Picture Courtesy of Bloody Scotland / Paul Reich
Scott Frank and the cast took a rare day off from filming the second season to appear at the Albert Halls in Stirling, and gave away more than they probably intended to.
Netflix’s Edinburgh-set crime hit closed out Bloody Scotland on Sunday with a packed panel chaired by executive producer Rob Bullock, joined by writer-director Scott Frank and stars Matthew Goode (DCI Carl Morck), Kate Dickie (Chief Superintendent Moira Jacobson), Alexej Manvelov (Akram Salim) and Leah Byrne (DC Rose Dickson). What’s on Netflix attended the virtual panel, and here’s what we learned about the show’s response and upcoming return.
Bullock opened by thanking the cast for turning up at all: “We are 15 weeks into a 20-week shoot. It’s long and grueling hours and we are actually in the middle of night shoots as well.”
Bullock’s “15 weeks into a 20-week shoot” is also a useful data point on the schedule. Early production listings had principal photography starting on July 13th and running to December 11th, but we reported in June that cameras actually rolled from around June 1st, with casting calls pointing to an October 11th finish. Counted from June 1st, Sunday was day 111 of the shoot — almost exactly 16 weeks in — which lines up with an October wrap rather than a December one. That keeps a second-half-of-2025 release the most realistic target.
Season 2 teases
Asked directly what he could tell us about season 2, Frank went with a rather joking answer, “Nothing. It’s shit.” He later expanded on that, slightly: “Season two is going to be okay, fine. You’ll enjoy it, you can fold your laundry while you’re watching it.”
The most substantial tease came from Goode, and it concerns Akram. “This is what’s so interesting about season two — you suddenly start getting the scripts and you’re like, oh my God. You start finding out about Akram and you’re just like, awesome… those of you who like the show, you’re going to [be in] for an absolute treat.”
Manvelov, for his part, described the character as a man hiding in plain sight: “It has to be a contrast to Carl, who’s insane. So Akram has to be secretly insane. But on the surface, he looks calm.” He added that all of the team “deal with trauma… but they do it in different ways. And this is a facet of a person who already kind of thinks that he already dealt with that trauma. He’s all cried out, he’s all done. And now he’s being the stable point of gravity for the rest of the group. But of course, inside, he is raging.”
Moira is getting out of the office, too. “Moira didn’t really leave the office much in season one,” Dickie noted, before it was confirmed from the stage that we visit her flat this season. She also mentioned shooting “a really exciting couple of hours where I sat in a helicopter.” Dickie does tease we’ll get to see Moira out of her natural habitat, saying, “You do go to her flat this season. Yes, you may see a little of my whole life.”
On locations, Frank confirmed the production has travelled: “We shot a little bit in Aberdeen this time up that way. We’ve shot a lot out of Edinburgh this time, but a lot of the show’s on sets.”
And on Kelly Macdonald, who played Carl’s therapist Dr Rachel Irving, Frank was blunt: “She’s making another show. She’s doing Lanterns, so our show and their show couldn’t make it work. But she may come back. We never know. Depends on how her career is going on the other show.”
One more for the worriers: Frank is still writing. Asked whether he’s a plotter or a pantser, he said, “seeing as you’ve been waiting for the last episode for six months for me to finish writing it, and seeing as we started shooting last season with two episodes written and we were basically building the airplane while we were flying it, I am definitely a pantser.”
The cast on why the show connected
Frank claims not to know, and says he doesn’t try to know: “I never think anything is going to cut through. I never think anything is going to work or be good. So I choose to be pleasantly surprised rather than violently disappointed.” Pressed, he offered a theory: “Sometimes, when you’re telling a story, the story is true to itself. And the story is told from the inside out. The story is told by characters and people get into the characters and they want what they want.” The mystery, he said, is “the sugar.”
It lines up with his rule for the genre: “the whodunnit is not as important as the whydunnit.” He also owns the pacing criticism. “I get accused of taking too much time in pilots or first episodes. But I want you to know the characters, because if you know them, then you’ll actually feel something at the end of the show.”
Dickie credited the depth of even the smaller roles: “When you’ve got really great characters written as a main, but then you’ve got the kind of surrounding stuff not as well written, it’s really hard to get immersed… you’re not just flat on a page. You get involved, you get immersed, you start to care.”
Goode was sent the scripts by Joel, his agent of 20 years’ standing, and the reaction was immediate. “I read it and I was like, the dialogue is so good. And this Carl character is… it’s outrageous. And like looking in the mirror.” He normally holds off until the scripts are done, he said, but not this time: “I try not to start doing the character before I read the scripts, but with Carl, I already started trying him on for size.” The source material sealed it — “it’s not like I get offered these kinds of things all the time. So I was like, yeah, I’m super interested. And 10 books as well. Super interested.” That’s referring to the fact that the series could go on for a long time, and he even later hinted that he’s interested in doing season 3 later in the panel.
Picture Courtesy of Bloody Scotland / Paul Reich
Bullock backed it up with Netflix’s own audience research, which he sat in on. “They were sort of saying, yeah, sure, I want to know why Merritt Lingard is being held in that chamber… But what I really want to know is, is Carl going to stop being such a dick to Akram? Is that relationship going to blossom? Is Rose going to find the courage to step up? How is Moira going to manage this bag of cats she’s got to manage? People really loved the characters.”
Scott Frank on working with Netflix
Asked how he’s managed to make two nuance-heavy shows at a streamer with a reputation for wanting the opposite, Frank first joked: “That’s what I do in every part of my life. That’s why I’ve been married so happily for 38 years. I just say, honey, I’m Scott Frank and I get what I want.”
Then he got serious, going back to Godless, Netflix’s first in-house miniseries, and Cindy Holland’s pitch to him at the time: “We’re going to agree on all the parameters… but we trust you. We’re hiring you and giving you all this money because we trust you.” The same held on The Queen’s Gambit, he said: “they never forced me to do anything as far as I can remember.”
He also took the opportunity to kill a very persistent theory on Netflix’s overbearing practices of dictating things like lighting. “There’s a lot written about Netflix, you know, they change the lighting, there’s Netflix lighting, there’s this — none of that’s true. If a show’s lit like crap, it’s because the director and the cinematographer lit it like crap. No one upstairs is saying, you know, light it like crap.”
What actually makes it work, in his view, is agreement up front: “everybody agrees on the intention, and if everybody agrees on the intention, it’s a much easier process. Then you’re just fighting about budget and time and how long it takes to achieve that intention.” Working on Dept. Q with Netflix UK, specifically now under Anne Mensah, he added, “has been one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.”
Bullock followed it with a story from the season 2 pitch meeting. Before anyone could talk about the new season, Frank told the room he wanted to talk about the first one — “I would love to hear from you what it was that you thought was really successful and what you really loved about season one.” Netflix then spent 20 minutes praising the show back at him and then at the end, Frank said the equivalent of we’re going to do all of that and more in season 2.
Picture Credit: Netflix