Line Of Duty’s Adrian Dunbar reveals he is not H in news that will delight millions of the show’s fans
IT’S the question at the heart of Line Of Duty – which of its leading characters is secretly the criminal mastermind “H”? Well for now, the show’s millions of viewers can rest easy, as it’s not the person many feared it could be — anti-corruption chief Ted Hastings. Actor Adrian Dunbar, who has played the […]
IT’S the question at the heart of Line Of Duty – which of its leading characters is secretly the criminal mastermind “H”?
Well for now, the show’s millions of viewers can rest easy, as it’s not the person many feared it could be — anti-corruption chief Ted Hastings.
Actor Adrian Dunbar, who has played the stalwart cop since the hit drama began on BBC2 in 2012, says he has been reassured by its creator Jed Mercurio that his iconic character is not the undercover fourth member of the organised crime group.
Chatting to journalist Elizabeth Day on her How To Fail podcast, he said: “It was a relief for me, as I spent all this time playing this character and I always thought Ted had a sense of duty and a moral core.
“And to have found out I was this arch villain . . . I would have been in real difficulty accepting that.
“Jed is aware of our audience and they know Ted has a sense of moral fortitude. I am glad he came out of it with flying colours.
“The police recognise me and they know there is a lot of slog in police work. We do show that it takes a long time for police to get to the answers.”
The previous series, screened in 2019 and by then switched to BBC1, saw Ted put in the frame by fellow cops who were trying to get rid of him, as his anti-corruption unit AC-12 investigated wrongdoing in the force.
By the end of the smash-hit run, which drew record ratings for the drama, Ted managed to clear his name but was given a final written warning for misconduct by meddling police top brass.
And while Ted was clearly finding his job was getting more and more challenging, Adrian knew how he felt.
The 62-year-old actor, who worked in an abattoir as a young lad growing up in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, said remembering writer Jed’s increasingly complex police jargon is becoming more difficult than ever.
But he added: “I would say emotionally, working in an abattoir is certainly more difficult than doing Line Of Duty because there is something about killing animals that eventually gets to you.
“You think you can handle that stuff, and believe me, it has not put me off a bacon sandwich, but at the same time there is no doubt that it eats into you and gets into your subconscious of what you are doing.
“I mean, I did not literally kill the animals, I was further down the chain, but that was difficult.
“But learning Jed’s lines is also very difficult and the older you get, the more difficult it gets. You know acting — it does not get any easier.
“What used to come easy is now harder — certainly the lines do. But I, like a lot of people I was in the abattoir with, could not wait to get out, particularly in the winter, when you went in in the dark and you came out in the dark. That was a real killer.”
Adrian eventually packed in his abattoir job in the late Seventies and was later introduced to the theatre world by his cousin.
After studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, his first role came in 1980 in TV movie The Long March. Then 11 years later came his break-out role in the Bafta-nominated film Hear My Song, about Irish tenor Josef Locke, which Adrian also co-wrote.
But it has been Line Of Duty which has made him a truly famous face. Last month’s series six opening episode was seen by 9.56million — a new record for the drama.
Adrian and colleagues Vicky McClure (DI Kate Fleming) and Martin Compston (DI Steve Arnott) have been in the programme since it began, and the three actors and writer Jed have grown to become good friends while filming in Belfast.
Adrian said: “Now I realise what a privilege it is to be in a long-running TV series. The downside is you get attached to your character and the other characters and you don’t want it to stop, and with Jed you don’t know if you are going to be killed or end up being a baddie.
“But the success coming now at this stage has been good for me, as I feel I am ready for it, and to deal with it. Line Of Duty is so big, so you have to know how to deal with the attention.
“I know myself better now. I was working in an abattoir when I started so my expectations were quite low. So everything seemed a bit of a fluke, so you don’t seem to take them that seriously.
“At some point you have to take success seriously. I don’t think I was able to when I was young, as I realise how difficult it was to earn £20 or £80 a week.
“I thought acting was a scream and at some point it was going to end. I was more interested in the fun and the frolics rather than building a career of it if I could be in control of that.
The big question this week
THE last episode of Line Of Duty saw Det Supt Ian Buckells (Nigel Boyle) arrested and brought in for questioning by AC-12 after bent copper DCI Jo Davidson (Kelly Macdonald) framed him.
It now remains to be seen if he can prove that he isn’t a villain.
Another victim of the criminals was Terry Boyle (Tommy Jessop), who was being set up to look as though he had killed TV journalist Gail Vella and came close to spilling the beans on who the real culprit was.
After opening his mouth, mobster-turned undercover cop Ryan Pilkington (Gregory Piper) tried to drown Terry as they travelled in a police car, which he plunged into a reservoir.
