Sharon D Clarke Talks Being "Entrusted" with the Titular Character in 'Inspector Ellis'

Acorn TV’s new three-part crime drama Inspector Ellis is in the classic mold of engrossing, emotionally nuanced series such as Morse and Dalgleish, with the welcome and long-overdue update of being led by a Black woman. Veteran stage and screen actress Sharon D Clarke (Doctor Who) brings a compelling mix of tenacity and tenderness to her performance as DCI Ellis, qualities the brilliant detective must rely on to succeed in disentangling the knotty, messy violence and tragedies she’s parachuted in to solve in each episode. 

This is another notable aspect of Inspector Ellis – series creators Paul Logue and Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre chose not to establish their protagonist as an entrenched member of a single community, but to make her an itinerant detective sent to help overmatched police departments solve confounding murders. In terms of doggedness and compassion, Ellis is comparable to DS Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) in Happy Valley, but the specter of a dead child doesn’t haunt her. Instead, Ellis is working to end her estrangement from her daughter, Grace, and becoming a beloved mentor to her new partner, the eager-to-learn DS Harper, played by Andrew Gower (Miss Scarlet).

Ahead of the premiere of Inspector Ellis on November 4, Clarke sat down with Telly Visions to talk about her first, very welcome, experience of being offered a role tailor-made for her, what she believes is at the heart of Ellis’s relationship with her daughter, and the serendipitous magic of casting precisely the right actor to play Harper. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Minor spoilers ahead!

Telly Visions: Let’s start with your relationship with crime fiction – as a reader, viewer, and performer.

Sharon D Clarke: I have always loved a cop show. Over here in Britain, I grew up with stuff like The Sweeney, The Professionals, Morse, and then Cagney & Lacey – those were everything. For me, being offered Inspector Ellis is like my own Cagney & Lacey moment.

TV: Could you say a little bit more about Cagney & Lacey? I’m familiar with it, but many younger viewers may not be. 

SDC: Oh! So, Cagney & Lacey was a cop show led by Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly, playing two female cops just going about their business. Tyne Daly played Lacey, who’s a working mum, and Sharon Gless played Cagney, who was single – they were just these two women who had this phenomenal friendship and partnership, and they just kicked arse. As a young kid growing up, seeing two female cops was just a brilliant thing to see. That has always stayed with me, with all the cop shows I've seen. 

TV: It's quite a milestone! Was the role of Inspector Ellis written for you? How early were you attached to the project?

SDC: I was attached very, very early on; I got a call from my agent saying, “Channel Five is commissioning a new cop show, and they want it to be black female-led.” And I thought, “Okay, so you got an audition?” and my agent said, “They want to know if you want to do it.” I couldn't believe I was being offered this role. I was prepared to audition, right? It’s such an honor and a privilege that someone would, off the bat, say, “We are going to entrust this with you because we feel that you will be able to take it where we want it to be taken.” 

SDC: It was an immediate yes, as I grew up in a multicultural Britain and went to a comprehensive school where my lunchtime was kids eating Jollof rice and samosas and baklava. We swapped all our cultures, but that wasn’t reflected on my television screen. I didn’t grow up seeing myself on television, especially as a dark-skinned black woman in a title role. If I’d have seen this as a kid, it would have been just something else, but I’m seeing this now, having been in the business for nearly 50 years. 

It’s kind of crazy that I’m doing this just now. We were at a screening last night, and a colleague said it was really refreshing to see Channel Five doing something like that. Yes, it’s refreshing, but it shouldn’t be refreshing. 

TV: Right – it’s wonderful, and it’s late to get to that milestone. I’m glad, and it would have been so cool for this to have been happening 20 years ago or more. 

SDC: Yes, we are seeing change, and change is slow. I am so pleased to be here and am glad to be doing this role. Someone has trusted me to lead this show, right? I’ve been in such a wonderful position, and I feel Ellis is a great character. She’s tough, but she’s really tender. She has a deep, deep well of compassion. It’s not just about physical evidence with Ellis; it’s about what connects people. 

