David Jonsson on playing a Black hero in the Christmas Agatha Christie: ‘I’m not a fan of colour-blind casting’

The star of ‘Rye Lane’ and ‘Industry’ was reluctant at first to take the lead role in the BBC adaptation of ‘Murder Is Easy’. He tells Ellie Harrison why he changed his mind, how the drama breaks the mould and why being excluded from school didn’t define him

‘If I can’t put a certain level of authenticity into something, I don’t want to do it’ (Photography: Freddie Miller. Grooming: Courtney Reece-Scott)

I know what British people are like, and you don’t mess with our Christmas TV,” says David Jonsson, the Industry and Rye Lane actor who is appearing on screens this festive season as the first ever Black hero in an Agatha Christie adaptation. It makes starring in BBC One’s Murder Is Easy “a little unnerving”, the 30-year-old admits. Since 2015’s And Then There Were None, the BBC has had a bit of a tradition of airing Christies at Christmas. And Jonsson feels the weight of that. He tells me he asked the team if they were certain they wanted to choose Christmas as the time to break the mould, a period with such huge TV viewership. It’s clear he’s apprehensive about the show airing. “I mean, yeah, to some degree,” he says. “Christie has such a bunch of loyal fans.”

The role sees Jonsson step into the polished loafers of Luke Fitzwilliam, a young man forging a career in Whitehall. On a train to London, he meets Miss Pinkerton (Penelope Wilton), an elderly woman on her way to Scotland Yard to report a string of suspicious deaths in her rural village. When she disembarks and is fatally struck by a car before talking to the police, Fitzwilliam decides to set off for sleepy Wychwood to investigate himself.

So far, so Agatha Christie. What makes this version different is that instead of being white British (and a retired detective), as in Christie’s original 1939 novel, Fitzwilliam is Nigerian (and the action has been brought forward from the Thirties to the Fifties). Not only did Christie not write any Black leads into her stories, but in recent years, her novels have been reworked to remove offensive language around race. So introducing a Black hero into Murder Is Easy – and making the prejudices that Fitzwilliam faces a central part of the drama’s narrative – felt radical to Jonsson. But he needed some convincing to take the part.

“I love Agatha Christie, but it wasn’t what I really wanted to do next,” he says, sipping a black coffee in a Soho hotel restaurant. “My agent said, ‘Think about it.’ And I did and I said, ‘No, I’m good.’” Why? “Look, I don’t consider myself a revolutionary at all, but anything that I do has to feel real, and if I can’t put a certain level of authenticity into it, I don’t want to do it. That’s the thing with the Agatha Christies – it’s like they’re kind of set in their ways, to some degree. And I’m not a fan of colour-blind casting. So if I’m going to do it, you have to see a Black man in all of his ways. I didn’t know how that would fit into an Agatha Christie. I just couldn’t visualise it.”

Eventually, after some more cajoling, Jonsson met the team, which includes screenwriter Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre and director Meenu Gaur. “They really spoke to me about it,” he says, “explaining that it wasn’t a colour-blind casting at all. It was a new way of finding the truth in 1954 about a Black man travelling from Nigeria to Britain.” In the Fifties, which is when the decolonisation of Nigeria began in earnest, many wealthy families would send their children to the UK for education and work, which is precisely the journey that Jonsson’s Fitzwilliam is on. And it’s not like Christie’s story hasn’t been tweaked before: the last adaptation of Murder Is Easy, which aired on ITV in 2009, aged down Fitzwilliam to cast Benedict Cumberbatch in the role.

The fact that the show is messing with the formula is both what scared Jonsson off the project initially, and what eventually tempted him to do it. “I honestly have no interest in doing stuff that’s been done before,” he says. “If it doesn’t feel fresh to me, then I can’t do it. It’s just not interesting to me. Agatha Christie has been done millions of times. The reason why I did this one is because I think it’s something unique… You know, my mum loves Agatha Christies but she never got represented. Well, she can’t have, because they’ve never had a Black hero.”

Penelope Wilton and David Jonsson in Christie adaptation ‘Murder Is Easy’ (BBC/Mammoth Screen/Anne Binckebanck)

Jonsson is not how I imagined him to be. On screen, he has an almost old-fashioned feel, and seems mature beyond his years. When I ask if he’s heard that before, he laughs. “I definitely get this. People say to me that it’s like a spiritual thing. But I don’t know what it is.” In person, he has a much younger energy, but just as much warmth. And the softness of his voice makes you lean right in, as if he’s letting you in on a secret. He is a bit secretive, actually – he confirms, for example, that he has a mentor in the industry, but he won’t tell me who it is. I get a slow shake of the head, instead. A playful smile.

The actor grew up in east London, the youngest of four children, to an IT engineer father and police officer mother. Even though he had an older brother and two older sisters, which might make you assume he had to be loud to vie for attention, he says he was “definitely the quietest, I’ve always been a bit of an introvert”. His family still live east, but he’s now relocated to Muswell Hill. “East is cool but it’s a bit too cool,” he says. “I’m not really in London very much [because of work], so when I am, I just want to go for long walks.” What do his family think of his career? “For my parents, I think this is genuinely beyond anything that they can understand or imagine,” he says. “They’re super proud. And they’re immigrants. So I think this whole life that I lead, they’re generally like, ‘Where are you, what country are you in now?’”

