The Good Ship Murder's Ross Adams: 'Colin wants to be everyone's friend!'

"I actually was — I remember, we did our first cruise probably about five or six years ago, and I remember thinking 'mm, I don't think that'll be for me', because I had this preconceived idea that it would be full of old people, and it would be quite boring! It was my husband who said, 'come on Ross, you're gonna really love it, you wake up every day in a different place', so I half-heartedly agreed to this cruise holiday, and I loved it from the get-go! We've probably done about five or six now — funnily enough, this cruise that we've just come back from was booked before I knew about The Good Ship Murder job. I think if I'd have known I was going to spend a large part of last summer on a cruise ship, I might have picked a different holiday! But it was gorgeous all the same."

"Oh, absolutely! I feel enormously lucky really, because as I was leaving Hollyoaks [where Ross played Scott Drinkwell from 2015-2024], I suddenly thought, 'I've got no idea what I'm going to do next'. I was at Hollyoaks for almost 10 years, so you do worry as an actor that you might struggle to find other work. Then, thankfully, the casting director got in touch and asked me to audition for Colin, and I remember reading the script and thinking, 'this would be so much fun!' I think the character was originally meant to be about 15-20 years older than me — in the audition script, Colin was written very much as an older character, there were a lot of references to the 80s, so I did wonder if they would go for an older actor. But I just put my own spin on it and tried to have fun with it."

"Colin goes off on a few excursions, so I did have a lot of stuff in Malta. Malta's beautiful — I'd actually been there on a cruise, but I'd only had about nine hours to wander around Valletta, so this time I got to see a lot more of Malta in general. I feel like I was really lucky, because a lot of Colin's stuff is on the ship, because he's leading the entertainment team, and he introduces Jack for his big song in every episode, but I did get to see a lot of Malta. And when we were on the cruise ship, I got on in Madeira and we went round the Canary Islands for about a week, then in the second week we did northern Europe, so we went up around Norway, and then the final week of the cruise was around France and southern Spain. It was gorgeous!"

"Yes, he does! Colin and Bev are quite different — Bev seems to kind of rule with an iron fist, she's quite firm, while Colin wants to be everybody's friend. So he does end up getting involved in the various scrapes that happen. He's also really good friends with Frankie, who's a new character for series two, played by Kiza Deen, who I worked with on Hollyoaks many, many years ago. She's head of security, so Colin ends up being involved in various things through her. He really does try to be everybody's friend — when you first meet him, he does a kind of briefing with the entertainment team, and he fills it with really awful dad jokes, and the team are all kind of looking at him thinking, 'who is this crazy guy who's just tipped up?' He's a bit of a try-hard, but hopefully, the audience should warm up to him because if nothing else, he's trying his best!"