The exact nature of Peter Capaldi’s character in new Prime Video series The Devil’s Hour is unclear – and the Doctor Who star has confirmed that viewers won’t learn the truth about Gideon until the final episode.
A six-part series, The Devil’s Hour explores the surprising link between a woman (Jessica Raine) suffering from waking nightmares, a detective (Nikesh Patel) investigating a string of brutal murders and a nomadic criminal (Capaldi) who believes he can predict the future.
“I can’t really tell you very much about him at all, because he holds the key to the whole thing,” Capaldi told RadioTimes.com and other press. “So to reveal quite who he is gives away the joy that you’ll have in episode six, when you find out – but he’s clearly somebody who’s fallen through the cracks, or decided to fall through the cracks, and he has a mission, which is a dark mission, which puts him on the other side of law and morality as we know it to be.
“So yeah, he’s a mystery, but not always, you will find out [who he is]. And that was one of the main attractions for me to the part, what is actually going on. Because sometimes you can read a script and you can think, ‘Oh, well, that all sounds very exciting’ and there’s diminishing returns – you know, they don’t quite deliver at the end the thing that they have developed your appetite for. But this does, which is lovely.”
The series was originally inspired, according to writer/creator Tom Moran, by “a throwaway line” in an episode of Fargo, where one character makes reference to meeting another “at the devil’s hour”.
“I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s cool, what’s that devil’s hour?’ and so I went down a YouTube rabbit hole, learning about weird superstitions and this time 3:33am, which is supposed to be the most cursed time. I just thought… what if you always woke up at that time? And why might that be? And you have to watch six episodes to find out why that might be.”
All six episodes of the series were written before filming began, with executive producer Sue Vertue explaining that it was Moran’s vision for the entire run that captured her imagination. “It was a fantastic [first] script – I just wanted to know that he knew where it was going, because there’s nothing worse than something just petering out. But he came in and he knew exactly where it was going all the way through.”
Read more:
- Peter Capaldi says The Devil’s Hour character “isn’t what he appears”
- Peter Capaldi won’t return to Doctor Who: “I’ve done my time”
- Peter Capaldi teases mysterious Devil’s Hour role: “He’s not what we think”
- Peter Capaldi might be a time traveller in tense The Devil’s Hour trailer
The Devil’s Hour launches exclusively on Prime Video on 28th October – try Amazon Prime Video for free for 30 days.
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