Sanjeev Bhaskar Interview: Unforgotten Season 5
In the British cold case mystery series Unforgotten, a devastating Season 4 finale sees a dramatic reset with Season 5’s arrival of a new DCI. In September 2023, MASTERPIECE spoke with star Sanjeev Bhaskar about the new season and the theme of grieving, his behind-the-scenes welcome of new costar Sinéad Keenan, his serendipitous adventure en route to Paris, and more. Plus, he reveals a Paddington 3 surprise!
[Note: Contains Significant Season 4 Finale Spoilers]
Can you describe Sunny’s state of mind at the start of Season 5, and what’s ahead?
Season 5 takes place a few months after the calamitous events of Season 4, and Sunny’s still trying to deal with that grief. What this season is investigating, outside of the crime itself, is how people deal with grief. Everybody’s going through some form of grief. For Sunny, it’s directly about Cassie. But also, how does that impact the people around him? How does that impact him at work? And Jess, the new person who’s come in to lead the team, is also dealing with grief of a different kind. And of course, the people who were affected by the crime, no matter how many years later, are still dealing with it. And so I think that’s what Chris Lang, the writer, was looking to explore this season—he’s always had a theme in his head that he’s trying to explore for every season. And I think this time it was how does grief impact us, ourselves, but also when we have a serious job to do.
How does Sunny’s grief manifest?
I think the interesting thing about exploring grief is that by its nature, it’s overwhelming, and when you’re overwhelmed, you lose perspective. Sunny has always been very good at being able to compartmentalize his personal life from his work. But the loss of Cassie has impacted in both, and I don’t think he’s ever experienced that before. It’s new territory for him to try to deal with.
A couple of temporary DCIs that have come in to run the team, and Sunny is very protective of his team, but now we’ve got Jess James, who is going to be a permanent leader, taking up the same position and the same responsibilities and—perhaps crucially—the same office, as Cassie. And I don’t think he knows how to deal with that. So a lot of it is exploring how he navigates these new waters, but also how it affects his relationship with [his fiancée] Sal.
I think that is generally the nature of grief—nobody grieves with three people and is fine with everybody else. It just impacts everything you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep and your dreams in between. So it’s never about getting rid of grief; it’s always about trying to manage it. I’ve got friends of mine who passed away years ago, I haven’t got over it, and in a way I don’t want to get over it. But I’ve been able to manage it better than I did.
So I think we’re looking at the rawest elements of that process in this series, picking it up where Sunny is kind of lost. He really doesn’t have the answers. He’s very used to having answers for something, but he’s got no answers. And a lot of it’s about how he goes about finding those or whether he finds them or not and what he does with that.
What was it like to have Sinéad Keenan, who plays DCI Jess James, join the cast?
I think that Sinéad had the toughest job of anybody on this. When she was told by her agent that she was being considered, she said “No—anybody would be an idiot to try to fill Nicola’s shoes!” But she’s fantastic at what she does, and she’s lovely and she’s funny. She said she very rarely gets to use her real accent in a role, so she was absolutely delighted that her Irish accent was able to come through.
When I heard that she’d been cast, I contacted her and asked if she wanted to meet before we started filming. I said, “It suddenly struck me that you’re going to be in exactly the same position as your character—you’re coming into this team where everybody knows each other and everybody’s got a shorthand and everybody likes each other, and the popular person who was there is gone and everyone’s missing her, and now it’s you.” And that’s for Sinéad and for Jess.
I didn’t want her to be surrounded by strangers on her first day, and because we met up beforehand, it meant that we had at least some reference points that weren’t the job. The rest of us have worked together for a number of years now on the previous seasons. And I can’t speak for them for sure, but for me and I’m pretty sure for them, this is the only part of the job that’s real, so it’s got to be a happy environment. That’s what you’re going to remember afterwards, so you want to put all that positivity and good vibes into the set, into your working day. Nicola was like that anyway, and it was a lovely discovery to find that Sinead’s like that. And she was great fun behind the scenes.
In Episodes 3 and 4, Sunny goes to Paris as part of the investigation. What was the highlight of filming in Paris?
I mean, filming in Paris was incredible. But for me, well, therein lies a tale. So when Sunny is on his way to Paris, he’s traveling on the Eurostar, the train from London to Paris, and as he’s talking to Sal because something huge is happening [in their lives], they get cut off as they go into a tunnel. So I was thinking, “Well, how are we going to do the tunnel bit—we’re going to shoot the thing, and then what, are we going to cut to something else? How’s that going to work?” So we rehearsed it once, and then when we filmed it for real, at the point that the signal is lost on the phone and they get cut off, we actually went into a tunnel!
