Andrew Lincoln has revealed he initially rejected his role in ITV’s new thriller Coldwater due to his fears around portraying an unpleasant and complex character.
The Walking Dead actor, 51, has said that playing John, a man in crisis who is forced to confront his demons when he escapes London for an idyllic small town in Scotland, was a frightening and scary prospect.
“I was quite scared about playing a character that was so unpleasant and weak and emasculated,” he told ITV in a press interview. “I wasn’t quite sure tonally where it sat, so I said no twice!”
He said the scripts constantly surprised him and made him “laugh in all the wrong places and squirm with recognition”.
“It made me scared as well,” he admitted.
Lincoln decided he couldn’t walk away from the role after speaking with the show’s creator, the award-winning Cyprus Avenue playwright David Ireland.
“David and I had a lovely hour-long Zoom and I just thought, ‘I really think he is a singular voice.’ I’d seen one of his plays and when I came back from America, I asked a close friend who I should be paying attention to here and David was at the top of their list.”
Lincoln added that although taking on the role was daunting, he had to accept it.
“I thought, ‘This is going to be frightening. It’s going to be difficult to thread the needle.’ I think I’ll probably learn something by doing this part and grow a bit.”
Coldwater follows Lincoln’s John, a repressed man secretly raging at his life as a stay-at-home dad.
When John’s failure to intervene in a violent confrontation in a playground brings his identity crisis to a head, he moves his family to Coldwater, where he is quickly befriended by his next-door neighbour Tommy, a self-appointed leader of the village’s all-male book group. John’s wife, Fiona (Indira Varma), despises Tommy and is convinced that he isn’t all he seems to be.
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When John’s long-repressed anger is unleashed, under the influence of someone incredibly dangerous, there are unsettling consequences.
Speaking to PA Media, Lincoln described John as someone “who doesn’t quite know who he is at the moment” and is constantly “trying to find a sense of himself”.
“In this event, we all wish to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances, and this guy just doesn’t and there’s an enormous amount of shame and guilt,” added the Love Actually actor.
The new ITV thriller marks Lincoln’s return to British TV screens for the first time since 2010, when he starred in the Sky series Strike Back opposite Richard Armitage. That same year, Lincoln took on the lead role of Rick Grimes in the longstanding AMC franchise The Walking Dead, which has kept him occupied since.
Lincoln described the role as a welcome contrast to his years playing Grimes, a former sheriff determined to protect his group in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by the undead.
“This was a great opportunity to not only work with David, but also to play something diametrically opposed to the archetype of a hero,” he said.
“To look at another version of masculinity. It made me uncomfortable because there are so many brilliant lines in it that feel familiar, the tribal nature of human beings and the vanity of small differences. I love all of that.”
Coldwater airs on 14 September on ITV1 and ITVX.
