Move over, Slough House, there’s a new investigative unit in town. This fast-paced thriller, based on another book series from Slow Horses writer Mick Herron, follows art restorer Sarah Tucker (Ruth Wilson), who enlists the help of private investigator Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson) after a girl disappears following a home explosion in her neighborhood. The two oddballs quickly get caught up in a twisty conspiracy.

Below, Down Cemetery Road‘s Ruth Wilson introduces the characters of Sarah and Zoë, ponders the series’ future (and her in it), and explains why it’s different from Slow Horses.

What appealed to you about this show and this role in particular?

Ruth Wilson: To be frank, it was working with Emma Thompson. I love Slow Horses, so it was the opportunity to also be in that Mick Herron world. I hadn’t done something modern for a while, and I think there was a lot of space to create Sarah Tucker. In the first episode, she felt like she wasn’t as sort of eccentric as the other characters, but I felt there was a lot of space for her to grow throughout the series and the season. She’s the kind of odd one out in this weird world, but actually, you realize she’s kind of more akin with it as they are as it goes on. I liked the idea of who she might become and exploring and creating the character from scratch really and working with Morwenna [Banks, executive producer/writer] to do so.

Introduce Sarah and Zoë and what makes them an unlikely but pretty good investigative duo.

Sarah is a middle-class wife and an art restorer. She is creative but isn’t particularly ambitious, so her life is fairly straightforward. She hasn’t got children. That would probably be the next thing on the list of things to do in her life. [She and] her husband have been together for years, but you can sense there’s something not right in their relationship. So, she’s a little bit of a restless soul inside this dynamic that she set up for herself. She has a complicated past, a sort of trauma in her past that she hasn’t really dealt with. She becomes obsessed by something that happens in a house explosion and this girl that’s gone missing, and she starts believing it’s a conspiracy theory, and no one really believes her.

So, she hires a private investigator — that ends up being Zoë Boehm — and her conspiracies prove to be right. She’s someone that has great instincts and follows her nose, and she gets drawn into this world of conspiracy and MI5 and dodgy, dodgy people, but she’s the sort of innocent in a way who gets dragged into this. Zoë and Sarah kind of have parallel journeys, and they come together, both in chase of this child and revealing this conspiracy. They become bonded by that. They are very different. Zoë is cynical, she’s been through life. She’s kind of eccentric, a private investigator. She doesn’t have many close, intimate friends or relations. She’s sort of a loner, an outsider. Sarah is a sort of slightly naive, open-eyed, like a colt, a deer, like a Bambi who sort of follows her along, but they together are a great team and get things and make things happen.

What are their opinions of one another, and how does that change as they get to know each other?

When they first come across each other in Episode 1, I think Sarah finds Zoë very rude. She’s curt, she’s sort of dismissive. She makes judgments about people and Sarah herself. So, Sarah finds her pretty rude and obnoxious and cruel in some ways. And I think Zoë probably doesn’t think much of Sarah, she’s sort of a creative hippie that has ideological beliefs but is a little bit naive to the world. But as it grows, you see that Sarah’s instincts are very right. She’s determined, she’s kind of like a dog with a bone, and she has a great empathy and heart for this kid and desire to find this child. There’s something that drives her, which is quite interesting in the show. And same with Zoë. Zoë’s funny, she’s dry, but she actually cares deeply for those who are close to her or she gets close to once she lets down her armor. They sort of manage to rub the edges of each other as the show goes on.

Sarah is very determined to get to the bottom of what happened, but she’s not a private investigator. So what exactly is it about this case that’s really gotten a hold of her?

It’s quite interesting. We discussed this because it is unusual. It’s unusual in the book as well. What is the drive? What’s the drive of Sarah? And I think we found a place that’s about her past, and she sees in this child a kind of courage that she had when she was younger that she’s now let go of or has bottled up or is not exploring. Somehow, the courage of that kid and the imagination of that child sparks something in Sarah, which is about her old self that she has long lost. So what I wanted to explore in the journey of her is her rediscovery of her younger self, and you see that as the show goes on. It’s her kind of exploring who her younger self is and was and bringing that back into the Sarah we see now. So I think that it was more a sort of existential desire to return to the parts of herself she’s locked away.

As you said, she’s the odd one out here. Besides her instincts, her empathy, and her drive, she turns out to be pretty good at looking for and finding clues. What does she bring to the table that someone else might not because of her eye on things?

