Jason Watkins - "If you don't deal with the past, it might come back and bite you"

Virgin Radio

22 Jan 2023, 22:42

The revered character actor's new series 'The Catch' starts this Wednesday on Channel 5.

Actor Jason Watkins is one of Britain's most versatile character actors, with prize winning roles to date in The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies (for which he won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor), Being Human, Trollied, and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson in Season 3 of The Crown.

His new series, The Catch, begins this Wednesday (January 25th) on Channel 5. Rumour has it that it's some of his best work to date.

He popped into The Graham Norton Radio Show With Waitrose to tell us all about the new thriller.

"I play a fisherman," he says, "and the story is about how the past can inform the present and affect it. If you don't deal with the past, it might come back and bite you, which it kind of does. The show kind of started as a kind of family drama. I'm the centre of a family, and my wife is played by Kathy Belton, who's just brilliant, Poppy Gilbert plays our daughter, Abby, and my mother in law is the wonderful Brenda Fricker. Basically what happens is that my character, Ed Collier, is under pressure with his business. He starts making bad decisions, and then things start go wrong and the past reveals itself."

Aneurin Barnard plays Ryan, a rich, handsome younger man who enters Ed's daughter's life.

"The show is a thriller, but it has identifiable themes that we all recognise," says Jason, 60. "He's over protective of his daughter, or is he right to be suspicious? What is it about this guy? Is he a good guy or a bad guy. Ed is under so much pressure, he's looking at this person as a threat, and everyone's saying, "What are you're talking about?" That's all going on in the first episode..."

The Catch is based on the novel of the same name by TM Logan, and is the second of Logan's books that Channel 5 has adapted, after The Holiday was released in March 2022.

"It's based on his book," explains Jason, "although we take the central theme of it and make it more detailed, really. Michael Crompton has written a rather brilliant script. The first episode is good, I think, but it goes on a real roller coaster. And all the family is under pressure. The family lost a child, Josh, 10 years ago, and that they've not really dealt with that.

He continues, "One of the reasons that I sort of took this on was I felt would be an opportunity to share a little bit about what it's like to lose a child within a family [Jason lost his two year old daughter, Maude, to sepsis, in 2011]. The script was so well written that I thought that this could be the place to do it. To tell that story, but with the added economic financial pressure."

Listen to The Graham Norton Radio Show every Saturday AND Sunday from 9:30 am on Virgin Radio or catch up on-demand here.