Before They Were Famous: Actors on 'Agatha Christie's Poirot'

In the winter of 1989, Mystery! was entering its ninth wildly successful season as Masterpiece Theater's British murder-and-crime-focused spinoff. The series had boasted a string of Thursday night hits, starting with the 1970s Father Brown series starring Kenneth More, the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, the 1980s Roy Marsden Dalgliesh adaptations, Edward Petherbridge's Lord Peter Wimsey, and John Thaw as Morse. But nothing beat Agatha Christie. There was The Agatha Christie Hour, the Joan Hickson Miss Marples, and Tommy and Tuppence in Partners in Crime. For Season 9 of Mystery!, PBS debuted a brand new series, Poirot (later rebranded Agatha Christie's Poirot), starring David Suchet as the definitive version of Christie's detective.

Created by Clive Exton and Brian Eastman, the early seasons of the show had a whimsical nature to them, developing the light touch we know today as "cozy crime" with a jazzy saxophone riff opening and an ensemble crew that supported Poirot in his adventures. Hugh Fraser played Captain Hastings, Philip Jackson Inspector Japp, and Pauline Moran as Miss Lemon, a surprising addition, considering the 1980s were not a time when TV creators worried about representation. Every week, these four ran into a new group of guest stars and had adventures, at first drawn from Christie's short stories and later from her well-known novels.

Like most shows that rely heavily on casting guests every week, these actors who passed through mostly went on to be "that guys" or "that gals," the BBC ensemble actors who seem to be in every mystery series. But here and there, a few breakouts emerged. Here are the top ten actors from Agatha Christie's Poirot who starred in Christie mysteries before they were famous. 

Agatha Christie's Poirot had a few high-profile guest stars in its first season, but none of the unknowns from that inaugural season wound up being break-out stars. However, in the first episode of Season 2, "Peril at End House," the series cast an actor who had only appeared in guest stints in two series prior to that the year before. That actor was Polly Walker, now famous for series from Peaky Blinders to Line of Duty to Bridgerton. Her big breaks would come in Patriot Games in 1992 and Emma in 1996, but in 1990, she led off Poirot's premiere in the leading role.

Walker starred as Magdala Buckley, who goes by Nicky in "Peril at End House," a young lady who catches Hastings' attention while he and Poirot are on holiday. Poirot is less impressed until she tells him she's escaped death three times in the last two days. Convinced someone is out to kill her, Poirot accompanies Nicky back to End House, where the bodies start to pile up, and the clues only make the answer more confusing. Of course, if you know Walker, you can probably guess whodunit before the hour is over...

Samantha Bond is now best remembered by PBS fans for Downton Abbey, and will soon be leading The Marlow Murder Club. However, she originally achieved international fame when took over the role of Moneypenny during the Pierce Brosnan James Bond years starting in 1995. But before she was famous, she'd already had a full decade's career on the BBC and ITV forerunner networks in various mystery series, including Miss Marple, Rumpole, and Morse. One of those early roles was in Poirot's second season, which aired in 1990.

Bond appeared in Episode 8, titled "The Adventure of the Cheap Flat," which aired in February. Bond plays the leading role of Stella Robinson, whom Hasting meets at a party. She regales him with the tale of the incredible flat she and her husband James have managed to land in Montagu Mansions in Knightsbridge, a fabulous little place, too good to be true. Of course, it is too good to be true, and Poirot quickly figures out why.

There are moments of serendipity, and then there are moments where life does a full circle on complete accident. The latter happened with Poirot's third season episode, "Wasps' Nest," based on the short story of the same name. At the time, it guest starred up-and-coming actor Peter Capaldi, who would go on to international fame for playing the titular role in Doctor Who, only a few seasons after the series had done an Agatha Christie episode inspired by the "Wasps' Nest" short story.

