‘Passenger’ Team on What Stood Out About Mystery Series & Its Inspiration (VIDEO)
If you like mysteries, true crime, and drama, then Britbox’s newest series—a screenwriting debut from Broadchurch actor Andrew Buchan—is for you. Starring Wunmi Mosaku (Loki) as Former Met Police Detective Riya Ajunwa, Passenger takes you to the fictional Northern town of Chadder Vale where strange crimes are becoming the norm for its inhabitants (and not in a good way). Riya, who has been looking for that “one big crime” to reinvigorate her since arriving in the town five years ago, soon gets her wish when a local girl named Katie Wells (Rowan Robinson) mysteriously disappears…and returns the next day, safe and sound. But for Riya, the nightmare and mystery is just beginning.
“It didn’t feel like anything I’d read or seen as of late,” Barry Sloane, who plays Katie’s father, Eddie Wells, told TVInsider during a chat at New York Comic Con. “All the characters I understood, the place…and anytime there’s ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances, it gets me excited.”
“There was nothing hard about it. It was rich, but it was also light and it was in our voices. It felt poetic and really simple at the same time,” added Mosaku of Buchan’s script and story.
With six tightly woven episodes, Passenger grips the audience and challenges them to provide their own theories and thoughts on how the show plays out. For the cast, it was slightly less of a guessing game, though still one that allowed the cast to posit their own ideas and perspectives about the story. “We did have two weeks of rehearsals where we got a good kind of gist of where we were going and the big story,” revealed Mosaku. “We kind of learned as we were going and then discovered on the job.”
And that intrigue is something Buchan wanted to make a priority. “The familiar butting up against the unfamiliar, or something traditional colliding with a giant unknown,” he said, citing Stranger Things, Fargo, and True Detective as some of his big inspirations. “Those are the shows that grip me. I need a show to really arrest me and go, you’re going to have to pay attention to me.”
Watch more from the cast in the video above.
Passenger, Streaming Now, Britbox
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