Top cop drama Line of Duty is so complicated even one of its stars has struggled to keep up.
Trainspotting actress Kelly Macdonald, 45, who joins the new series, said she was baffled by her lines and the police jargon.
Kelly said: “It’s the kind of detailed forensic policing that, even when I’m saying the words, I’m only half aware of what I actually mean.”
She joked that the cast read-through left her “a shell of a woman”. She added: “It was a very dense script. I’d never done as much dialogue on any job.”
Kelly knows another actor who turned down a part because of the amount of detail in the scripts.
The Scottish star plays a senior officer in the hotly anticipated sixth series alongside regulars Adrian Dunbar, Vicky McClure and Martin Compston for the seven-parter, which starts next Sunday. Anti-corruption unit AC-12 probes her character over her conduct on an unsolved murder case.
Millions of fans of the show are hoping the identity of the mysterious “H” will finally be unravelled.
Compston revealed there is much corpsing on set, especially in the “huge interview scenes”, which are so “daunting and stressful”. He said: “There’s always a point… somebody says something and we’re gone. It takes a good 20 minutes, we just laugh it out and get back to it.” He said the “righteous rants” of Ted Hastings, played by Dunbar, can set them off.
Compston added Dunbar “shouted, ‘There’s a herd of elephants coming for you’. It’s not in the script. He was on a rant. We tried to keep it together, then somebody went and we were all gone.”
