Kris Marshall would return to My Family after 14 years under one condition
We are overdue a reboot.
The golden age of TV has now regenerated into the golden age of reboots. In the past few months alone, we’ve had the returns of Gavin and Stacey and Outnumbered, while there are plans to revive US classics, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Arguably grossly overlooked, however, is the formerly long-running BBC comedy My Family. At its peak, it was the most-watched sitcom in the UK attracting an average of just over 10 million viewers.
My Family did not rip up the rule book; its joy lay in its simplicity and relatability. It centred on the exploits of the middle-class Harper family headed up by Robert Lindsay and Zoë Wanamaker in Chiswick, London.
They attempted to assert their parental authority over their three children; most notably, wayward but lovable slacker Nick, played by Kris Marshall, 51, who tells Metro he would not rule out a comeback.
‘My Family was great,’ he says, echoing the opinion of most 00s audiences. ‘If I were to reboot it, it would have to be in a situation where it really worked because Nick Harper was very much a character of his time.
‘I was 27 when I started, but I was playing 19, so he was a very youthful character. I’m not quite as youthful anymore so it would have to be something really special. But never say never.’
Kris said ‘never say never’ when asked about rebooting the BBC sitcom (Picture: BBC)My Family partly owed its success to that rare, elusive thing in TV: a show that has true inter-generational appeal. It was family viewing in my house, as it is now for Kris, his wife Hannah and their children Elsie and Thomas.
He says: ‘What I love about My Family is they run repeats now on one of these free view channels and so I’ve watched a couple with my kids, and, one is like, ”Dad, how young do you look?” They are cheeky my kids.
‘Also, a lot of comedy doesn’t age very well for obvious reasons, or for not so obvious reasons, and I think it really stands up. I don’t think I’m biased here because I’m quite critical of my work.’
How so? ‘One of the hardest things I’ve ever found – and it’s not something that I think I’ve ever gotten used to – is seeing myself on screen,’ Kris replies. ‘It was something I struggled with early on in my career and as you get older it doesn’t really get any easier because then you’re ageing on screen.
‘My wife says I pull a particular face when I’m watching myself on screen – like I look like I’m in pain – but it’s not a necessarily bad thing. I’m critical in a positive way, in terms of what can I glean from [questions like] how did I approach that scene that I’m particularly watching? How can I improve it in the future?’
Kris admitted he has only watched Love Actually once (Picture: Universal Studios) He said he ‘struggles’ watching himself on screen (Picture: Joseph Sinclair)Still, he has only watched Love Actually, in which he stars as Colin Frissell, a Brit who banks on his accent to finally find love in the US, once. His children are ‘a little bit young’ to watch it right now, but the Christmas classic has a ‘massive place’ in his heart.
It was not the enduring blockbuster hit, though, that pushed Kris to seek acting opportunities in Hollywood. It was rather a horror accident in 2008 – Kris was hit by a car while on a night out in Bristol – that forced him out of his ‘comfort zone.’
Not long after being discharged from hospital, Kris was performing eight shows a week in the West End. ‘It was quite tricky because I probably still wasn’t fully recovered,’ he says. ‘But, actually, it helped me because it moved my focus onto something else very quickly.’
For the first time, he also decided to try his luck in LA. ‘It’s something I’d avoided doing, even when Love Actually came out,’ he admits.
‘I thought, “Well I need to forge on. And I need to try things outside of my comfort zone.” And so that’s what I did and I spent the next three years living in LA, working in LA so I guess you could say that was in direct consequence of my accident.’
Kris’ Death In Paradise character Humphrey was given a spin-off (Picture: Red Planet Pictures)Now, though, he’s very much at home – literally and metaphorically – filming Beyond Paradise in the South West of England. In it, Kris once again plays his Death In Paradise detective Humphrey Marshall, who has ditched the Caribbean to settle down with Martha (Sally Bretton).
A marked difference between the two shows are the crimes: Death in Paradise is all about murder, while Beyond Paradise features a wide variety of criminal activity. Was that a conscious decision to show fewer dead bodies on screen?
Kris replies: ‘It’s not that we decided not to do that, it’s just that the crimes in Beyond Paradise are not necessarily the complete raison d’etre of the show. They are a huge part of it, but it’s often more about the puzzle and the solving of the puzzle.
‘It’s set in a more rural part of the country as well, so you have rural crimes – sheep rustling is a crime nonetheless – so [you naturally] find more interesting, intriguing ways of [solving crime] rather than just having a dead body with a knife sticking out of its back. There are only so many ways you can murder someone. I think we just wanted a bit more of a broad palette.’
He’s now solving more rural crimes in Beyond Paradise (Picture: Craig Hardie/BBC Studios/Red Planet Pictures)While some critics have snarled at Beyond Paradise, calling it ‘lazy TV’, it has been a hit with viewers, becoming the BBC’s biggest new drama in 2023 and watched by nearly nine million people in its first 30 days.
Some have even claimed it’s better than its predecessor. Does Kris agree? ‘No comment,’ he says, while laughing.
‘It’s a different show, but it also retains the DNA of its mothership. It’s an original show and we always set out to make a completely unique show. Otherwise, there’s no point in just making a carbon copy of Death in Paradise.
‘What we set out to achieve in the beginning and continue to aspire to is a completely unique stand-alone show, so that you don’t have to have seen the original. And it goes right down to the way the crimes are solved; I can’t think of another show that solives its crimes in the way we do. It’s unique and it’s great that people love it.
‘Is it better? I don’t know. Maybe…’
Beyond Paradise returns to BBC and iPlayer from 8pm on Friday, March 28.
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