Magpie Murders is back with the latest installment, Moonflower Murders. Like the first series, it follows Susan Ryeland (Lesley Manville), an editor, solving a real murder mirrored by a mystery in a client’s novel. Pippa Bennett-Warner plays Madeline, a character in the story within a story.
“I tried not to think about the play-within-the-plays type thing because what was happening to her was absolutely happening to her,” says Bennett-Warner of playing a fictional character, even within the world of the show. While the real mystery is happening in the present, Bennett-Warner’s character exists in the 1950s.
Says Anthony Horowitz, the author of the Magpie Murders book series, “We have a 1950s detective having a relationship with a 21st-century editor…there’s nothing on television that’s quite like it.”
Says Bennett-Warner of the period setting, “We’d look at the monitor after some of the takes and it just looked like it looked like a painting.” Adds Horowitz, “But…it’s not just about costumes and about weeks of makeup, although that is a huge part of it. It’s the performances as well. It’s the knowing how to be the ’50s woman.”
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He praises Manville and Bennett-Warner’s performances, saying, “If you’re going to talk about strong women in this show, we have two of the strongest women in the business, very different from each other, doing an absolutely wonderful job.”
Horowitz points out that although the conceit of a story within a story is fun, there is a serious element to the series. It is, after all, about a murder. “A young woman has gone missing and…she knows too much and it seems that she may have been murdered herself,” he says. “She has parents and she has a, you know, a mourning husband and a child.”
Watch the interview above with Horowitz and Bennett-Warner for more on the series.
Moonflower Murders, Sundays 9/8c, PBS