Now that DI Steve Arnott and DI Vicky McClure know his true identity, will they instantly expose him to the world – or will they now observe him more closely and find out who is giving him orders?
The show also ended with DCI Davidson contacting the same mastermind, using the laptop messenger service that we saw Pilkington’s OCG – that’s Organised Crime Group if you’re not keeping up – were using in series five.
Will we finally get to the bottom of what the bad guys’ hold is over Davidson this weekend?
“Now I am in a much better place to accept success and get the best out of it.”
Adrian has not just made a living from drama but has lived through some scary scenes himself.
In the late 1980s he and his Australian wife Anna Nygh — also an actor — were on holiday in Bethlehem with their children Madeleine and Ted when their rental car exploded, moments after they had parked it.
Adrian recalled: “We parked at the Nablus Gate and we walked into the city and we heard a bomb go off and we looked into the sky and I just knew it was our car. I said to Anna, who was with the kids, ‘I am just going to look at something’.
“I went and I knew from where the direction was and we were driving an American budget car and they had identified the car as an American car.
Scary things
“Thankfully we did not have anything serious in it at the time, like our passports. But I just dealt with it like, ‘Oh, someone has blown up our car’.”
Adrian, the eldest of seven children, also recalled living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the sectarian conflict that lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s.
He said: “When I played in the bands in Northern Ireland and you were travelling late at night it was very dangerous. I was in three or four accidents, mostly because people were tired at the wheel.
“But you did see scary things that unnerved you or you just missed things. When you are late teens there is an air of excitement about all that. There is an excitement about living through a time when you have to grasp as much as you can because it may be taken from you.
“You felt so much alive but I don’t think I have anything like PTSD, which would come after an incident or a death.”
H: The full story on a mystery
THE identity of the crucial fourth person in the organised crime group – the mysterious “H” – has been the subject of fierce debate among Line Of Duty viewers.
So far we know three of the corrupt senior ranking officers in the fictional Central Police force. And Ted Hastings has declared that he will not rest until he catches the final member.
The revelation that H is not an individual but a group of officers was made in series three by DI Matthew “Dot” Cottan, played by Craig Parkinson, in his dying declaration.
He provided essential information to Kate Fleming, played by Vicky McClure, by blinking when she recited the alphabet and got to H.
Later, Steve Arnott, played by Martin Compston, noticed in the video of Dot’s final moments that he had also been blinking.
Steve discovered this to be Morse code, indicating that H was not in fact the surname of one person but a wider group.
Dot had admitted to being one of the four, with Assistant Chief Constable Derek Hilton, played by Paul Higgins, revealed as the second in series five and Senior Legal Counsel Gill Biggeloe, played by Polly Walker, said to be the third at the end of the last series in 2019.
In the last series, viewers were also led to believe that Ted could be the final one of the four, due to his suspicious activity, but charges against him were eventually dropped as it emerged he had been set up by Gill.
Although the topic of H is more on the backburner in series six, it is coming back to light, with various coppers acting oddly.
Detective Superintendent Ian Buckells, DCI Jo Davidson, PC Ryan Pilkington, Deputy Chief Constable Andrea Wise and Police and Crime
Commissioner Rohan Sindwhani are all prime suspects.
Despite Adrian’s success in one of the UK’s biggest ever dramas, there is a tinge of sadness that his mother Pauline cannot enjoy his accomplishments, as she battles Alzheimer’s.
He said: “She is with us but she is not with us. It has been three years since I have had a conversation with her as such.
“I have sat down and spoken to her and we have been together in one another’s company but she can’t speak to us any more. She was a great soprano and she was the one who instilled in me a love of musicals.
“The Alzheimer’s thing is a killer as it is not allowing me to share this particular success with my mother. That is one of the things about Alzheimer’s.
“As well as robbing the person of all their memories, she does not remember my father or any of the trips that she went on with me and my wife Anna or my sister who is in America. Those memories, they have all gone. It really is the most cruel disease.”
His father, Sean, died suddenly in 1979 from a brain haemorrhage while Adrian was in his second year at drama school in London.
He pays tribute to his dad in Line Of Duty in the most heart-warming way — using an old phrase of his, which fans now call a “Tedism”.
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He said: “The ‘Mother of God’ stuff comes from my dad who used to use that all the time.
“He would say, ‘Mother of God’ all the time. He used to just say ‘Mother’ and we know what he meant. So the ‘Mother of Gods’ are a way of saying thanks to him in certain ways.”
- Adrian Dunbar was talking to the How To Fail With Elizabeth Day podcast.