Interview with Eddie Marsan who plays Paul Britton

6 August 2021

Why did you want to take part in Deceit?

I was doing two other things that had been postponed because of Covid, and my agent sent me the script for Deceit, saying: “I’d prefer that you didn’t do it because we can’t fit it in”. But I read it and wanted to do it – it was a brilliant script. Emilia [di Girolamo, writer] takes the audience on an amazing journey where, for the first half of the series, you’re terrified for Lizzie and of Colin, then it switches around. And Paul Britton was a great character for me to play: very intelligent but exhausted, his workload was unbelievable. Ray Donovan had just finished, so coming back to Britain I was being offered different kinds of parts to the stereotypical East End gangsters I used to get. Now the parts are more erudite, complex and articulate.

Who is Paul Britton?

The criminal psychologist called in by the police to profile the possible killer of Rachel Nickell – a brilliant man, but like many, flawed. I never judge anyone I play, I always try to understand them. When I read his book, The Jigsaw Man, it struck me that his workload was enormous. He went from the Jamie Bulger murder to this and then on to Fred and Rose West. So when he went to work, he would deal with the worst parts of humanity, trying to understand them. If we’re going to ask people to take on these responsibilities, you can’t demonise them when they make mistakes. When I make mistakes, we do another take. He had the press outside his house.

How much more responsibility do you feel playing a real, living person whose reputation was arguably destroyed by the events we see?

I can’t take much responsibility in that regard. I have to serve the script, so that debate about his portrayal and function in the story has already happened. My job is like a musician playing the notes.

What did you remember of the case?

When it happened I’d just come out of drama school, an unusual-looking young actor from London, and a lot of people said that if they made a drama of this, I’d be playing Colin Stagg. When it was announced that I was involved, one newspaper said I was playing Colin, which was flattering as a 53-year-old! I remember the honey trap and it being thrown out of court. I also remember you had the murders of Rachel Nickell and Stephen Lawrence in a short space of time. Growing up in London, I thought how depressing that was, and how traumatic for the city. Two atrocious, high-profile murders, and the perpetrators of both went unpunished for a period of time.

What is Paul’s relationship like with Lizzie James and Keith Pedder?

In the script, Britton says all the way along that it’s not a trap but an exercise to allow Stagg to implicate himself or exonerate himself. I think he believed that, but whereas Britton was very analytical and academic about it, Pedder wanted a result and Lizzie was feeling under pressure because she believed she was putting herself in danger. He was also exhausted – he wasn’t as flexible and as nuanced and open to other suggestions as he could have been.

And he was entirely unprepared for the scrutiny?

Yes, he was the first in the country to do this sort of thing. We often ask people to do something incredibly difficult and complex, investing all this trust in them, but when they show human frailty, we condemn them. I find that really unfair. Without belittling what happened to Colin, Britton solved a lot of crimes and did a lot of good.

Does Britton start to believe his processes are a magic bullet?

I don’t know about Britton in real-life, but in the script he never did. Because it was a very new science, he had few other people to refer to or to question or challenge him. He had a certain set of criteria and for them Colin was fulfilling that criteria; the problem was that the criteria was flawed.

What were the most fulfilling moments of the shoot?

I was amazed at the ingenuity of the crew. I love film sets anyway – my wife was a make-up artist, so I’m married to the crew. One of the joys of filmmaking is the collective response to a problem, and we all mucked in.

What is the benefit of making Deceit now, rather than ten or 20 years ago?

This felt like the first time I’d read something set in the 20th century that felt like it was the 20th century, that there was a big difference to now. The criteria Britton used to profile the killer almost feel Victorian now, in the age of social media and MeToo. The values system they worked under feels antiquated. People are more open now about all elements of humanity, sexuality, sexual preference, equality, gender…

Are we moving in the right direction?

I think so. Our institutions were created with a patriarchal, white supremacist mindset that all of us will have subconsciously adopted, but it no longer holds water in the modern world. We have to be able to bring up those subconscious prejudices and discuss them so we can forgive them.

What lessons can be learnt from this case?

To learn the lessons rather than blame anyone. Blame is very binary. When I did Happy-Go-Lucky with Mike Leigh, people asked me whether I liked my character, there I couldn’t stand him, but I completely understood him. Here I totally understand Paul Britton and his motivations.