Martin Compston grew up in thrall to the big American action films of the 80s. “Harrison Ford was a big hero,” he says. “I was obsessed with Indiana Jones as a kid. I had the hat, the whip and the leather jacket. There was a whole six-month period when I refused to answer to anything other than ‘Indie’…”
The 41-year-old Scottish actor grins, thrilled now to be part of the industry at a time when – he argues – British television is “really having a go at matching the scale” of classic Hollywood action adventures. He’s just finished shooting a second series of ITV’s high-octane thriller Red Eye, in which his character – Clay Brody – is in charge of security at the American embassy in London during a terrorist attack. He gets to dash around the big glossy building with a gun, talking into his hidden mic, unsure of who might be lurking in the elevator shafts.
Compston tells me the show’s British writer, Peter A Dowling, is also an 80s action junkie. “He loves Die Hard,” he says. “A New York cop at the top of a skyscraper with a machine gun fighting international terrorists. It doesn’t make any sense but it is one of the best action films of all time.” The plot of Red Eye strains credibility to a similar level, but the adrenalin pumps through it with such gleeful gusto that only a killjoy could resist being swept into the high-stakes transatlantic drama. “You have to commit to the fun of it, as an actor and a viewer,” says Compston. “It’s Big Flashy Escapist Entertainment.”
He points out that advances in tech and investment from the big streamers – as well as the impressive audience figures of over 15 million for series such as Line of Duty (in which Compston is about to return as DI Steve Arnott) – has allowed UK shows to match the ambition of America. “Some shows I’ve been on, people have said, ‘There should have been a much bigger finale!’” he shrugs. “But we didn’t have the money to do that. Just no budget.”
You have to commit to the fun of a thriller, says Compston (Photo: Laurence Cendrowicz/Bad Wolf/Sony Pictures Television)
He says he really began to feel a shift when he shot Amazon’s 2023 sci-fi-horror series The Rig. “When I first got a call about the show, I thought it was going to be more gritty social commentary,” he says. “Hard-drinking guys in a room. My dad worked on an oil rig and I thought it would be more realistic. But then I saw the script and I saw the Hollywood size of the set.” One scene saw his character set ablaze and Compston took a leaf out of the Harrison Ford playbook – “he always said it’s important to do as many of your own stunts as you can” – and did the scene for real.
“Being set on fire was fun for the first five to 10 seconds,” he explains. “But when the flames didn’t go out things got a bit toasty.” He winces at the memory. “My character was supposed to be knocked out and another guy [played by Iain Glen] was supposed to be putting the fire out. I could hear Iain panicking, repeating ‘It’s not going out!’ I was like, ‘Shit, it’s getting a bit hot in here,’ and the teams came running…” He shakes off the experience with a joke, old-school action hero style: “I ended up with a bit of a tan.”
Such widescreen adventure is a big genre leap from Compston’s screen debut as Liam, the troubled underdog hero of Ken Loach’s 2002 coming-of-age crime drama Sweet Sixteen. It’s set in Compston’s Scottish home town of Greenock, Inverclyde, and – despite his promising parallel teen career as a footballer – the young Martin auditioned for the role without any previous acting experience. His raw performance as the young drug dealer saw him win the Most Promising Newcomer award at the British Independent Film Awards, but today he recalls struggling in the aftermath of that success.
“I was so lucky for that start,” he says. “What an opportunity – to work with Ken Loach, one of the greatest directors of all time.” But when he moved down to London, he had “people thinking I was that kid – Liam”. He adds: “It was weird. I had this identity which wasn’t mine. I certainly knew characters like him growing up, which was why I could access the character so well and draw out that performance. But it wasn’t me.”
Compston found early success in Ken Loach’s ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (Photo: Joss Barratt/Icon Film Distribution)
Compston put this down to “snobbery” – the assumption that an untrained, working-class lad could only play himself. “Everyone assumed I was from a broken family, poverty, neglect…” He shakes his head. “Couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, I was working class. But me and my brother had anything we wanted growing up, to an extent, you know? Good football boots? We’d get those at Christmas.”
He thinks things have changed and young actors – such as Adolescence star Owen Cooper – without industry connections “will hopefully get more opportunities than I did. But back then, if you weren’t from drama school you couldn’t do anything that wasn’t playing yourself”.
He adds: “I struggled for a while. The offers just weren’t coming and I quit to do football.” Having played for Aberdeen’s youth team he signed to Greenock Morton and made two first-team appearances in the 2001-02 season before he landed a part in BBC comedy drama series Monarch of the Glen.
