, but he’s not actually having an affair in the books, and he’s not in our version either. But that lady’s maid, who he has a relationship with, comes back into existence while Frances is still there. There’s this sort of dilemma of his first love and the person he’s married to, which I think is really smart and creates good drama. And as Damien Timmer, our producer, said, it’s big, it’s a family drama. The saga is old-fashioned soap, in the same way as Downton Abbey or Upstairs, Downstairs — posh EastEnders, basically.

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I think it’s great when recreations of films or series add stuff like that! For your prep for the character, did you watch the previous versions at all?

No, I read the books. In the very first stanza that he features, the character I play is referred to as Old Jolyon, but in our version, he is called Jolyon Senior. Jack Davenport very much wanted me to be called Old Jolyon. Jack plays my brother; he’s a very good friend of mine. Old Jolyon is described with a dome head because he’s completely bald apart from a little bit around his head. Something I sometimes do is look at books of the day that my character would have read, or certain music the character would have known from the period. So I created a music playlist.

Oh, what was on the playlist? That’s so interesting.

It’s called Domehead. My character plays the piano in the show. Debbie and Damien knew that I dabbled a little bit, I’m by no means a pianist, though. So quite a lot of Chopin preludes, some Gabriel Fauré, and some Liszt, mostly piano-based.

There’s a really lovely one, Berceuse No. 11, which I love, and I learned to play it. There’s also a Nocturne in E-flat Minor and Traumerei, which is very famous. Many brilliant pianists encore with that piece, and I follow a lot of musicians who do. So there’s lots on there, but it’s mostly classical. There are some Hungarian pieces too, Hungarian waltzes and things like that, which are really nice.

I love that! Do you usually do playlists when you prep for a character?

I like doing it because I like having an understanding of what that person would have been doing. He seemed to lean into it because he’s musically inclined. They wanted to give him something that reflected that.

In the series, Jolyon Jr. is an artist. So they wanted to reference the idea that perhaps his father was an artist too, but through music. That seemed like a really nice direction to go. We don’t really ever talk about it, but it’s nice to have it in your head.

Absolutely. You can properly channel that version you created.

I think that’s great. It’s always fun to do that. I’ve got a show coming out that I did for Netflix in January, he’s a character with a duality in his life. He’s very professional at what he does, but he’s also a protector for somebody. Those things go against each other. I was really interested in how he came to be: who is he, why, what’s he read, what’s he listening to? It’s a modern story. It was really nice because I went from playing in Forsytes last year, from May to July, then straight to Belfast to do Art Detectives. While I was there, I met a couple of times with Shawn Ryan, the show-runner and creator of The Night Agent.

So I went into Christmas 2024 knowing I was starting The Night Agent in January 2025, which you don’t often get to do as an actor – to know six weeks ahead that you’re starting something new. We lived in New York, and I was shooting there. It was the first time I had worked from home in twelve and a half years, so actually leaving home in the morning and coming back at night. First time in twelve and a half years. 17 states and nine countries in that time, but never home.

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Haha, it all aligned! You are in Art Detectives as well, and obviously it’s very different to Forsytes.

It’s crime-solving. Art Detectives is a lot of fun, it’s really sweet, and quite a charming show. My character [Detective Inspector Mick Palmer] is a bit of a geek, which I loved. And again, he’s into art, so that was something for me to go down.

Did you go to many art galleries for prep?

As much as I could. There are a couple of really fantastic galleries in Belfast. I lived very close to one, which is the Northern Irish Museum of Art. Then, where I lived, near Queen’s University, which is extraordinary – they had travelling shows coming in. There are also a couple of other great galleries there. I’m a member of MoMA in New York, so I was always going to MoMA. Whenever my kids have school art trips, I volunteer as the parent to go to the art museums. I was really glad to be able to take them to the Guggenheim as the kid wrangler.

When the producers first came to me with their version, the first draft of the pilot, there were a couple of elements that were part of the character’s pre-history. We like our detectives to be damaged in some way, to have some kind of dark past. Most of them have deep historical backgrounds that have shaped who they’ve become in their present lives.

