Timothy Spall has told of the “enormous responsibly” of playing a murder victim who has loved ones who are still alive.
In new BBC1 drama The Sixth Commandment, the actor portrays university lecturer Peter Farquhar who became a victim of his young partner Ben Field. After Farquhar died, Field moved on to his friend and neighbour Ann Moore-Martin - played by Anne Reid - persuading her that he was in love with her despite their 50-year age gap.
Spall, 66, said he was thrilled that Peter’s family, particularly his brother Ian and sister-in-law Sue, who are represented in the BBC1 drama, had watched the four episodes and felt he’d done Peter justice.
“The responsibility of playing somebody who has loved ones still alive is enormous,” he explained. “I just managed to find footage of him and watch it, observe him, and just try and connect my psyche with his, really. You use yourself, as an actor, as a toolbox. Whatever you try and cook up and feel, it’s only a petrol that you put yourself in somebody else’s engine, and that’s what you have to do.
“It was trying to just inhabit someone, rather than impersonate them. So it means a hell of a lot that people who knew him feel that side is authentic. There’s a difference between an impersonation and trying to encapsulate somebody.”
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Éanna Hardwicke and Anne Reid also star in the new drama (BBC/Wild Mercury/Amanda Searle)Anne, 88, agreed: “It’s a terrible responsibility playing somebody whose relatives are still there and still loving them. If somebody was playing my mother or my aunt or something, I would be very worried about that. But they were absolutely lovely to us. They were very, very nice.”
In reality Ann survived Field’s attempt on her life but died soon afterwards.
“The story was extremely disturbing - Ann was a good, kind, trusting woman, who was so cruelly deceived,” Reid said. “What’s terrifying about this story is that this sort of terrible evil is hiding in plain sight. Ben Field could be anybody – he feels like he’s a normal loving guy. It makes you sort of question your own life.”
Field, now 32, was jailed for 36 years in 2019 and the court was told that he had either a narcissistic personality disorder or a psychopathic personality disorder.
Writer Sarah Phelps said she was at pains not to glorify Field, preferring to tell the story more through the lives of this victims - which is why the police don’t arrive until the third episode.
“I wanted to do it like this because I think one of the things that can happen when you’re looking at a crime, a true crime and a true story, is that you can forget the people that it happened to,” she explained.
“I didn’t want to glamourise Ben. I really wanted to tell Peter’s story and then to tell Ann’s story because they seemed to be so specific and I didn’t want them to get lost.
“Otherwise I felt it would be the tricksy perpetrator and the dogged police. And while the police were dogged and they were phenomenal, I didn’t want to feed Ben Field with that sense that, in fact, he was the main part of the story. I wanted Peter and Ann to be the main part of the story, and their families and the people who loved them.”
She said that Field would have enjoyed the intellectual decline in Peter caused by the slow poisoning. “One of the things about Ben Field is that he loves to be the cleverest in the room. He believes himself to be an intellectual genius. And I think what was really important for him to do was to take away, from Peter and from Ann, their intellectual capacity, their faith, their cleverness, their open-heartedness, their erudition, their memory.”
Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke said he had to put aside his “horror and disgust” at Field’s actions to play him. “I find it all unfathomable,” he admitted. “Truth was something he bartered with, not something he lived by.”
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The Sixth Commandment airs on BBC1 on Monday 17 July at 9pm.
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