The world of British crime dramas is full of detectives. From the traditional (Agatha Christie’sPoirot) and straight-laced (Inspector Morse) to the more modern (Broadchurch), offbeat (Ludwig) or unconventional (Death Valley), these days there’s likely to be a crime-solving savant to fit any viewer’s preferences. Yet, few shows feature a character quite like DI Mick Palmer, the quirky and idiosyncratic lead of Acorn TV’s newest mystery series, Art Detectives.
The head of Metropolitan Police’s (exceedingly small) Heritage Crime Unit, a tiny office that’s charged with investigating forgery, theft, and even straight-up murder tied to the world of art and antiquities, both Palmer and the show he leads are a bit different than one might expect from his genre. Played by former True Blood star Stephen Moyer, Mick is as interested in art and history as he is in crimesolving, nerding out over relics, lesser-known artists, and offbeat bits of trivia. Rather than the arrogant Sherlock Holmes-style geniuses we often see in shows like this, Palmer isn’t interested in trying to convince anyone of his brilliance. Instead, the character is often full to bursting with the sort of palpable nerdy joy that will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever gone off on a twenty-minute extemporaneous tangent about an esoteric topic that only you care about. As a character, Palmer is utterly charming, and the role is an excellent showcase for an actor who has long deserved the chance to play an unabashedly good guy for a change.
We got the chance to speak with Moyer about his decision to join the seemingly never-ending ranks of British crime solvers with Art Detectives, the backstory he created for Mick Palmer that we didn’t see onscreen, the surprising genius at the heart of forgery, and more.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Paste: I feel like it’s a rite of passage for British actors to have to play a detective at some point in their lives. So it’s your turn now. But there are a million procedurals and a million detective shows, and I have to admit, this one hooked me even though I’m not usually a mystery person myself. What about Art Detectives spoke to you and made you think, ‘Yes. This is the one I’m going to do my detective era in?’
Stephen Moyer: It’s interesting that you should lead with, ‘You are not usually a…’ mystery person. Because I’m not either. And I, in my early years, did quite a lot of these British dramas, often turning up in episodes as the killer. But I didn’t envisage this as a world that I would enter or get into. There have been a couple of times people have approached me to do things like this before, and I’ve chosen not to do it. But with this, I just didn’t feel like we’d seen anything about art forgery before, or this slightly different kind of world. It’s a bit quirky, and it’s very sweet. It’s actually quite gentle.
But my interest was piqued by the idea. And they came to me quite early on, so I had a bit of a say in the way that my character [Mick] developed. For example, at the beginning, we didn’t have the father character, which left us all asking the question: ‘Why would you become this? Why would you choose this as a job?’ I mean, in the whole of the British Police force, the smallest department is the forgery and fraud department. It’s just three people in the U.K. That’s where the idea started, only with obviously just this one character, which made the question of how he got there more important.
We came up with the idea of Mick’s father being an art forger, and him taking a different direction in his life because of that. And I thought that was really interesting, that they’re estranged because of this. And also, this is an obligatory thing in crime drama, but he’s also a little bit broken in his emotional world. Really good at his job, not so good at life. Obviously, that’s a trope of these detective dramas. But I thought it was unique in the way that ours developed: Him losing his mum early and being brought up by this man who is living against the law. And my character, you don’t really see it that much in the show—but keen watchers will catch it—he collects comic books, and there’s a specific comic book character [he loves].
Paste: Oh, that makes the moment he gets gifted an issue later in the season make so much more sense now.
Moyer: Right! And that is astonishing to him, that his father would’ve thought to give him that. Because in our notes, and in mine and Larry’s [Lamb], who plays my father, in our notes, he doesn’t see comic book art as real art. This is the backstory we came up with. He thinks that’s not real art, and he’s ashamed of his son for being into this.
Paste: It’s like people who think reading comic books isn’t the same thing as really reading.
Moyer: Exactly! So Larry and I, when we were trying to work out the history between us, we came up with this idea that…that he had this character he attached to. In the comic book he loved, there was this detective, like a kind of Marlow character. And I took this idea to the art department, and they created a character called The Tolimon. And if you look in my house, there are posters and comic books of this, but we created it. It’s not a real thing. And it’s really brief, but it’s there.
Paste: You all really put in a lot of work creating this lived-in backstory and history for your characters. There’s so much detail.
Moyer: I’ve got this little green Moleskine notebook. And you only see inside it, I think twice in the whole six episodes. But inside, it’s full of sketches of the Tolimon, which my character does when he’s sitting by himself. There are so many of these little details that are just fantastic. They even created a little figurine that’s on a shelf in my house.
