Nobody plays the baffled, bruised, put-upon Everyman better than John Simm – except maybe James Nesbitt or David Morrissey, stars of the BBC’s crime anthology series The Missing. It was Simm’s agent, however, who answered the call from the creators of Strangers, ITV’s eight-part international conspiracy thriller, and Simm who stepped into the shoes of Jonah Mulray, a mild-mannered professorial type who writes books nobody wants to read and whose life is tipped into crisis when he learns that Megan (Dervla Kirwan), his wife of three years, has been killed in a car crash in Hong Kong. It’s her death which opens the show.
By the end of episode one, Jonah’s only crime had been to not pack his mobile phone charger for the necessary trip to the island – an oversight which was crucial for the cliff-hanger ending – and to have defaced a first edition of Jane Eyre with a smoochy inscription to Megan. This was shown to us in flashback. But by then our luckless protagonist had been robbed and assaulted, made to identify his dead wife as she lay on a pathologist’s slab, thrown on the mercies of chilly consular official Sally Porter (Emilia Fox) and realised that if he was Jane Eyre and Megan his Mr Rochester – stick with me here – then it stood to reason she had some pretty serious secrets locked away in her attic.
She did. And not just in her attic. The first big reveal came when Jonah encountered another man at the police station apparently also being briefed about Megan’s death. Tailing him in an inept, John Simm-y kind of way brought about a confrontation in which he learned that the man was called David Chen (Hong Kong crime movie veteran Anthony Wong) and he had been married to Megan for 20 years. Long enough to have a grown-up daughter, in fact: Lau (Scottish Harry Potter actress Katie Leung), who we first meet her when she’s arrested for spraying political slogans attacking a shadowy Hong Kong property magnate. So far, however, her existence is entirely unknown to Jonah.
Penned by Mark Denton and Jonny Stockwood, creators of Netflix drama iBoy, and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, who made the excellent London To Brighton, Strangers was shot on location in Hong Kong. The nocturnal, neon-drenched milieu is straight out of the Wong Kar-wai playbook though the scruffy, ruddy-faced Simm certainly isn’t, a fact which heightens the sense of his being a fish out of water. Quite where this fish sits in the food chain remains to be seen, however. With a name like Jonah, you kind of expect the worst.
Why are you making commenting on The National only available to subscribers?
We know there are thousands of National readers who want to debate, argue and go back and forth in the comments section of our stories. We’ve got the most informed readers in Scotland, asking each other the big questions about the future of our country.
Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse.
So that’s why we’ve decided to make the ability to comment only available to our paying subscribers. That way, all the trolls who post abuse on our website will have to pay if they want to join the debate – and risk a permanent ban from the account that they subscribe with.
The conversation will go back to what it should be about – people who care passionately about the issues, but disagree constructively on what we should do about them. Let’s get that debate started!
Callum Baird, Editor of The National
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here