And the guys at Black Dog Television, who produced this, came up with the idea of having this father figure who is a forger. Sometimes you’re just looking for a key that you have in your pocket, something nobody else sees, like an anchor from your past. For Mick, that was really interesting because his dad is an art forger, and a very, very famous one. That lent me the possibility – and as I say, that wasn’t in the first draft, they came up with it, of having someone who has spent his entire life around art, around turpentine and paint and brushes and canvases, because his dad is so brilliant. What it gave me the ability to do was go back and see how his father, such a brilliant craftsman, could basically impersonate anyone. What I love about that idea is that Ron, Larry Lamb’s character, is sitting in the pub. He is a raconteur, with all these mates who are artists telling stories. My character’s mum dies when he’s eight, so he’s been brought up by Ron, who would have been his superhero, this legendary figure. 

But he’s sitting in the corner of the pub, not part of it, reading comic books. And it just so happens that the comic character he’s reading is a detective, one he becomes obsessed with. This is the joy of creating something from scratch: I went to the art department and said, “I’ve had this idea. He’s really into art, but the comic book character is an old-school detective, like Chandler’s Marlowe, 1930s, collar up, trilby.” We printed a bunch of these comic books. They created a character called The Tolliman, a mac-wearing, trilby-wearing detective. I gave them my Moleskine notebook, and they filled it with sketches of this character. Whenever you see me with the little pad in my hand, there’s only one shot where you actually see it; in that book are my doodles of The Tolliman.

In my house in the show, there are pictures and posters of the character. There’s a whole rack of comic books. So I could lean into the history of art and also into the comic-book world. Of course, when he got to 18 or 19, his father never thought comic book art was “real art,” and they argued about it. My character becomes obsessed with this detective and eventually becomes a detective himself. There’s this dichotomy between being a policeman and not turning his father in. In my head, he says, “I’m going to turn you in, so you better get lost,” and then he doesn’t see him for 15 years. At the beginning of the show, when we first meet him, it’s the first time he’s seen him since. It’s a nice colour, a nice texture.

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That comic book idea is amazing! It also adds a great layer that your dad plays a famous forger when you are trying to solve art crimes… For the show, you were a producer as well, right?

They came to me early on, so I got to have a say in a lot of those decisions, which was great. In fact, they said, “We’re looking for someone to play your father. Who do you think it should be?” I said, “Larry Lamb.” They said, “We’re never going to get Larry Lamb.”

I texted him. I said, “Mate, do you want to come play my dad in a detective show?” He went, “Where am I coming, son?” I held it up to the Zoom call. We’re very, very close friends, and it was a dream come true for us.

The power of connections, love it. That’s great, it all worked out. You two make a really good on-screen team. How do you switch off your different hats when you do more than one job on a project, such as being a producer or director as well as acting?

I’m a producer in the sense that I find material and get it made. I get people to come do it, the professionals I want, from costume to directors of photography to great hair people. I’m a producer in that I can get things together and create things. But I’m not the day-to-day producer. I hate it. I’m not the person who likes dotting i’s and crossing t’s. I’m the one pushing it: “Let’s just do it, it doesn’t matter.” So I’m good at getting the thing off the ground and creating it. Keeping the money straight, real production, I’m terrible at.

But the directing is different. I find it extremely difficult to turn that off. I absolutely love it. I’ll say to a director, “I’m really sorry, just tell me to shut the fuck up.” And a lot of the great ones I’ve worked with will say, “What do you think we should do here?” And I’ll say, “Are you going to do that shot?” And they’ll say, “Yep, but it might be nice to get this shot,” and sometimes they’ll take the idea. If it’s a really good director, I don’t need to do that because they’re going to do it anyway. They will come up with way better ideas than me. It’s hard to turn it off because I love it, but it’s really nice being with someone I trust, so I can turn it off. I never particularly had any desire to direct myself. I ended up doing it on Sexy Beast. Jason Bateman is a great example of someone who does it extremely well; he’s wonderful. He did a really good film, maybe 15 years ago, with Chris Walken, himself, Nicole Kidman, and Maryann Plunkett. It’s a great movie about actor-parents who’ve abandoned their kids. Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman. I watched it and thought, “Oh my God, he is really good.”

