Created by Paul Abbott (Shameless), Sky Atlantic’s first original drama series Hit & Miss stars Chloë Sevigny as Mia – a contract killer with a big secret: she’s a transgender woman.
Launching at 10pm on Tuesday 22nd May, the six-part series follows Mia’s attempts to mix her killer instincts with her new maternal ones as she starts life with her new family.
Train. Kill. Receive payment. Repeat. This has been the routine for Mia ever since she was taken under the wing of Eddie, a long-standing resident of the criminal underworld, and transformed into a sharp-shooting assassin. Fate, however, ensures things don’t stay the same for long, and the arrival of a bombshell-laden letter from her ex, Wendy, changes Mia’s life forever.
Find out who’s who…
Chloë Sevigny as Mia
“Mia grew up as a boy in a travelling community. She was abused by her brother and her father, but she escaped when she was quite young and lived with a woman, Wendy, for a couple of years.
“She grew up gay and very feminine and always knowing something was wrong, or different, about her and so eventually she decided to transition to a woman. She ended her relationship with Wendy, ran away and totally isolated herself and ended up getting in trouble with a guy. Basically she killed him.
“That’s what brought her to the attention of Eddie, who recruited her to become a hit woman. When we meet her that’s her job. She totally isolates herself from the world and lives on her own. But then she finds out about this family that she inherits courtesy of Wendy and the discovery totally transforms her. She unearths her maternal instincts and she wants to protect and help them. Until she brings her work into the family: as much as they transform her and help bring her out of her shell.”
Jonas Armstrong as Ben
“I’m playing a character called Ben. No surname: just plain old simple Ben. We first meet him when Mia goes for a drink in the local pub when she arrives at the place where her children live. She meets these two lads who are Yorkshire-to-the-core, salt of the earth kind of fellas.
“One of them she doesn’t get on with very well – that’s John, Vincent Regan’s character. And then there’s myself. I take a bit of a shine to her and vice versa and that’s how their relationship starts. There’s an attraction.”
Peter Wight as Eddie
“I play Eddie, who’s Mia’s boss. He’s a professional criminal in Manchester with a chequered background. My take on it is he became involved with crime quite early on: at school and on his first job he got a reputation as a powerful person who you don’t mess with. That hooked him up with a few local criminal enterprises.
“He worked for a particularly fierce crime boss in the sixties and became a trusted lieutenant. I think he’s been in prison for quite a while. When he came out he had to start from scratch, building his own connections, doing security work and protection work and buying a couple of little enterprises like his Chinese restaurant – which is a front.
“There are so many clichéd gangster hard men on screen and he’s of that genre but I wanted him to have a bit more of an interesting personality than the normal run-of-the-mill cliché gangster. You really see it in his weird relationship with Mia.
“He would never use the word but he lives a lonely life. Mia is the only one who’s reached under that door, in a very understated way. But Eddie would never admit it.
“He heard how somebody had raped her and how she bumped them off. He met her, talked to her, gave her a couple of trial jobs and she’s spectacularly good. And discreet. And doesn’t boast about it; she’s absolutely perfect.”
Vincent Regan as John
“I play John, the farmer, who probably has no redeeming features whatsoever. Actually saying that he has one or two but they’re buried somewhere deep and they haven’t been dug up for a long time.
“John owns the smallholding that the kids live on now and he was carrying on with Wendy, their mum – or he was trying to carry on with her; he had a couple of little liaisons with her, because he thought she was the village bike. He treats women as pure sex objects, basically. He has absolutely no respect for them. And when we first see him he’s moved on from Wendy to carrying on with her daughter Riley.”
Karla Crome as Riley
“Riley is sixteen and she’s the eldest of the four children. They live in Yorkshire in the hills. She doesn’t know her father, or at least he’s not mentioned. And her mother, Wendy, the mother of all the children at the farm, has recently died of cancer. So Riley is really looking after all of the kids and we see that burden on her right from the beginning. She’s basically the mum.
“She’s having an affair – I guess you could call it that – with John, the landowner and owner of their house. She began sleeping with him in order to pay the rent for the house and then she fell for him. This is all going on and it’s a bit dark from an outside point of view, but with her mum dying she finds something in John that maybe is a bit paternal – a friend, or even just someone to look after her.
“And then in comes Mia. She knocks on the front door, and Riley kind of recognises her as this person from her mum’s past. Not only has this strange character who is her half-brother’s father just turned up out of the blue but she also wants to stay with the family and she wants to be the mother. She’s been asked by Wendy, the mother, to look after her kids after she dies.
“So Mia arrives and the initial episodes are about the slow integration of Mia in to these children’s lives. She’s a very lonely character – she needs to be because she’s a killer. But the kids have no idea. They just know this woman who used to be a man has come in to their lives and said, ‘I’m taking over.’ We later find out that she does that because she wants contact with her son and she cares for these children. But in the beginning they see her as an intruder.”
Reece Noi as Levi
“I play Levi, who’s 15 and the eldest son of Wendy. He’s quiet, a little antisocial and he’s got one close friend. Mind you, all the family are quiet and a little antisocial – their mum’s just died. Levi is shy, and he doesn’t really know to deal with people outside the family much.
“He’s a farmhand and quite insular. I don’t think he knows who his dad is – we assume he and Riley have got the same dad.”
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Watch an interview with Chloë Sevigny…