Yeah, that’s what they set up. Again, it’s different from the original book because she didn’t really have a job in the book. She was much more purposeless and trapped in a marriage that was a pretty unlovable marriage or not a great marriage, so, she was more of a trapped housewife. But in this, the creative team wanted to give her a job that made sense for her, and so, she’s an art restorer, she has attention to detail, and she can see things. That’s what her brain is focused to do. She has an enormous amount of focus and attention, and that’s why she discovers things. She sees clues, pulls out clues. It was important to see what her skills alongside Zoë’s were as it went on.

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And I think she’s naive in the sense that she never really understands the danger. I think she’s so desperate to get out of her life. I always thought it’s quite interesting. There’s many times she could have got [out of this situation], and she chooses not to. She chooses to remain on the journey. And I think that’s partly the life she has is not one that she wants to return to, so, she’s kind of on this journey and on this escape from her life really. She’s slightly naively unaware of how dangerous the situation is, which makes her kind of quite useful because she’s pretty brave and determined, despite the level of danger she’s in.

Speaking of that, how dangerous does it get for her, and how does she handle that kind of danger?

Like I said, I think partly, she’s not aware of it. She’s sort of going along. It’s quite fun sometimes. … But as it goes on, she gets in really dangerous situations and it becomes more and more, she’s gone so far, I suppose. It becomes even more serious to find this child that she’s on the mission to do, so I think that determination grows, and so that’s why she sticks with the sort of mission.

It gets life and death [dangerous], and she has to face her own fears of things that she has struggled with over her life. She has to face things about herself throughout the course of the journey. … This is not her world. This feels like a TV show to her, and it is a TV show to her and she sort of half enjoys it. But the main thing is that she’s kind of driven by trying to get this child that reminds herself, and there’s nothing to go back to, so this is the only option she has at this stage. What else is she going to do? I think she knows by going on this odyssey which she’s traveling on, she will break free of the life that she’s sort of imprisoned herself in.

Is she going be catching the investigative bug? Do you think she’ll want to continue to solve cases after this?

I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Morwenna what the plan is for the next [season], if this ever goes again. I think definitely her life will change dramatically after this. I have a feeling that Zoë will pull on her at some point and bring her back into the fold. I don’t know if she’d actually decide that’s her job. I don’t think she’s that good at it. She’s OK. But I don’t think she would consider this a vocation, and I think she’d have to care a lot about the person. She cares a lot about Dinah [the child]. That’s the main reason and the drive. I think if she didn’t care so much about the subject she was trying to find, she wouldn’t be that involved or she wouldn’t care about it. She wouldn’t do it. So, I think that she might get drawn back in by Zoë at some point, but I’m not sure what her life is yet. We’ll have to see.

You said that part of the appeal of the show was working with Emma, so talk about working with her.

Oh, she’s amazing. As soon as we got together, it was like, OK, this is where the show is. It’s this dynamic, these two women, they’re hilarious. She’s such a good energy on set. She’s so brilliant. She’s kind of playful and easy, and everything is just fun. I’ve loved her work for so long, so, managing to work alongside her and be with her and find some really quirky dynamic between the two characters was really fun. What we’d built it is interesting because we’d built our own journeys prior to that. The two characters worked so well. I loved it.

So you touched on this a bit, but this is based on a book series and Sarah does come back in the book series. So do you know if there have been talks about how many seasons this could run? Would you return? Would you want to return?

Yeah, I mean, if the show goes again, they will have to wait until it goes out, sees how it does and everything. But I think people are very excited about it generally in the Apple creative team and 60Forty [Films]. So I think there is a belief that it will go again. And if that is the case, they’ve got three more books; it’s four books altogether, the series. And I think they’re going to try and put it into three seasons altogether. So, it would be about condensing those three books into two more seasons. And they may, depending on what they want to do, I mean, Sarah doesn’t actually feature in Book 2 and 3, she comes into Book 4, but I think they might bring Sarah in, create another storyline for her. But we’ll see. I’ve got no idea. That’s what they’re sort of working out now. I have no idea what the storyline might be or if that’s even going to happen. We’ll probably know by the end of the year whether we’re going to go again.

I think people are going to love this show.

Oh, I hope so. It was really fun to do. It was mad, and it’s a madcap odyssey. It gets mad as it goes on and gets more wild and dangerous, and the landscape changes, and in the way it’s shot is all wild and brutal in the last three, and it feels like a sort of action movie thriller by the end, so I love the journey of it. That’s why it’s different to Slow Horses in a way. It’s a road movie and it’s an odyssey for these two characters, and through it, they’re finding things out about themselves as they go, so it’s very different. It is in the same world and the same humor and wit as Slow Horses, but actually structurally, it’s quite different.

Down Cemetery Road, Series Premiere (two episodes), Wednesday, October 29, Apple TV+