David Jonsson: ‘I don’t think I was an inherently bad kid. I think I was just distracted’ (Photography: Freddie Miller)

In previous interviews, Jonsson’s life has been depicted as being defined by a sliding-doors moment. He got into a lot of scraps at school, spent months in Pupil Referral Units, and was eventually permanently excluded. His parents decided to take him out of east London and send him to a school in Hammersmith, where he essentially reinvented himself, and started acting. “I’m always going to remember where I came from,” he says. “And east London is where people are still growing up today. I don’t think I was an inherently bad kid. I think I was just distracted, and I know at that time in my life, a range of stuff was happening at home. So, it was just a moment in time. I don’t consider myself to have this, like, ‘big story’. Not at all. I think it was just something that happened to me, and thank God, I managed to find a way to make it right.”

Recently, he’s been back to visit his secondary school a few times. He has been struck by the conversations he’s had with his old teachers. While for him, his teenage struggles were his entire world, for the teachers, he was just another troublesome student. “It’s almost like they can’t even remember,” he says. “I think teenagers around that age really have a special place in my heart, because it’s hard being young and being Black, growing up in London.”

Jonsson and Harry Lawtey in slick banking drama ‘Industry’ (BBC/Bad Wolf Productions)

At 16, Jonsson was offered a full scholarship to study art and drama at New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts, whose starry alumni include Spencer Tracy, Danny DeVito and Paul Rudd. He moved there alone, spent a couple of years studying and sneaking into bars and clubs, then came back to the UK and got into London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), where actors from Tom Hiddleston to Cynthia Erivo trained, on his first attempt. Some have spoken about a bullying culture at the school, including This Country’s Daisy May Cooper, but Jonsson had a good experience. “I saw people in my year not have such a great time,” he says. “That was hard. But I think I was ready for it. Probably because of going to school in east London and getting kicked out. Like, there’s nothing you can do to me now, at this stage.” He laughs. “I remember [when I was at school in east London], a teacher said to me, ‘I’ll exclude you, and I’ll smile and wave as I say bye bye.’ And I walked out and I just remember that so distinctly. So going to Rada, with all these people prancing around, you know, like, what are you gonna say to me?” He cackles.

You have this general apprehension against people who have privilege, and that’s nonsense. Everyone’s human and struggling

Jonsson ended up leaving Rada before the course finished when he landed a part in Robert Ike’s Mary Stuart at the Almeida, where Lia Williams and Juliet Stevenson would toss a coin each night to see who played the lead. Then West End roles came – he starred opposite David Tennant in Patrick Marber’s Don Juan in Soho – before he bagged his first TV job, in the 2019 Fox thriller Deep State. The following year, the slick, sexy banking drama Industry came along. Its producer Lena Dunham told the young cast it would change their lives. It did.

David Jonsson: ‘I don’t want to be like anyone else’ (Photography: Freddie Miller)

Jonsson was so convincing in the role of gay Etonian Gus that I had assumed he was, in real life, a very posh person. In fact, to prepare for the part, he visited Gus’s alma maters Eton and Oxford to get an insight into a background so different from his own. The experience, he says, “made me realise that I can’t judge anyone. That was my takeaway. My family, we’re a working-class family, so I think you have this general apprehension against people who have privilege, and that’s nonsense. Everyone’s human and struggling.”

Earlier this year, Jonsson starred in his first film: the cartoonish, sugary, romcom delight that was Rye Lane. Set in Peckham – where cinemagoers rushed to see it in the spring – the film starred Jonsson and Vivian Oparah as Dom and Yas, two people falling for each other as they wander through the streets of south London. Jonsson has been knocked sideways by the sheer adoration for a film he didn’t think anyone would see. “I was on the Tube recently and I had the weirdest experience,” he says. “Someone had a sticker of my face, of Dom and Yas, on the back of their phone.” He says the girl spotted him and started to pant. “Then she got up and she said, ‘I just love you in Rye Lane!’ and darted off.”

Opposite Vivian Oparah in sugary romcom ‘Rye Lane’ (Chris Harris)

He likes interacting with fans who have enjoyed his work, but he isn’t up for having a huge fandom of the kind that major franchise work would bring. “I have no problem going on record saying I have no interest in that at all,” he says. “I just want to do good roles and good work.” But he has been cast in Alien: Romulus, the latest movie in Ridley Scott’s epic saga, so mega-fame might be lurking.

When I suggest that Jonsson is quite cerebral about the roles he chooses, he argues that it’s more instinctive than that. “Part of why this Agatha Christie show was a good thing for me was because it scared me to some degree; I’d never done anything like this. I’d never been a leading-man detective.” He wants every part he plays to be totally different from the last, to show all the experiences that “being a young Black man” can be.

He smiles. “And my instinct is that there are a lot of people who have been before me. You have to be different. I don’t want to be like anyone else. I just want to be me.”

‘Murder is Easy’ is out now on BBC iPlayer, with episode one airing on BBC One on 27 December and the second episode the following night

Grooming by Courtney Reece-Scott