Emma Appleton: “The Killing Kind is a pure paranoid thriller”

She no longer knows which way to turn. The Witcher actress plays a defense lawyer disconcerted by her troubling client in this new British crime series to watch on OCS. Encounter.

British thriller broadcast by Paramount + last summer in Anglo-Saxon countries, The Killing Kind is coming to us today on OCS. A pure legal thriller, which follows in the footsteps of Ingrid Lewis, a brilliant lawyer capable of acquitting the worst bastard. And in fact, one of them, named John Webster, returns to his life in the wake of an unexpected tragedy. Is this absolute narcissistic pervert with whom she had a relationship really guilty? Will she let herself be seduced again? Or are appearances deceptive? Breathtaking adaptation of the eponymous novel by Jane Casey, The Killing Kind is worn by the actress Emma Appletonrecently crossed in The Witcher. She deciphers it for us.

Were you already reading Jane Casey’s books before starring in The Killing Kind ?

I didn’t know about it before auditioning, but I started reading his novel (from which the series is based) the moment I got the role. Except that there, I understood that the character of Ingrid Lewis was very different in our version. We are really in an adaptation, even if the series remains faithful to the universe of Jane Casey. So in order not to get lost along the way, I chose to put the book down. I filmed the series. And then I read the novel.

The Killing Kind has all the ingredients of the impossible-to-solve psychological puzzle…

We’re in a pure paranoid thriller and that’s what’s fun. All these mysteries that punctuate the story… We get lost in Ingrid’s head. We spend the entire series in his mind asking this question: can we really trust him? Same for the other characters. One moment we say to ourselves that we can believe them and the next moment we have doubts. The audience remains constantly on guard until the resolution of the last episode… which is frankly impossible to guess in my opinion.

Was it the denunciation of toxic masculinity, in the background, that initially attracted you?

What particularly interested me was the way in which the series approaches the legal system. How victims of harassment or sexual harassment are very rarely heard before a court. And when this is the case, their entire life is thus dissected publicly. I wanted to shed light on this, because it shows why people don’t go to the police, sometimes, in this type of case and why that needs to change. And then the series shows, for once, a female defense attorney, navigating this ecosystem. It shows that when you do a good job on the defense side, it has repercussions for the victims and Ingrid ends up integrating that.

How did you develop the relationship between Ingrid and the scheming John Webster (played by Colin Morgan)?

What’s tricky is that their relationship changes from one scene to the next. Sometimes she is afraid of him. And in the next scene, she is very attracted to him, almost falling in love. I really went through an emotional elevator on this shoot! Fortunately, we were in constant communication with Colin. We discussed each scene together before filming, to try to better understand the feelings of their duo and find meaning in their relationship, in a natural way.