By Patrick Cremona

Published: Sunday, 07 August 2022 at 12:00 am

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Marc Warren’s detective Piet van der Valk is normally the one apprehending criminals – but while shooting the new series of the crime drama the actor almost found himself on the wrong end of a police incident.

Speaking to RadioTimes.com and other press ahead of the new run – which starts on ITV tonight (Sunday 7th August) – Warren detailed a tense moment during filming when he and co-star Maimie McCoy found themselves getting pulled over by officers.

“In the last episode [we shot], Maimie and I had to drive through Dam Square at its most packed in the Cherokee and we were wearing bulletproof vests,” he explained.

“I don’t think we had our guns on us but we had the flashing lights going on, and somebody had not told the local police that we were doing that and we got pulled over and I suddenly thought, ‘Christ, if we’ve got guns on us as well, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble.’

Thankfully, the pair managed to escape from the situation with nothing more than an interesting anecdote – but according to Warren, the incident was especially tense for him as a result of something he’d witnessed earlier the same day.

“Literally just before we shot that scene, I was sitting in my dressing room out on location and out the window I saw a guy running down the street and next thing a police car screeched to a halt,” he said.

“And the guy ran across the street and then the officer got his gun out, and I’d never seen that before. I’d never seen anybody pull a gun on somebody before, so it was sort of weird considering. But I think what was interesting was that, having never witnessed that before, it seemed very normal because we spend all day doing that [in this show]. And here was the reality of it.

Funnily enough, this wasn’t the first time Warren had had a run-in with law enforcement while working on a TV drama – a similar incident happened while he was working on the Sky series Mad Dogs a few years ago.

“I remember being in Cape Town doing Mad Dogs and we had a gun in the car,” he said. “And because often people don’t know that you’re being filmed, the camera might be a long way away, we got pulled over then, and you don’t want to be pulled over with a gun in your car, so it was hid very rapidly.”

Additional reporting by Flora Carr.