If there’s a word that comes to mind for Stephen Graham, it’s “intense.” Talk about a Class A: to watch one of his performances is like huffing a mile-long line of the world’s purest, most chemically refined acting powder. He punches you in the face with emotional power and keeps you there by the throat — so infinitely compelling regardless of whether he’s turning up to snatch scenes from De Niro and Pacino in a Martin Scorsese banger, staring down Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders, or putting in one of the great sad-dad turns in Adolescence. He can be erratic, so much so that he seems to vibrate, but he can also be deadly still, his eyes piercing like a pair of LED torches.
Erm, forgive the glaze. Point is, Stephen Graham is extremely good at what he does, and always a major draw; the headline act, even when he’s the opener. And one of his upcoming roles sounds like the perfect match for his vibrant skillset. In Apple TV’s 10-episode drama Nocturne, out on 30 October this year, he’ll play an extremely Hannibal Lecter-coded serial killer, Jurek Walter, in a show that sounds like a top-tier Silence of the Lambs regen.
Based on a couple of bestselling crime thrillers by Lars Kepler — the nom du plume used by the Swedish husband-and-wife writing duo of Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril and Alexander Ahndoril — in the “Joona Linna” series of novels centring on the same murder detective, Nocturne is set to Americanise the books’ grisly events, reimagining Linna as Jonah Lynn, played by Liev Schreiber. An ex-soldier turned detective once based in Philadelphia, he “moves to a small town in western Pennsylvania for a quiet life,” per the official series synopsis. “But, as the town and his family come under attack from [Jurek], Jonah must protect all that he holds dear,” including his protege and surrogate daughter figure, FBI Agent Saga Bauer (Beetz), who takes the lead in the search for Jurek’s last missing victim.
Created by Tin Star‘s Rowan Joffé, the show is adapted from Kepler’s Lazarus and The Sandman, the latter novel being described as “The Silence of the Lambs Goes Nordic Noir” in a 2018 review from the New York Times. The article describes the book’s setup as “a serial killer, so intelligent and seductive he seems to be able to murder people from beyond his maximum-security cell, matches wits with a world-weary, brilliant cop,” so you can see why they’d draw that line. By the sounds of things, there’s more than just the Lecter comparison — on paper, Bauer is basically Clarice Starling.
In the book, one of the men thought to have been killed by Jurek re-emerges after over a decade, tells cops that he was actually being kept captive by a nutcase he dubs “The Sandman,” and that his sister, also once assumed dead, remains trapped. Bauer then goes undercover to befriend Jurek in prison in order to try and find out who The Sandman is. Again, the Lambs comparisons are practically screaming, with a star rookie of the FBI begrudgingly forced to seek the counsel of a notorious murderer, all to track down one of his fellow psychopaths.
As to whether Graham’s Jurek will also be a cannibal with a taste for Michelin-star man-eating is yet to be seen. Whatever the case, it all sounds killer. Come October, we’re going to be eating good.