To be fair, Capaldi was not quite a complete unknown when he appeared on Poirot in 1992; he'd had a career for a good decade already, including a supporting role in 1988's Dangerous Liaisons as Azolan, Valmont's valet. But he was still a decade away from his In The Thick of It fame, let alone his Doctor Who years when he played Claude Langton in Season 3, Episode 5. Langton is not the leading role; that is John Harrison, played by Martin Turner, whom Poirot visits, telling Harrison he's here to prevent a murder before it happens. At first, it seems he's suggesting he's there to stop Langton from committing a crime, but things are never as they seem, are they?

Capaldi wasn't the only Doctor to find himself studied by Poirot. The clever gray cells matched wits with multiple future and former Doctors, including Paul McGann, who guest-starred in Season 9 many seasons after he'd played the Eighth Doctor in the 1996 film. But in between Capaldi and McGann, Poirot found himself confronting a suspect from the North, a young Christopher Eccleston, who at the time had only guest-starred in a handful of single episodes in 1990 and 1991.

In Season 4, Episode 3, "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe," Eccleston played Frank Carter, the shady boyfriend of Gladys Neville, the secretary of the deceased, Poirot's dentist. Eccleston's character is clearly set up to take the fall for the murder from the jump; his working-class roots and accent make him an obvious suspect, though his motive is thin. As one would expect, Carter is arrested, but Poirot realizes quickly he is innocent, it's just a matter of getting his pride to admit what actually happened that afternoon.

Long before he was the Hottest Henry VIII to ever Henry VIII in Wolf Hall, or even took the role of the only British actor in a sea of Americans in Steven Spielberg's original Band of Brothers, Damian Lewis' second professional role ever was in Agatha Christie's Poirot's adaptation of the famous novel Hickory Dickory Dock. Originally titled Hickory Dickory Death when it was published in 1955, the murder is set in a youth hostel, after Poirot is called in to solve a light case of Kleptomania the day before.

The episode aired in 1995 as the second episode of Season 6, the first to run as feature-length installments instead of one-hour episodes, as the series had run out of Christie short stories and was adapting novels instead. Lewis played Leonard Bateson, the medical student whose items go missing during the early round of thievery and whose medicines are used in the early going of the murders that take place. As such, he is one of the early suspects, but Poirot realizes quickly this is just a red herring; Bateson is far too earnest about saving lives to be someone inclined toward the cold-blooded killings taking place in and around the building. 

As noted, after the first five seasons, Poirot had exhausted Christie's short stories, and after doing a four-episode season of full-length novels as feature-length episodes, ITV retired the series. However, fans remained loyal, demanding its return, and four years later, Poirot returned in 2000, with Season 7 and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Christie's debut novel. Now rejiggered to be "Poirot's Return from Retirement," it was one of only two feature-length cases that comprised that return season. 

As both episodes were treated as event specials, the casts were filled with major A-listers of British yesterday year, most of whom we wouldn't know today. However, there was one brand newcomer in the Season 7 premiere, a young actor who had only been in the Horatio Hornblower TV movies: Jamie Bamber. Bamber played Ralph Paton, Ackroyd's stepson from his late wife's previous marriage, and the primary suspect for most of the episode's run. Of course, as the most obvious suspect, he is not the actual murderer, but the person the real killer is hoping to fool Poirot into believing did the deed...

Much like Season 7, Season 8 was also a two-installment season made up of two of Christie's more famous novels, airing in 2001. And much like Season 7 kicked off with one of Christie's most famous mysterious novels, so too did Season 8, with the feature-length episode adaptation of Evil Under the Sun, a novel previously made into a hit film with Peter Ustinov as Poirot. Once again, the cast was made up of old-time British actors from BVC television of yesteryear who are mainly forgotten now, save one young man, Russell Tovey, who was making the jump from child actor in Look & Read to adult acting.

Tovey was cast in the Season 8 premiere as Lionel Marshall, a gender-flipped version of the novel's Linda Marshell, who is Kenneth's 16-year-old daughter and Arlena's naive stepdaughter. In the novel, Linda is suffering from depression and mental issues stemming from her father's remarriage to Arlena, who treats her abominably, and is convinced by those around her she is the one who killed her stepmother, despite not remembering having done so. Choosing to recast the role with a young man (though Tovey was not openly out yet) was a brave choice in 2001, and made the episode all the more remarkable for its time.