Her background is in social psychology, so she’s all about what makes people tick, what makes them feel, and what makes them do the things they do, and it’s those things that help her solve the cases far more than the physical evidence because then it holds pieces all of those things together. It pieces the physical evidence together, whereas the physical evidence doesn’t piece together the human behavior.

TV: That reminds me of the Episode 1 metaphor, which is being used in the show’s marketing: Ellis’ insight about James Brown/Prince’s explanation of funk. Funk isn’t the notes; it’s what’s between the notes. She’s coaching Harper not to look at each person/piece of evidence; it’s what’s between those things, what connects them, what drives them apart. I wanted to hear your thoughts on using that metaphor to get to the heart of Ellis’ relationship with Harper and offscreen daughter Grace. For you, what’s between the words and the moments of dialog that contributed to your understanding and performance of these facets of DCI Ellis that aren’t necessarily spoken out loud?

SDC: Well, Grace, for one, this is the first time you’ve seen Ellis lose her cool. She’s very calm, very collected. The minute she leaves Harper and types that last message, you can see that none of her messages have been answered. The minute those three dots start flashing on screen, just the way her heart begins to beat. You don’t know what’s going on, exactly, but you know this is something massive to her. It’s those kinds of secrets; those are Ellis’s spaces. She’s not prepared to go with Harper yet, and I would suppose, without trying to give too much away, a guilt there for her. 

That’s as much as you need to know at this moment in time. 

TV: Do you have a hypothesis as to what drove that wedge between Grace and her mother?

SDC: Oh, I know exactly what it is!

TV: It feels like such a significant hook for what I hope will come in the subsequent series of Inspector Ellis.

SDC: We didn’t want to include something like that and then just chuck it all out in the first three episodes because how do you grow on that? There is a mystery about that, an intrigue as to why she went on Gardening Leave. Her superior officer, Belmont, thinks that Ellis broke down. So, there are all these different facets, mysteries, and unanswered questions that can be developed. I hope we get Season 2 so that we can share that development. 

TV: The series ends in such a way that it tells a complete story, but there’s so much more, too. As we wrap up, I wanted to ask how you and Andrew Gower built your on-screen relationship as Ellis and Harper. Are there any little details or a reminiscence that you can share about that process? 

SDC: Andy and I built our relationship for Harper and Ellis at our first read. I had to do a set of chemistry reads, and Andy was the first guy that walked into the room. As he walked in, sat down, and said his name, there was just something, I suppose, that thing — you know when you walk into a house you want to buy. You’ve seen others and don’t know what it is, but you just know it’s this house – know what I mean? It was that feeling with Andy. 

He just had my heart from then, and then we started doing the read, and it just clicked. It was like we’d been working together for years; it just made sense. He left at the end, and I said, “Well, it’s this guy, right?” We would see more guys, but I thought, “Yeah, but it’s this guy.” The other actors I read with were wonderful, but that umbilical cord was between us, and as people, we just clicked on set. Andy makes me laugh. He has the driest wit, the corniest wit. He’s fabulous. He’s also a musician. So he sings; he’s a songwriter. He sings. His band is called Gustaffson. Check him out on Spotify!* 

(*Gustaffson’s songs are moody and melancholy, and Gower has a conversational yet straight-to-the-heart voice. Recommended for fans of Taylor Swift songs produced by Aaron Dessner, and of Dessner’s band, The National. – Ed.)

SDC: That was a glorious way of being in our downtime, just singing together, sharing and talking about music, laughing, and having a good time. I always feel that when you do a job, if you come away with a person as a gift from the gig, that’s a great job. And I’ve come away with a mate I love who will be in my life. It’s wonderful when you can be working and find that kind of connection. We are very lucky to have met so many different types of people in the industry in which we work. We’re not sat in an office with the same people for 30 years. Our intake of people is glorious – people from all walks of life and cultures, and if you can find someone who will walk the journey with you, that’s a wonderful thing.

Inspector Ellis premiered on Channel 5 on Thursday, October 31. It will debut in the U.S. exclusively on Acorn TV on Monday, November 4. The series will air and stream weekly on Mondays through November 18, 2024.