I had to do everything to carry on acting, because really what I wanted to do is kind of [exclaim], “Did you see that?! What are the chances!” I said, “Look, we’re never going to get any better than that, surely. How are you going to replicate that?” Once you go into the big tunnel under the sea, you’re not going to be able to shoot it again, because you’re now in the tunnel for like 40 minutes. These were little tunnels that came before the big one. But they said, “Well look, we should do it again anyway.” I said okay, we did the scene again, and I got to the point where I was going, “Sal? Sal? Sal?” and we go into a tunnel! I mean, come on! Lightning twice struck me! Honestly, I was just punching the air. I went crazy at that point. The tunnel thing was just incredible. I’m never going to have a moment like that again. But who knows? I had it twice.
At the beginning of a new season, do you already know the shape of the plot and the solution to the mystery, or do you discover it as you’re reading the scripts?
I get the scripts beforehand, and every single season, it’s so exciting to get. I read it like you would a novel, trying to guess who did it and what their connections to each other are. And sometimes, you have moments where you see the scenes as you read them. On Season 5, one that instinctively came to mind was [at the end of Episode 1] where Sunny kind of beats the hell out of a washroom door. I thought, I haven’t done that before, and I have to say, I tried to psych myself up to do the scene. Then when we shot it, I punched the door clean off its hinges. They said, “Okay, let’s do that again. Let’s fix the door.” And I said, “That’s the most macho thing I’ve ever done in my life! Why can’t we keep that in?” And they went, “That’s kind of unrealistic.” “It’s unrealistic? I just did it.” So we shot it again, and the door did better that time. It wasn’t a total knockout. But when I was reading that in the script, it stood out.
So you see those scenes beforehand, and you do know the structure of the thing—you have to, because you shoot out of order. Just in terms of pacing your performance, you have to know. On previous seasons, I’ve arrested the person who’s done it before I’ve met them. When you meet them, you have to go, “Yeah, forget about stuff you were doing before… but I got you!” Get it out of your eyes when you go, “Hello, who are you? And may we have a word?” But the moment of getting the scripts and reading them in order is always exciting. It is like your favorite novelist has just come out with a new book.
Have you ever guessed correctly in you five seasons of Unforgotten?
Not once. I did that thing which I hope the audience do, which is that at the end of every second or third episode, I’m changing my mind. “Yeah, it’s definitely her. I mean, when I said her, I mean them. I mean the two of them. Him. I mean him. Yeah, when I said her, them, I meant him…All of them. All of them except him or her.” And so yeah, you do that throughout the thing, and it’s a delight to read and then kind of slightly daunting to play, because you respect the writing so much that you don’t want to be the person that screws it up.
Your character, Sunny Khan, carries a backpack, and many of our viewers know that the costume department fills it with funny and unusual items, which you then discover and share by posting on social media. What have been some of your favorite items you’ve discovered so far? [Take a look inside Sunny’s backpack in this video.]
Oh, gosh. I mean, there were so many! I still can’t quite get over the metal flamingo. I don’t know how the hell they got it into the bag—I mean, I got it out of the bag, I can put it back in. There were a few inflatables this time as well. There was an inflatable dumbbells, an inflatable guitar. In previous series, there’ve been stilettos, and a whole pineapple—I was carrying it around for the day. There was an entire cocktail set in one of them, complete with the shaker. But the one that I couldn’t get over—how did they get all of this in the bag?—was the giant flamingo with the feather boa. I’m always tempeted to look inside [before filming], but I never do.
I love it. Of course, it’s fun for me, and the costume department get into it, and that’s great. But trying to be objective about it, I think it suggests a really happy set. And that’s the thing—it’s like, if the costume department and the props department can be making fun of me and I’m sharing that, then we’re all getting along pretty well.
And for Season 5, I’ve held back six of the backpack contents that haven’t been seen before, that I’ll be posting especially for MASTERPIECE viewers, one for each episode.
I love that you’re thinking of your US audience!
Well, the response from the US audience has been really warm and quite humbling, actually. It’s an amazing thing. I did a movie called Yesterday, the one I did with Ed Sheeran, the Richard Curtis one, and the most interesting thing for me was seeing, from the people who did see it in America, were the comments like, “Just seen Sanjeev in Yesterday—he does comedy, who knew?” I was like, “Okay, you’ve only seen me play Sunny Khan, and so yeah, I can imagine why that was a bit of a shock to learn.”
So many people have also seen you in Paddington 2. And you just today posted a Paddington 3 teaser/announcement on your Instagram!
Yeah, yesterday I was on set on the latest Paddington movie—very briefly, and I didn’t expect to be involved at all, so when the call came in to say, “Would you do this one scene?” I said, “Yeah, you had me at Pad!” The second Paddington was just a joy to do, and for me, it’s still a joy to watch, actually. I think it’s a fabulous movie, one of those where the balance between the comedy, the sentimentality, and what it’s saying about the outsider, is fantastic. It’s incredibly delicate, actually. But it was really strange yesterday because some of the other people who played the neighbors, we were all doing the scene in the neighborhood, all in the same kind of outfits that we’d had before, and I said, “This is like I fell asleep on set and woke up and we’re still on set.” It was absolutely lovely to do…and I hope we stay in the edit!