Poirot was off the air for another year after Season 8, not because it was on hiatus, but due to a massive shift behind the scenes. Exton and Eastman exited the show after Season 8, and a different group came in, which reframed the Poirot mysteries as darker and grittier, more serious prestige dramas. There was major cast turnover as well, with only Suchet staying out of the original main leads; Fraser, Jackson, and Moran left and did not return until the show's finale episodes in Season 13.

These final seasons were also massively star-studded affairs; the cast lists are who's who of the present-day BBC creme de la creme. Season 9, for example, did Death on the Nile as Episode 3, with a cast that included James Fox (father of Jack & Laurence), JJ Feild, David Soul, Judy Parfitt, Barbara Flynn, Frances de la Tour, Steve Pemberton, and Félicité Du Jeu. And yet, it also found room for a young actor in her fourth role ever, Emily Blunt, who played the doomed Linnet Ridgeway.

Blunt wasn't the only future Academy Award favorite to find a starting role in Poirot's final seasons. Season 10, which ran from 2005 to 2006, also gave a start to a major award winner of the next decade, Michael Fassbander. Funnily enough the episode he was in wasn't that famous a novel of Christie's; After the Funeral is known, but it's no Death on the Nile. However, like Season 9, the cast is stacked: Robert Bathurst, Geraldine James, Monica Dolan, Anna Calder-Marshall, William Russell, Kevin Doyle, and Annabel Scholey.

When Fassbender landed the role of George Abernethie in 2006, he had a slightly longer CV than most, having landed a minor role in Band of Brothers and a litany of one-and-done guest roles on British TV since 2001. The funeral of the title is for Richard Abernethie; George is Richard's nephew and son of his sister Laura; a solicitor for a stock broker's office, and one of the heirs to Richard's fortune. All the heirs have their reasons for wanting Richard dead, so Fassbender's character is a suspect, but he's far from the only one...

Poirot's final season was wall-to-wall established actors, but the penultimate season produced perhaps the most prominent actor of them all (at least in terms of award hardware): Oscar winner Jessica Chastain. Season 12's episodes aren't all the best-known Christie stories, but Episode 3 was the humdinger of the group, one of the two Greatest Christie Stories of All Time, Murder on the Orient Express. Once again, we're talking about a battery of A-List names, playing the roles of those stuck on the train with Hercule Poirot: Toby Jones, David Morrissey, Eileen Atkins, Hugh Bonneville, Barbara Hershey, and Samuel West, to name a few.

However, the role of Mary Debenham, the American on the train of the group, was Chastain's. Season 12 aired in 2009-2010, so this was the year before The Help debuted and put the actor on the radar of the Academy and the public. (Previously, her only claim to fame was a three-episode Law & Order arc.) Chastain practically stole the feature-length episode out from under the far more seasoned performers around her, even though, as those who know, she's not the murderer ....or at least not the only one ....or at least not charged.

The final season of Agatha Christie's Poirot didn't arrive until the summer of 2014, bringing back the original cast while keeping the darker and grittier tone of the later episodes. Those final four installments felt like a blend of the show's two halves, with a now much older Japp, Lemon, and Hastings with the newer regulars of Zoë Wanamaker as Ariadne Oliver and David Yelland as George. They were also very A-list heavy, as the later seasons had been, but for the first time, they included something the first 12 seasons had failed to do: Black actors.

One of those who got cast, Elliot Barnes-Worrell, who fans will know from Van der Valk, Domina, and the upcoming The Killing Kind, had only just started his career the year previous and landed the role of Etienne De Souza in the third episode of the final series, "Dead Man's Folly." One of the late Poirot novels from 1956, he's invited to a murder mystery weekend at an estate where the "Girl Guide" (Girl Scout) who plays the victim winds up actually dead. Barnes-Worrell's character is a cousin who turns up unexpectedly to the weekend gathering and is a primary suspect for a good section of the episode, but in the end is a red herring.