Phil Davis, the British actor and director, says gritty drama offers escapism from the recession
A corpse is found in a dark London alley: across the body a jester's hat is draped, or maybe there is a charcoal inscription of a tarot symbol, or perhaps the spray-painted tag of an unknown graffiti artist. Something mysterious anyway. For this is British crime drama – the new, macabre style. No more slamming car doors and seedy nightclubs. Popular thriller series such as Whitechapel on ITV or Sherlock on the BBC rely instead on chilling their audiences to the bone. And somewhere, amid the gloom, the increasingly well-known face of Phil Davis often lurks.
Davis, who is a regular in Whitechapel and who played the warped taxi driver in the first series of Sherlock, believes the demand for smart, modern horror is a symptom of the times: "There are two things everybody wants when they are depressed: one is to be frightened out of their wits and the other is to laugh."
The success of Whitechapel, in which Davis plays a cop opposite Rupert Penry-Jones, has given his career one of its intermittent boosts. "My fame has had an incremental growth," he says. "I have a renaissance every 10 years."
Davis has starred in the legal series North Square and in Rose and Maloney, but it is his role as a director that will be marked next month with the release on DVD of his 1995 film ID, widely regarded as a gritty classic. In a fortnight the cast, including Reece Dinsdale, Philip Glenister, Claire Skinner, Saskia Reeves, Sean Pertwee and Warren Clarke, will reunite to celebrate the film, which is about a police undercover unit who are changed by spending time with a gang of football hooligans. The story has a grim tone, quite distinct from the horrors of Whitechapel, and there are plans for a sequel. "I haven't watched it for years, but it is very dark," Davis says.
He also has three short films coming out: an Ealing-style comedy called Outside Bet; Fast Girls, to be released in June; and Borrowed Time, "a film about a man who gets burgled by a kid who then feels guilty". He will also be joining the cast of the BBC legal series Silk, alongside Penry-Jones.
The high ratings for Whitechapel, he suspects, were down to the interplay between his character and Penry-Jones – and to the scary mood of the series.
"The first Whitechapel we did, the Jack the Ripper one, was directed by S J Clarkson and she really put a stamp on it. She created a shadowy kind of template." Davis hopes for more unconventional commissioning in British television. "They should have made 12 hours of Sherlock straight off, not just three. We should be more confident in the way we commission in this country. I was in Bleak House and that was a huge hit. We did eight and a half hours of it. There was this huge book, so we made a huge series to do it justice."
Davis also mourns the lack of single dramas where "writers could come from anywhere and run the agenda, rather than things being dreamed up by the channels".
The actor is proudest of his recent work in Double Lesson, a Channel 4 film about a teacher who loses control.
After his success with ID Davis was invited to Los Angeles but was unimpressed. "It was well before they were making committed, difficult dramas like the HBO stuff they make now. I might be wooed over there again as an actor, but I am a happily married man and the thought of being away from my family for almost six months of the year is almost unbearable." (Davis's wife is actress Eve Matheson, recently seen in the BBC2 satire The Thick of It.)
Now a new script by Shameless writer Tracy Brabin may tempt Davis back behind the camera in this country. "I have found something I would like to make called Yarko and set in Great Yarmouth," he says. "It's about a boy who gets a girl pregnant and wants to be a dad, although she isn't interested."
Davis grew up in the East End of London, where his dad was a factory worker. "It was a working-class family and my parents were great because they were completely baffled by this kid who wanted to do this thing, yet they just let me go and act." After the National Youth Theatre, Davis joined Joan Littlewood's company. "When Joan took me on it was actually an advantage not to be trained. She was such an anarchic talent, so idiosyncratic, and she taught me a wonderful pragmatism."
But it was working with Leigh that showed Davis how to break free from playing East End types. Since then, whether playing Dickens or modern coppers, Davis has created a parade of carefully drawn characters. "They are all out there," he says. "Stand at any bus stop. We are all grotesque and fantastic."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/apr/29/phil-davis-modern-british-horror
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