Having never set out to direct myself, I ended up doing it on True Blood, and again on Sexy Beast, and had such a lovely time that it made me reappraise it. I think I know enough at this point to trust myself not to worry about it. It didn’t even occur to me during Sexy Beast that it was an issue. I was proud of those episodes. I’m not necessarily planning to do it, but I’m not going to let it stop me either. I had a project for a long time where the producers said, “Can’t you play that part?” I didn’t want to, but now I’m thinking maybe that’s how we get it made.

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I suppose never say never to when a directing opportunity might come again. So many of your characters couldn’t be more different from one another. Is there still a character or a story you want to explore in the future?

I’m halfway through writing a film that I would direct, which is about a sort of ’80s Essex. It’s provisionally called Break. It’s about the period in my life when I was a choirboy as a kid. If you’re a choirboy, your voice breaks at some point, and you stop being a treble or a soprano. In England, we call it a boy treble or a boy soprano. Then there’s a waiting period while you work out what your voice is going to do, whether you become a tenor, baritone, or bass. It’s about that period in my character’s life, set against the backdrop of ’80s Essex, which is when I grew up, and Thatcher’s Britain. I had to stop a while back, but I will get back to it. It’s just finding the time to sort of, I know what the story is. There are a couple of things that I’ve got on the burner. There’s another film that’s set in France, at the Santiago de Compostela walk.

Oh cool! So, did you have to do that walk? Or are you still going to do that?

No, I haven’t done it. I would absolutely love to, but circumstances are not ideal.

Haha yes, I was gonna say, when do you have the time for that?

Hopefully, when we make the movie, that will be great.

So when did you start writing that project you just talked about, the Break one?

I started around the end of 2023. I revisited it in 2024, bits and pieces throughout the year. It’s all indexed. You know this, you’re a writer, I sort of index card everything – that element of it is constructed. I should just put it into ChatGPT and see what it spits out at me. It could be a nice experiment. It would probably do it better than me!

That could be fun to just try and see what it spits out. When you write something, like a movie or a series, do you see yourself as the main character, a side character, or do you not have yourself in mind at all?

That’s a really good question. There have been different versions. I worked on a screenplay a few years ago about a wonderful astrophysicist who’s one of the heads of physics at Columbia, Jana Levin. Me and a really lovely writer, Tom Dean, were constructing truth based on her world and story, but also within an imagined worldscape where a lot of my life and historical stories became part of another character’s journey. Not because it was thinking of me, but because they were interesting elements that would be good for that character to go through. Sometimes you can’t help but allow some of your world to permeate it. It’s never just for me. The one I’m talking about is obviously autobiographical, but I’m not married to it being truthful. If it makes the story better, I’ll do anything to make it as good as it can be.

Coat, shirt and trousers Kent & Curwen / Boots Walk London / Rings The Ouze, Phira London, Paul Magen

Makes sense. If you could choose someone other than you, who would you choose to play you as a younger self or even an older self?

Well, he’s going to be way too old by the time I get to do that project, but the young boy who played the lead in Adolescence, he’s brilliant, absolutely extraordinary. The kid who plays my son in The Night Agent is very gifted, but I’d have to search because he’d have to be able to sing. If we get there, it’s not going to be next year because next year is booked. We’re probably looking at spring 2027. So it’s going to be somebody who’s 12 or 13 then. In terms of who could play me now, I am a big fan of Paul Rudd. He came up to me at a party about ten years ago and said, “You’re Vampire, Bill.” I said, “Yeah!” He said, “Everybody says you look like my brother.” I’d never thought that, but his wife says it all the time. I’ve always thought we’d be distant blood cousins.

Maybe you are. Who knows.

Yeah. I’ll ask my mom. Big fan of Paul Rudd, big fan of Steve Carell.

Great options. I guess we will see! You said you’re pretty booked out for the next year. Apart from that Netflix show, can you unveil anything else or is it under wraps?

Next week I will start a horror movie in Budapest.

Oh, I love horror movies. What is it going to be about?

Have you ever seen Orphan?

Funnily enough I watched it just the other week. I do love a bit of horror.

Okay, it’s within that world. I don’t love horror, but I’ve done a lot of horror. I like acting in it, I’m a bit of a wuss, but I enjoy the mechanics of it, the smartness of the storytelling. Horror is a very specific genre; you have to really know how cameras work to create fear in the audience. That’s the skill. After that, there are a couple of things competing for January to May. Then I start Forsytes in May. End of July, I start the next season of Art Detectives, which takes me through to the end of the year.