Today he recalls the Monarch set as “my acting school” and comes over all warm and fuzzy and the memory of working with “acting legends” Tom Baker, Richard Briers and Julian Fellowes. He has a pocketful of deliciously eccentric Tom Baker anecdotes – “Tom always said it was rude to tell the truth” – and remains grateful for the way the Fourth Doctor took him under his wing.
Apparently Baker insisted on making Compston’s tea every morning. “One morning – it was the second to last day of the shoot and Richard Briers had come back as a ghost – they were all in Tom’s dressing room, catching up. It was the first time I’d come into make-up and my tea wasn’t there. I could hear these three legends talking and then I heard Tom say, ‘Scuse me, fellas, I’ve got to go and make Martin’s tea…’ That was surreal.”
‘Line of Duty’ is set to return for a new series (Photo: Aiden Monaghan/World Productions/BBC)
The companionship he found on that set came in marked contrast to the loneliness young Compston often experienced on sets down south. “Loneliness is a horrible, pit of the stomach feeling isn’t it,” he mulls. “It comes with a bit of shame, right? It’s like, ‘Why don’t I have friends down here? What am I doing wrong? And why can’t I just be happy on my own?’” He recalls a former girlfriend telling him that whenever she saw somebody eating alone in a restaurant, “she would get sad, thinking of me sitting alone in hotels or just wandering around London”.
Now – happily married with a five-year-old son – he can laugh at that memory. “Now I can really enjoy sitting alone with a nice steak and a glass of wine and a book and a bit of peace. It’s f**king paradise. As you get older you’re just more comfortable, more confident in your own skin. You can use that downtime to regenerate.”
But he draws on his youthful experience of feeling cut adrift for his new role in Paramount’s terrific comedy-crime drama, The Revenge Club. It’s a show about a disparate group of people of all ages and backgrounds who join a divorce support group only to team up – “like a pound shop Ocean’s Eleven” – to take revenge on their former spouses. It’s one of the freshest, most delicious shows I’ve seen in ages.
Compston is tenderly moving as Callum, a builder struggling to maintain a relationship with the daughter from whom his ex-wife is trying to alienate him. “His cause is noble,” says Compston. “He tries to do the right thing in the wrong way.
‘Comedy isn’t my forte – I was nervous,’ says Compston of ‘The Revenge Club’ (Photo: Leanne Sullivan/Paramount Global/Gaumont)
“The Revenge Club feels original because you cant quite nail it to a genre,” adds Compston. “It’s got comedy, murder mystery, some darker stuff, some romance…” He suspects it will resonate with viewers because “we’ve all got somebody – a bully at school or somebody at work, somebody who’s crashed into your car and left the scene… something in our head where we’ve thought about it [revenge]. You have some sort of fantasy in your head where you get your own back. What makes us good people is that we don’t follow through on it. But these characters are living out those fantasies on screen for you.”
He adds: “And we were a proper actor’s gang all together in so many of the scenes.” He admits that “because comedy’s not my forte, I did feel nervous trying funny lines sitting opposite Meera Syal – she’s comedy royalty… ‘What if Meera thinks I’m not funny?’” He cringes.
She would certainly have laughed watching him try to put on surgical gloves in the last series of Line of Duty. He confides that years of shooting the police show has taught him that “there’s simply no cool way to do that. You can’t blow into them because that would contaminate evidence”.
Although my friend in the police has been known to eye-roll the way Jed Mercurio’s police corruption drama has eaten into public trust in the force, Compston tells me coppers are “always very friendly and asking for photos” when he’s out and about. He also argues that Mercurio’s scripts are “always based on real police incidents – a core of truth that’s spun to a dramatic extreme. That’s true of the new series too”.
Compston admits that the hardest part of filming Line of Duty is conveying emotion while clad “top to toe in SOCO [scenes of crime officer] gear”. But I’ve always thought he does a lot with his dark, darting eyes. He smiles and nods. “Sometimes people on sets will say, ‘Martin, you’re not doing very much.’ But the camera picks up every subtlety. If I’m playing a cop or a spy, those guys are not going to be emoting, giving out big signals.”
He laughs. “One of the most backhanded compliments I ever had was from a director who told me, ‘I cast you in this role because you’re really good when you don’t talk.’”
‘Red Eye’ series two starts at 9pm on New Year’s Day on ITV1. ‘The Revenge Club’ is streaming on Paramount+
Your next read
