“The audience is going to be really surprised by it.”
Professor T star Emma Naomi (DS Lisa Donckers) has teased a “different direction” in the ITV crime drama’s third season.
“Not so much the cases, but the aesthetic of the show,” she told RadioTimes.com. “How it’s been edited, and the music is very different and interesting.
“While being faithful to the humour, the wit and the darkness that has already been set up in seasons 1 and 2, it’s definitely going in a different direction. The audience is going to be really surprised by it.”
Barney White, who plays Naomi’s colleague and love interest DS Dan Winters, explained that “it was a different director this time”.
“The first two seasons were Dries Vos and this was Maarten Moerkerke,” he said. “And he loved the one-shot. That’s quite cool, and it definitely looks different, feels different.”
White went on to say that he found the one-shot scenes “quite exhilarating” to shoot because it “feels like a play, you can’t mess up”, while Naomi spoke about the “challenge” of working within those parameters.
“There’s one take in particular,” she said. “It wasn’t so much a challenge for us because we just had to stand still, but the camera men were going from outside, into a hotel, down a lift, into a lecture room and filming the entire lecture, and I think that’s a 10-minute shot.”
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White added: “I remember being really nervous about it because I was worried I was going to mess up the scene. And then I watched it back and I’m blurred in the background [laughs].”
White also teased more “strange, knotty” cases this season, “which give the show a different feel to a lot of other crime shows out there”.
“All of the crimes are compelling,” he added. “The third episode is very cleverly written around Professor T’s own trial [he’s in prison after trying to defend Christina Brand at the end of season 2].
“So it’s a courtroom drama on the one hand, and then him solving a crime in prison. That’s quite a cool, nice balance of things.
“And then the sixth episode is just a helter skelter, a lot of the culmination of personal storylines as well as the crime itself, which is quite intense.”
Naomi also said that there’s a “visceral connection to the victims this year that is very disturbing”, adding: “You really see them. I’m thinking of episode 2, in particular. There’s a woman who dies in a pool and you see her floating there.
“There’s definitely an emotional connection to the victims more than a search for the psychology of the criminal. It’s really quite striking.”
Professor T season 3 debuts on ITV1 at 9pm on Wednesday 27th March. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what else is on.
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