James Nesbitt has made a career of playing Irish men in strange situations. In Cold Feet he was a charmer with a Northern Irish accent living in Manchester, not long after the IRA had detonated a bomb in the middle of the city. In Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies he was a dwarf with a gravity-defying moustache and a yeasty Ballymena burr. Now, in the Netflix series Run Away, he’s a wealth manager living in a large house somewhere in the north of England, searching for his missing daughter.
“My Irishness as an actor has always been very important to me. I fought to play my roles as Irish. Not because I can’t do other accents. But because I’ve always wanted to,” he says.
“I grew up in a time of conflict. I grew up where the rest of the world saw and heard my accent as something that related to only one thing, even as a child, even though I grew up kind of distant from the Troubles. When I say distance, I mean 10 miles away ... I also knew that I did not want that to be the picture painted about where I came from.”
Nesbitt has had a hugely successful life on screen. He has acted opposite Ian McKellen, Liam Neeson and Richard E Grant, clocked up Bafta and Golden Globe nominations, and served for 11 years as chancellor of the University of Ulster.
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This latest chapter of his career is perhaps his starriest yet – and it is all thanks to the murderously moreish whodunits of Harlan Coben.
He first collaborated with the crime writer in 2021, playing a jaded police sergeant in the Netflix adaptation of Coben’s Stay Close. He was back for more last year with Missing You, where he brought the chills as an organised crime boss. As the star of Run Away, he plays a father trying to save his daughter from addiction.
Coben’s Netflix shows – there are nine and counting – are hugely popular all over the world. Forget Stranger Things or Squid Game: in 2024 the streamer’s adaptation of Coben’s Fool Me Once was the most-watched drama in the first half of the year.
That winning streak looks set to continue with Run Away, which transposes Coben’s 2019 book from New York to an unidentified city in the UK. (It was filmed around Manchester.)
Nesbitt is proud of that success – and he takes great satisfaction in the thought of his Co Antrim idiom travelling the globe. “The show is seen all over the place, all over the world. The idea that the translators, particularly the people that are dubbing it, are going to have to try and find ways in Spanish, Chinese, whatever to say, ‘a bucket of shite’ – things like that. That’s where I celebrate the fact that he’s an Irish man living on a different island.”
His character swears throughout Run Away, and with good reason. His teenage daughter, Paige (Ellie de Lange), has run off with her dodgy heroin-addict boyfriend, to the understandable distress of Simon and his wife, Ingrid (Minnie Driver).
Without his wife knowing, Simon tracks his daughter down to the local park, where she’s busking, and gets into a brawl with her iffy other half. But when footage of Simon giving the oik a good thumping goes viral, he is mistakenly assumed to be a villain. Just like that, his name is muck everywhere.
Nesbitt knows a few things about being in the public eye. When Cold Feet, the relationship dramedy, made him famous in the late 1990s, he became a target of the tabloids. For many years his love life was open season: during Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, he took a successful legal action against the News of the World, the British Sunday paper, for breaching his privacy. Did he draw on his own experience of being hounded by the press to portray Simon’s shock and frustration when he goes viral?
“I don’t use that at all,” he says. “I’ve never really considered my own history in that. It’s such a different thing, print. What’s interesting about what Simon goes through ... there’s a brilliant bit of film-making – the screen compartmentalises the number of people looking at this online [video], and that’s brutal.”
Soon to turn 61, Nesbitt isn’t particularly anxious about the internet and the 24-hour surveillance culture it has created affecting him personally. But he is concerned about how it might affect the lives of his loved ones, particularly his daughters, Peggy, who is 28, and Mary, who is 24.
“I’m much more worried about my children, my friends. I’m worried about the world in terms of how things can be that destructive in such a short moment.”
He points out, however, that Run Away ultimately takes an encouraging view of what happens when things go viral. Yes, it’s a nuisance for Simon, and he receives a few odd looks. But the incident doesn’t rip him to tatters, and ultimately it’s forgotten as the public moves on to another victim and another feeding frenzy.
“I quite like Simon’s reaction, which is ... you know, it doesn’t destroy him,” he says. “It’s just more like, it’s incomprehensible ... It makes the story and the journey of those characters more accessible.”
Coben was inspired to write Missing You after discovering drug paraphernalia in his daughter’s bedroom. She explained that it belonged to a friend, but by that point Coben’s imagination was whirring. How would it feel to see your sweet, innocent child fall victim to addiction? That’s the question at the centre of a series ultimately about the bond between parent and child and the pain both sides experience when it frays.
Coben and Nesbitt have become close while working together. They are both fathers of daughters, which is something Nesbitt drew on for the scenes between Simon and Paige.
“If you’re playing the parent of a daughter who’s disappeared, it’s helpful that I am the parent of girls. Hopefully, it’s there on the page when you’re doing it – particularly with Harlan, it usually is there on the page. Quite often, frankly, all I’ve got to do is learn the lines and say them. But at times, if you’re struggling, it is useful.”
That said, he adds that putting yourself in the shoes of your character can be challenging, particularly when the subject matter is as close to home as it is in Run Away. The thought of your child disappearing into a cloud of addiction weighed on Nesbitt during the shoot.
“It becomes difficult to locate the reality of it if you consider your own family and your own children. And in a way [you] have to block it a bit, because it’s too painful to consider ... For an actor who started in comedy, I’ve ended up doing a lot of fairly emotionally dark roles that have taken you down some rather dark paths.”
Coben’s shows have been a phenomenon even by Netflix’s blockbusting standards. “He’s just so good at creating dramas that are suspenseful. He takes you up the wrong avenue with all these twists and turns, but at the same time his characters are relatable,” Rosalind Eleazar, who starred opposite Nesbitt in Missing You, said earlier this year.
Coben believes his stories work because they hook the audience, who want to stay with it to the end, to find out what happens. “I’m the guy who’s writing what I call the novel of immersion,” he told me in 2023.
“You take it on vacation, and you’d rather stay in your hotel room and finish it. Or you started tonight at 11 o’clock. The next you know, it’s four in the morning and you’re cursing me. But kind of happy. With that kind of novel I love the feeling. You’re just so lost in a book the rest of the world disappears. That’s what I aim to write.”
The appeal ultimately comes down to the human component, Nesbitt says. “Why do people watch Harlan Coben shows? For many reasons: for twists and turns, for the roller-coaster thing. But I think because you recognise family, you recognise pain, you recognise being powerless, you recognise vulnerability, you recognise love. You put all those things together and come up with a wee bit of what Harlan is about.”
Run Away is on Netflix from New Year’s Day
