Sanjeev Bhaskar Interview: Cold Case, Warm Friendship in Unforgotten
Unforgotten star Sanjeev Bhaskar sheds light on the unique and powerful relationship between his character DI Sunny Khan and DCI Cassie Stuart, and how it’s mirrored in his friendship with Nicola Walker off screen. Plus, we take a peek into Sunny’s backpack and more in the British actor’s Season 4 interview with MASTERPIECE.
What drives Sunny and Cassie and makes them such a great team? And what do you think also makes them such a good detective duo for a TV series?
Their relationship has always been kind of an idealized synergy, in that she leads with emotion, works on a hunch, and uses her instincts, and he’s much more methodical. So I think they make a great team—they each bring something to the table. She has the ability to be methodical and hardworking in the way that he is, and he has the ability to be emotional. And over their relationship, they’ve worked out where each other’s strengths lie.
They’re both driven, and I think that’s essential. I imagine that a lot of people who join the police, at least I hope, join with a greater purpose to make the world a safer place, to bring justice where there’s injustice. (And also, individuals are individuals, so you get good cops and bad cops, as we well know in real life, and we get them in dramas, too.) So I think that whatever brought them to their line of work, that sense of getting justice, of it being important, still holds true for them. And particularly in Unforgotten, that time is not the issue—just because something happened a long time ago, doesn’t make it less just. They’re both driven to bring balance to that particular universe.
That’s their working relationship. Their personal relationship is one that has always had mutual respect within it, as well. There’s a deep friendship and a love between them, all of which I think are unusual in a police procedural series. And I think what makes them great as a team is being able to tell each other the truth. They will hear it from each other because they know that the other person is on their side. So I think that works for them as a relationship, but also as a team, recognizing the strengths that the other brings, and therefore being able to utterly rely on the other emotionally, professionally…the works. That that’s the basis of it.
In terms of TV relationships and certainly detective relationships, I think theirs is quite unusual. I think that at the heart of drama is conflict, so in a lot of very good police dramas, when you’ve got a pair of some kind, people think it’s tension created between them that creates the drama. But what [writer and creator] Chris Lang did with Unforgotten was create the drama around them, so they have a force field around them—they are solid together. They do disagree, and they kind of get annoyed with each other, and they fall out, but you never feel that it’s permanent.
One of the descriptions that people used about Sunny and Cassie on social media was the word “reassuring.” It surprised me, actually—I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms, but once they said it, I got what they meant. There’s something reassuring about seeing a great relationship, whether it’s romantic partners or whether it’s a mother and son or a father and a son. I think that’s what they bring. And I have to say it’s very, very similar to the relationship that Nicola and I have.
Can you describe how the Sunny/Cassie relationship is similar to yours and Nicola’s?
Chris Lang had always written the characters as having that mutual respect and affection for each other, and it’s impossible to know beforehand whether the actors are going to feel it, or would act it, but Nicola and I didn’t need to. We first met at the first read through of the script, but Nicola always says that she knew within five minutes that we’d be fine. The very first scene that we shot in the first season, we shot it five or six times, and I remember at the fifth or sixth time, I turned around to her and said, “This is crazy. I’m talking to you like I’ve known you for 10 years. I’ve known you for 10 minutes.” She said, “I feel exactly the same.” We’ve built that kind of friendship outside the series as well in a very similar way.
I imagine that’s probably very rare.
Yes, and it’s actually something that she said to me during this season, with great pathos and irony. She said, as we were walking back from filming something, “You know how rare this is, right?” I said, “Yeah, I do. I do.” It is rare. I get on with most people and I have huge admiration for actors and crews and anybody who’s creative—I mean, that’s my tribe—but to have that depth of relationship so quickly, especially on a movie or a TV set, because you’re in and out, and don’t necessarily see each other every day. With Nicola, it was certainly there. I’ve always kind of maintained that one of the biggest gifts for me from doing Unforgotten has been this friendship with Nicola.
