You might not immediately recognise Anna Samson without her sun-soaked, sandy backdrop and her signature waistcoat. The 35-year-old actor made her British primetime telly debut last year as the stony-faced sleuth Mackenzie Clarke, who solves murders in the Death in Paradise spin-off Return to Paradise. Like the original cosy crime series, her show – set down-under in Australia’s fictional Dolphin Cove – garnered millions of viewers for the BBC and cemented Samson as a “Paraverse” star, as well as its first leading lady. “A female lead hasn’t changed the DNA of the show at all,” she affirms, as the mystery series gears up for its second instalment. “And it hasn’t lost us viewership, thank goodness. Death in Paradise viewers are sophisticated.”
They are also deeply devoted. Death in Paradise has been running for 14 seasons and counting, and has also spawned another spin-off, Beyond Paradise. Some have criticised the franchise for its predictable plot lines, but it might be precisely because of its formulaic, easy-watching nature that it is so loved. “You see, a lot of people say that the programme is like escapism for them,” Samson reflects of Return to Paradise’s popularity. “In the world at the moment, it’s quite rare that justice is served; that the bad guys get got – Mackenzie’s always going to get her baddie and there’s something comforting in that, in a world that doesn’t offer us much ease of justice.”
The inaugural Return to Paradise series saw Samson’s DI Clarke return to her hometown in Oz after she was suspended by The Met for allegedly tampering with evidence. After flying back to Dolphin Cove, DI Clarke looks longingly at a weathercam of grey and windy London, feeling like a misfit in the picturesque beach town she grew up in. British-born Samson recognises this sense of displacement, having spent her early years living between West Sussex and Nigeria, where her father relocated for work, before eventually moving to Australia aged 11. “I’m not going to say I never recovered because that sounds so dramatic,” she says of her family’s choice to leave the UK for Sydney. “But I’ve never stopped calling England home. I find that a very relatable part of the script.”
We chat on a rainy Thursday morning over Zoom as London has been plagued by tube strikes. Samson makes sure she visits the city once a year and has lost the TFL lottery with the timing of this year’s trip. The night before we speak, she went for dinner with two of her franchise co-stars – Lloyd Griffith, who plays the kind-hearted detective sergeant Colin Cartwright, and Tai Hara, who stars as Clarke’s ex-fiancé and pathologist Glenn Strong, whom the DI jilted at the altar before fleeing to the opposite hemisphere. In the absence of underground trains or any available taxis, the trio were almost forced to hop in a fairylight-adorned pedicab home from central London. Instead, they summoned an Uber. “I was like, look, that’s half my yearly wage, whatever,” jokes Samson in a lilting accent, her Aussie twang giving an edge to her long English vowels.
Just as Samson grounds herself with yearly trips back to the UK, Clarke keeps her connection to The Met going through regular exasperated phone calls to Death in Paradise’s former lead detective DI Jack Mooney, played by Ardal O’Hanlon – a Paraverse darling, who’ll also appear in season two of the spinoff. “His character starts to function slightly like a fairy godmother,” Samson says. “Without his gentle intervention, Mackenzie’s life would take a different path. Very subtly, he’s trying to push her towards being her best self,” she explains of the inspector’s input. “But it doesn’t look like that on the surface, it’s just her boss telling her what to do. But Ardal is so beloved and he has this sparkle to him, just as a human, so he brings a little bit of magic to the show.”
Filming as a lead detective in the Paraverse is hard work. While actors with minor parts get to kick back, have a cocktail and chill out in the sun when cameras aren’t rolling, the star of the show spends all of their downtime learning their extensive lines. O’Hanlon previously complained about working his “a*** off” for “12 hours a day, six days a week” during his time fronting Death in Paradise from 2017 to 2020, but Samson seems unphased by the workload. “I don’t find it hard to remind myself that I work hard but I’m incredibly lucky and this is a beautiful life I’m living,” she says.
For each series of Return to Paradise, the star – who started her career on the stage in plays including Simon Stephen’s Birdland and David Hare’s Skylight – spends four months living on location in Illawarra, New South Wales. She films all the day and learns her lines all night. The biggest challenge with every episode’s script is the multi-page monologue where DI Clarke reveals the episode’s killer in an Agatha Christie-style gotcha spiel. “If I get any downtime, I’ll be learning one of them,” she says. “I’m quite rigorous about my homework. I study the script. Follow the text. In theatre, the script is sort of like the bible.”
The cast of other popular tropical on-location programmes, such as HBO’s The White Lotus, have said that similarly immersive shoots caused them to go full meta for a chunk of filming. Does Samson ever blur the lines of fiction and reality? “There’s an obsessiveness to Mackenzie that is absolutely alive in Anna,” she says of her similarities with her character. “It’s an all-consuming period. But I don’t suddenly wake up and think I’m a detective solving crimes around Sydney.”
For inspiration on how to play a good detective, Samson has looked to Martin Freeman’s portrayal of sidekick Dr John Watson in the BBC’s Sherlock. “I think Martin Freeman is an intelligent, transformational actor,” she says. “He’s one of the most remarkable actors we have.”Samson also observed her fellow Paraverse detectives before filming Return to Paradise’s first season, and noted just how far they push the edges of the crime genre in their performances. “It’s not a farce, it’s not a parody, but it is slightly hypercolour and comedic,” she says. “The show doesn’t take itself seriously – but it does take its audience seriously.”
Mackenzie Clarke – emotionally avoidant, shrewdly intelligent and quietly proud – is certainly serious about what she does. “It’s quite a rare thing to play a character who’s not only good at their job, but they know it,” Samson reflects. “She loves a compliment. It’s very human. It’s one of the things I love about playing her because you don’t see that in women on screen very often… She can be spiky, and she isn’t particularly concerned with being liked, but she is also human and is concerned with being loved. I think she believes the world doesn’t want her, so she rejects the world first. She believes she doesn’t need community, romance or friendship. That’s incorrect.”
These assumptions will be challenged in Return to Paradise season two as Clarke’s historic feelings for Glenn continue to bubble at the surface, and her friendship with her DS Colin deepens. “Mackenzie would never say this, and doesn’t realise it, but Colin is her best friend – and she has no idea,” Samson says. “She would say, ‘It’s just that annoying guy I work with.’ But in the way they behave, in the way they care for each other, they are functioning as best friends in the world. Our show is very kind. It has a lot of love at its centre. Despite Mackenzie’s wish to be removed and cold, she cares about these people and they care about her. There are some beautiful, vulnerable scenes.”
Samson has similarly found kindness in the Paraverse fandom. The actor left her previous role as Mia Anderson in Home and Away in 2022 after one year, having been subjected to cruel body shaming by fans of the show. “People still feel they have the right to shame, comment on and harass women about their appearance,” she wrote to trolls on social media at the time. “It’s part of a culture of cowardice. Cruelly commenting on our weight loss or gain, our faces, our choices, our voices.” Thankfully, viewer responses to the first female detective in the Paraverse were quite different.
“Young women, from the age of 10 or younger, right up to 15 or 16 are saying they love the show and they love Mackenzie because they too feel on the outside. They’re not sure they belong. They’re figuring out how to have friends and boyfriends,” Samson says of the overwhelmingly positive feedback from Return to Paradise viewers. “I think having a female protagonist who doesn’t always have to be palatable and pleasant or polite and presentable has made people feel less alone in the world, certainly young women, and I didn’t expect that response. I didn’t think it would happen,” she reflects. “It makes going to work and putting that waistcoat on every day very much worthwhile.”
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