Can Spotless live up to its Breaking Bad comparisons? Chris Schulz talks to Miranda Raison, one of the stars of a hyped new crime show that comes with a sadistic streak.
Losing a role that's already yours might be the greatest fail by an actor of all time.
But that's exactly what happened to Miranda Raison with her new show Spotless, a gory new series now streaming in New Zealand that has earned comparisons to The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.
Sofar, Spotless - about a crime scene clean-up company that gets into the murder business - has only screened in France, with the show's English-speaking characters having their lines dubbed into French.
Raison says most of the cast have French-speaking backgrounds and were allowed to dub their own lines for the show's debut.
"I speak French and I wanted to dub myself but they didn't let me. They let me audition, but I didn't get the part ... of playing myself," Raison says, laughing at her epic fail.
"They were very nice about my French ... but they said having a slight accent meant I came across as being foreign."
Spotless, streaming on Sky TV's Neon service, follows two brothers with a dark past. The show opens with French-Canadian actor Marc-Andre Grondin's character Jean Bastiere running a struggling crime scene clean-up company in London, spending his spare time cheating on his wife with a young sales assistant.
Things take a darker turn in episode one when his brother, French actor Denis Menochet's Martin, shows up with a portable freezer containing the body of a drug mule. The sale of those drugs leads to a longer term contract with a very bad, often murderous, group of very eclectic gangsters.
As Raison explains it: "It was pitched as a 'European Breaking Bad'. It's black comedy ... it's pretty gruesome and dark in places, but it's got an undercurrent of humour because of the central characters. It's quite gory, and it gets more so."
She's not joking. In one scene, Jean cleans up brain matter stuck to a wall inside a swimming pool changing room. In another, that drug mule is sliced up on a table so the brothers can gain access to the packets of heroin inside her. As the show goes on, Jean finds himself staging murder scenes - or cleaning up some he's been involved in.
And in the middle of the season, something happens that is so horrific Raison refuses to talk about it. "It's pretty shocking," is all she'll say. "We were all like, 'Oh my God'."
A scene from the new TV show Spotless.
In the beginning, Raison's character Julie is very much the Skyler of the show, a bored housewife struggling to keep her family together.
But she quickly comes out of her shell as she works out what her husband is up to.
"She's a frustrated mother who hasn't gone back to work yet and feels displaced. Her husband's having an affair but as things go on she really comes into her own," she says.
"They wanted her to be the antidote to the whining wife at home. Julie discovers what's going on both in Jean's personal life and in the gangster underworld.
"Of all the characters, she goes through the biggest personality shift in the series. Her world is turned upside down."
Raison, who has roles in Spooks and 24: Live Another Day to her name, with a television career dating back to 2002, admits this is the first show she's been in her dad can't watch.
"He's been watching it with my stepmother and she tells him when to go out of the room. Understandably he doesn't want to watch a sex scene... that's fine. I would find it very creepy if he enjoyed those moments. But my mum is surprisingly hardcore. Anything with blood and guts she's all over it."
A scene from the TV show Spotless.
Spotless earned rave reviews in France, and has a US debut lined up for the middle of November on the Esquire Network. Raison is doing something far more serious at the moment, starring in Kenneth Branagh's West End production of The Winter's Tale alongside Judi Dench.
But she's hoping she can return for a second season of murder and gore in Spotless.
"It's been announced as being in development... we're hoping everyone's schedules will work out and we'll be back for a second season.
"It ends with a cliffhanger ... but by the time I got to the end of the second episode I was just watching as a fan."
What: Black comedy show Spotless Where and when: Streaming now on Sky TV's Neon service For fans of: Bloodline, Breaking Bad, Sunshine Cleaning
