Eve Myles has a wide, sunny smile on her face, and she’s talking to me about serial killers. The 46-year-old Welsh actor, who rose to fame on the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, has made a lunge for the macabre with her latest project, the Paramount+ series The Crow Girl. In it, she plays a Bristol police detective on the trail of a ritualistic murderer. “To prepare, I watched every 24 Hours in Police Custody that’s ever been made. And every forensic and serial killer show on the planet. But to be honest with you, that’s nothing to do with the job,” she laughs. “That’s kind of the stuff I watch… I’m a little bit odd like that.”
Adapted from a bestselling book series by Erik Axl Sund (the pen name of Swedish writing duo Jerker Eriksson and Hakan Axlander Sundquist), The Crow Girl follows sarcastic DCI Jeanette Kilburn (Myles), as she investigates the grisly killings of several young men. The six-part series transposes the action from Sweden to Britain, an ambitious reworking by writer Milly Thomas that “changed a lot, with the blessings of” Eriksson and Sundquist. “It’s a strong psychological piece,” Myles says, speaking to me over Zoom. “It’s about her relentless need to put the bad guy behind bars. I’ve always wanted to play a DCI – and I tried to play her with huge flaws, and huge cracks. She’s in completely over her head.”
Strong, driven women are very much Myles’s wheelhouse. Torchwood viewers watched her character, alien-wrangler Gwen Cooper, go from wide-eyed newbie to hardened pro over the course of four series, while dual-language drama Keeping Faith (recorded and released in both English and Welsh) cast Myles as a solicitor whose husband disappears without explanation. In series two of Broadchurch, she was a murder witness with something to hide. But The Crow Girl still feels like we’re seeing something new from Myles – a hard, rebarbative complexity that seems utterly incompatible with the chilled-out, jocular figure speaking to me now.
“I think my process has changed,” Myles tells me. “I’m not frightened to play on the floor, to get things wrong. I’m always trying new things. When you’re younger, you kind of shy away from things like that – you’re not confident enough.” It’s not just a matter of on-screen confidence, either. Behind the scenes, Myles has felt her approach shifting. “When you’re leading something, you’ve got a whole new responsibility that you’ve got to take on board,” she says. “You’ve got to be leading your cast. You’ve got to be there for your crew. So you’ve got several hats to be wearing at the same time. The older I get, the more I crave that responsibility.”
Floating around the periphery of The Crow Girl’s mystery are a woman with dissociative identity disorder; a hard-nosed psychiatrist, played by Katherine Kelly; and a sinister paedophile ring. In other words, the series isn’t afraid of traversing some truly dark territory – inevitably calling to mind Scandi crime predecessors such as The Killing or The Bridge, with a soupcon of Stieg Larsson. “When the subject matter’s like that, you certainly don’t go home with it,” Myles says. “You leave it on the floor.”
The preparation wasn’t all Police Custody marathons and binges of Mindhunter. Myles had long conversations with a friend of hers who worked as a police detective. Was there anything that surprised her? “Absolutely,” she responds, pausing just a moment before adding: “And nothing that I can possibly reveal. Things that you think would never possibly happen are just a normal occurrence in their department. It’s shocking.”
The bleakness of the material doesn’t seem to have dampened Myles’s carefree outlook – an attitude she credits her father for. (She is the daughter of a Scottish father and a Welsh mother, who split up when she was three.) Her father struggled with alcohol addiction and was often absent throughout her childhood in Ystradgynlais, south Wales, re-entering her life, sober, when she was an adult. “‘Enjoy today, and tomorrow will take care of itself’: that was my father’s motto, and it’s something that he drummed into me,” she says.
“Our industry is a very unnerving, unsettling place to be sometimes. We all have strange and deep anxieties about it – and find ourselves needing advice now and again to see us through something. My father would always be there on hand with that piece of advice.”
After graduating from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Myles cut her teeth on the long-running BBC Wales drama Belonging, between 2000 and 2008. Her big break – a guest role in the Doctor Who revival, which led to her own starring turn in its spin-off opposite John Barrowman – brought greater recognition, but also its own anxieties.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled
Try for free
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled
Try for free
“I was naive to it at the start,” she says, “when I was fortunate enough to be asked to be in [the Doctor Who episode] ‘The Unquiet Dead’. I didn’t really know what was going to happen with that. When it came out, I wasn’t on social media at the time, but I was hearing from friends, going, ‘This is big. This is really big.’ I was introduced to a world of people that I’d never, ever experienced before in my life. It changed my life.”
Myles seems to relish talking about her appreciation for Torchwood and Doctor Who’s ardent fandom. “Have you ever been to a fan convention?” she asks. I shake my head. “I held back at first because I was really frightened. I was terrified of what the responses were, how people would react to me. I was 26, 27 at the time, and it was a completely new ball game for me.”
She says Barrowman was a very supportive co-star. “John held my hand, and looked after me, and we never looked back. There were babies in arms, there were people in their nineties. It was pure joy. The fans are the people that have got me to where I am today – and I’m profoundly grateful to them.”
Myles is still enjoying today, it seems. Tomorrow, as she says, will take care of itself.
‘The Crow Girl’ is streaming on Paramount+ now
