Van Der Valk actor Marc Warren is back on the beat as he reprises his role as the cynical Dutch cop for a second season of the detective drama.
There will be more grisly murders for Commisaris Piet Van Der Valk and his team to solve in the bustling, canal-lined city of Amsterdam. And this time there is also romance on the cards for the very private Van Der Valk.
Watch To Watch caught up with Marc Warren to chat about Van Der Valk season 2...
We hear that love could be on the cards for Van Der Valk this time?
"Yes. At the end of the last series you realise his partner (Arlette) had drowned after a car accident. This one starts with him meeting a woman called Lena, who’s played by a fantastic Dutch actress, Loes Haverkort. Lena approaches him out on the street when he’s getting hit on by two other women and her relationship with Piet runs across all three episodes. He’s such a commitment-phobe and he’s usually quite closed and impenetrable so it’s nice to be able to show a different side of him."
Van der Valk’s colleague, Inspector Lucienne Hassell, tries to get him to open up about his budding romance doesn’t she?
"Piet talks about taking a relationship to the next level, and he says to Lucienne, ‘Is that a bad idea?’ And she replies, ‘No I think it’s a great idea.” But when he actually does it, he doesn’t really know what the next level is. For Piet, the next level is to get a dog!"
Tell us about the new canine companion that joins season two of Van Der Valk…
"We’ve got a new dog called Sniffer and she seems to be on screen quite a lot. Unfortunately Trojan, the dog we had in the first series, passed away so Piet buys his boss, Dahlman (Emma Fielding) a new one. She’s an ex-sniffer dog and trained to track out marijuana. You never want to be in a shot with a dog for two reasons; one; the director only uses the take that the dog is good in and two; everybody looks at the dog because the dog is way more natural than you’re going to be!"
The Dutch police force carry guns. What was it like for the cast having to handle firearms?
"In the first series I don’t think we got to actually fire them but we do in this series. There’s a lot of safety measures involved. There was one time during filming that Maimie and I had to drive through Dam Square with the flashing lights going and somebody hadn’t told the local police that we were doing that. We got pulled over and I suddenly thought, ‘Christ if we’ve got guns on us too we’re going to be in a lot of trouble’. We had to let the ‘grown-ups’ the directors deal with it all and sort out the paperwork and the licences."
Van Der Valk is still living on his boat. What’s that like to film and could you ever live on a boat yourself?
"I love the guy who owns the boat, he sits around smoking cigars and reading books all day. He’s here in Amsterdam for six months of the year and then spends the rest in Portugal growing olives. There’s something about him that makes me think he knows something the rest of us don't! I’m not sure I could deal with the crampedness of living in a boat. When we’re filming in hot weather, it’s unbearable."
Van Der Valk was originally an ITV hit in the 1970s (it ran from 1972-1992 and starred the late Barry Foster in the title role). Do you have memories of watching it back then?
"Yeah, I remember watching it at my nan and grandad’s and I remember the music and theme tune really well. Getting offered the role for this came out of the blue. I got a call from my agent saying ‘I think they’re interested in you playing Van Der Valk’. The next call I had was ‘They want you to do it, can you meet them for a meal?’ Life seems to present the next thing and you either rise to it or you don’t, so I jumped in!"
You’re known for playing your fair share of villains over the years such as the Comte de Rochefort in BBC1 period drama, The Musketeers. Does this role feel like a bit of a departure?
"The longer I do it the moodier I seem to get! I wouldn’t say Piet is a barrel of laughs but there’s dry humour in this. I think I’ve tended to play quite larger than life characters who were a bit flash and Van Der Valk is a very different proposition and a lot more minimal. With the amount of screen time I have if I employed the same approach that I had for previous roles it would wear thin very rapidly."
Did you enjoy hanging out with the rest of the cast in Amsterdam when you had time off from filming ?
"I’m not a big sightseer, and I’m not a big socializer — but I certainly met up with the cast more times than I had before. In the first series, I didn’t meet up with anybody. This time I tried to take a leaf out of their books, because they’re a really lovely group, and they’re very sociable. Also I had a bike this time. They gave me a bike in the first series, but I never used it. It had been 30 years, maybe more since I’ve been on a bike. Once you get over the self-consciousness of first getting on it, and thinking everybody’s looking at you, and how quick they all go, it was incredibly liberating. And it’s such a beautiful city and biking by the canals and over the bridges during a lovely summer was joyous, it really was.”
Van Der Valk starts on Sunday 7 August at 8pm on ITV (there's currently no US release date).