Lovely, booked and busy.

I’m not complaining. A couple of interesting things haven’t been cemented yet for January to May, but they’re both really cool projects.

Do you ever steal anything from set? If so, what’s the coolest or weirdest thing you’ve ever stolen?

I’ve got all sorts of stuff here that I’ve stolen. Unfortunately, a lot of it is in a container because I’ve just packed up somewhere. I’ve got bookends right here (proceeds to show me), more up here. These are more bookends – I have them separated so they’re not the same. They’re all from Vampire Bill’s office, where I got to pillage, which was really great. There are all sorts of things, but most of my “theftory” is in New York. I have an office in California that’s full of stolen props, too.

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Nothing like a bit of set theft! Obviously, you are active in both the States and the UK with projects. Do you find there’s a difference when it comes to being on set, the overall vibe?

I’ve been extremely lucky to have worked all over the place. The American crews are so professional. I’d always known how much work goes into creating a piece of television or film, but when I started directing True Blood, I was four years in.

Also, there’s a difference between directing an episode in the middle of the season versus the first episode. A lot of casting choices and scenic elements, like an office room, are already established by the director of the first episode.

When they kindly respected me and saw I was capable, they gave me the first episode of season six. I did a lot of casting and worked extensively with Suzuki Ingerslev, Alan Ball’s designer, who’s a genius, and Audrey Fisher, costume designer. We had a symbiotic idea where colours of the walls, fabrics, and all visual elements were coordinated with the set design, costumes, and my director of photography.

We tried to create a world where, for example, red could signify vampire, danger, blood, lifeblood, but also considered what other colors fit in, like nature green. You bring elements of a character’s elemental force into their surroundings. That even affects the filters in front of the lens, lights, and tiny pieces of color on costumes to make the audience feel something.

You see the amount of thought behind creating a prop rock, or a chair someone’s sitting on. Forty chairs might be considered – what would that character have in his office? Is he into 18th-century design, modernist, or Bauhaus? All that connective tissue is considered before the actor walks on set. Then the actors have ideas too – “I don’t think I’d sit on that chair; I’d prefer that one.” That’s a through line I’ve seen everywhere I’ve worked, whether in England or America.

One aspect that’s different in the UK, and I think Europe generally, is that almost 90–95% of the productions I’ve worked on, you can’t afford overtime. Producers aren’t prepared to pay the crew for it. In America, you do 15-hour days, you shoot until you’ve shot the call sheet. If that means going over three hours, everyone gets paid overtime. In the UK, people can’t afford that. So around six o’clock, you know you’re wrapping at seven, and it’s “squeaky bum time.” You have to start being creative, like “How can I shoot this scene efficiently? Can I finish this scene traditionally or do it in one shot?” I really enjoy that. Some of the most exciting stuff happens in that last hour. That’s a classic British kick-bollock scramble, full KBS. That’s not to say the American version isn’t better; it’s a balance. You can take your time in the US because of overtime, which lets you go slower. 

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Sometimes the best work happens under pressure! But that is a really interesting insight. Last but not least, what’s your guilty pleasure film or series?

One of my favorite movies of all time is The Producers, by Mel Brooks. I know it backward, so I can’t even call it a guilty pleasure because I’m not guilty. I absolutely love it. We’re also all watching Celebrity Traitors at the moment.

No spoilers please!

I’ve dragged my children, kicking and screaming, into Celebrity Traitors. Another difference between the US and the UK – here in the UK, there are no commercials. It’s a game-changer. You can watch television uninterrupted. In the US, you’re constantly bombarded with ads, whether that is ED, eczema cream, psoriasis, or acne; it’s all spoon-fed during the show. 

I know exactly what you mean – they have a lot fewer regulations around those things over there! I noticed that on my trip to the States earlier this year.

Yes, it’s great to watch Traitors and not have the kids being sold something. The show makes me giggle; it’s a bit silly, but I’m not guilty about it. Reality TV is not my thing but The Traitors – that’s a class one.

Agreed – thank you so much for your time and speak soon!

All episodes of Art Detectives are available on free streaming service U.

The Forsytes continues every Monday at 9pm. Watch and stream on 5.

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