Obviously, this show is an art department’s dream in many respects. They have to create a Vermeer, they have to create a Walter Sickert. There’s a Viking Hoard, and then Titanic antique plates in episode five. There’s all this stuff. The portrait that’s above the piano, which is in the first scene of the first episode that begins with Rosa saying, ‘I love this painting. Who’s that?’ And I say, ‘That’s my mom, painted by my dad.’ Well, that’s actually my mom in that painting, at age 19. There are loads of details, and really interesting stuff that we got to play with. And one of the nice things about being an actor is the stuff we do behind the camera that doesn’t necessarily make it onscreen, the research. Right?
Paste: Of course. And it still informs the final product—after all, if you don’t believe in the world, why are the people watching it going to believe it?
Moyer: Absolutely! And I’ve worked with actors before who have done this to an even greater degree—I’m thinking about Denis O’Hare, specifically—where you write down an entire history for your character, up until the point where we meet him or her in the show. When Denis was doing True Blood, his character was 3,000 years old, and he wrote this several-thousand-year history of his character. And you could throw it to Denis—What was [Russell Edgington] doing in the ninth century, and he’d go, ‘Oh, he was in Germany at that point.’
So, I do that all the time with everything I do, whether they’re a fictional [character] or not. If you’re playing somebody historic, you can go back and have a look at their real life. [With Mick], I didn’t have to do three thousand years, but I went through his childhood and I went through his relationships, asking why he is so broken? What happened in his emotional world that created the man we see today?
Paste: One of the most interesting things about Mick as a character is that he’s clearly seen and been through some stuff in his life. But it hasn’t made him hard in the way that you see in a lot of shows like this, where the detective is very grizzled and traumatized. But that’s not who this character is, and it feels very different from a lot of what we see in this genre. In all of your backstory and figuring out who Mick is, what was your guiding North Star for who he is?
Moyer:That’s a good question. We’ve touched on his escape world, which is this comic book world. But Paul Powell and I—he’s one of the series writers—we had this idea that after his mom had died, Mick’s father, Ron, became this raconteur, this fraudster who was just the life and the soul of the party. And I’m sure you know this, but in the U.K., children are allowed in pubs. It’s very different from America in that regard, you don’t have to be over 18 to go into a pub if yu’r with your parent So our idea was that Ron would be entertaining all his artist friends in the pub and Mick would just be sitting in the corner, this little boy with his comic books.
When we were all kids, my friends and I all went to the pub every weekend with our families. All the parents in my village were part of the same parent association, and they all went to the pub at the weekend, and the kids would all be there or in the garden running around. I imagined Mick as this only child by himself in this room full of adults and watching them talk about art and him getting really interested in art as a result and not realizing, of course, that it was all fakes or that what his dad was doing [was illegal] until later. There’s a sense of shame there, of learning that’s who is father was, that he wasn’t real, that he was fake too. Him becoming a detective is sort of a reaction against that, which is why there’s such an antagonistic relationship between them.
And the other thing is, he has an emotional life that has been…difficult. This partner left him, they broke up, and she took her daughter—his stepdaughter—with her. That’s left a hole in him that he hasn’t been able to fill, and doesn’t want to fill, and is honestly scared of filling. It’s why his relationship with Rosa is so bumbling—he’s just terrified he’s going to screw it up or that he’s going to get hurt again. And she’s similar to that. Truly, there are all these nice things and layers to play around with. Admittedly, it’s all quite gentle, but I quite like the coziness and gentleness of it all.
Paste: Me too, honestly. It’s soothing in a way, not to mention weirdly educational. In that vein, what was the most interesting or most bizarre artifact or piece of art you learned about while making this?
Moyer: I’m going to go out on a limb and say something that’s maybe risque. I think that being a forger is actually in many, many ways, much more difficult than being an artist. Because if you take … I don’t know, what’s your favorite painting?
Paste: I’m trying to think of something that’s not a medieval triptych because that’s what I studied in school [laughter]. But I’ll be basic and say Starry Night.
Moyer: So let’s take Starry Night. Although to illustrate this point I’m going to make, let’s choose something medieval. Because in order to create that, and to fake that in a believable way, you’d have to find a piece of parchment or fabric from that period. The paint you used would have to be from the period. The varnish that you use would have to be from the period. The brushes you use. Because if a piece of the brush comes off on the canvas and it’s found on that painting, that piece of badger hair or whatever you’re using has to be from 1500 years ago. The brush you use has to be an ancient brush. So, in addition to having to be a brilliant artist and being able to paint in that particular style, you have to make sure you have all the right components that fit together to create it. So you’re also a detective, because you need to find all those things from that period or even earlier in order to create something as good as the original.
So when me and Larry, who plays my father, started examining all this, he kept sending me stuff all the time, stories of people who he’d found who faked art or news stories that had just been unearthed about famous paintings—are they real or are they forgeries and how do you tell? So I suppose the big kicker here is that, in making Art Detectives, I, Stephen, ended up with this massive respect for forgers because you really have to be brilliant to do it.
New episodes of Art Detectives stream on Mondays on Acorn TV.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB
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