What do you think it is in Sunny that allows him to, at least so far, not be destroyed by the crimes and suffering he’s exposed to on the job?
I think he’s better able to compartmentalize. I do a lot of work for UNICEF, and I remember going to Africa on a UNICEF trip and there was a lady there who was the head of the mission in Malawi. She had formerly been in the Congo, and I asked her what her role had been there, and she said she basically had to go into these villages that had been decimated by the civil war, to look for children. I said, “How do you deal with that? How do you not bring that home with you?” and she said, “I’m able to compartmentalize.” And she had kids. For me, trying to imagine being in that situation, I just wouldn’t be able to shake that off. But she was able to because that’s the job. She said, “There are those people who are not capable of doing that, and it’s not the right job for them.” So within the Unforgotten world, I think that Sunny has been very good at being able to compartmentalize his life and say, “That’s work, leave it at work.” You’re obviously always thinking about a case and you’re trying to work it out and find solutions, but he’s very good at being able to hang the more distressing parts of it on a hook on the door before he gets into his house.
Something else that makes Unforgotten so special and different is that it starts from a position of empathy. In each of the four suspects you have a complete human with a history and a story and a tragic action or decision or mistake. And the show asks you to see them as people, to empathize.
It’s the stone dropped in a pond and the ripples out from that. The dropping of the stone happened sometimes decades ago, and they’re dealing with those ripples still, whether it’s guilt, whether it’s hiding something, or whether it’s the kind of the pressure and anxiety that comes with hiding something from people that they absolutely love and adore and are open with about everything else.
But something that’s really touched me is the number of—and I’m trying to think of how many, but it’s five or seven or so—ex-detectives that got in touch with me, sending emails to my agent to say how much they enjoyed the show, but also how we have reflected their experience of police work. Because again, most television, by its very nature of being dramatic, has tough cops who are determined and strong, but they’re tough and they’re hard bitten. There’s a little chink of vulnerability, but then they’re tough because you have to be tough! But all the detectives in our team exhibit that same kind of empathy. There was one ex-detective who emailed me and said, “I would love to have had Sunny work on my team. The way that you talk to suspects, the way you talk to victims, talk to their families, it’s exactly right. That’s how it should be.” I mean, there could be no kind of greater positive comment than that. Well, other than “and the Emmy goes to…”
Has Nicola made any contributions to Sunny’s backpack, which is famously loaded by the costume department with random objects to surprise you with during filming?
She’s been very, very supportive of the backpack. I mean, usually the backpack supports people, but she’s been supportive of it. For viewers who don’t know, so what happens on set, over the last three series, is that I get the costume department to fill Sunny’s backpack with random stuff. I don’t look at it during the day—I carry it around, I do the scenes, and at the end of the day, I open it and I take a photograph of the contents and then I put it on social media. So it started out just as a bit of fun between me and the costume department. Then I started to share it and it became this thing.
I posted the pictures of the backpack contents on Twitter after each episode when [Season 4] went out in the UK, but there are at least one, if not two, in which Nicola is much more involved in the backpack than any photograph I’ve posted far, and I’ve held them back especially for Masterpiece PBS viewers.
We’ll keep our eyes peeled! The backpack is Sunny’s, but the costume department and others on set are doing this for you, so it’s really yours. From playing Sunny, you know him better than anyone. So what do you imagine that Sunny might put in the backpack for you?
I think it would be things that are a lot darker than anything the costume department has put in there. I think there’d be mousetraps in there—the old-fashioned mousetraps that you find in cartoons, Tom and Jerry, and I think there’d be a lot of snacks. Sunny knows me well—he’d know to put a snack in there. I travel around with an iPad and a little speaker—I’ve been kind of movie-mad ever since I was a kid—so wherever I go and whenever I’m filming something, I have to know that I’ve downloaded a bunch of movies and TV shows so I can lock into them. So I think if he knew me well, it would be that. But I’ve got a feeling it may just be mousetraps.
