Jonas Armstrong (Robin Hood) stars as Ben in Hit & Miss, Sky Atlantic’s new drama series about a contract killer with a big secret: she’s a transgender woman.
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.
Created by Paul Abbott (Shameless), Hit & Miss is currently airing on Tuesday nights at 10pm on Sky Atlantic.
How would you describe your character?
“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.”
How long before he finds out about her secret?
“Which secret? She has a couple! He finds out about her being trans and there’s a big confrontation. He’s the one pushing to move the relationship forward and she’s saying ‘listen, this can’t work’ and he’s saying, ‘Why, why?’ He’s adamant.
“When he does find out it throws him a bit, because he’s not that open-minded a soul. He goes off and he tries to assert his sexuality, drinks a lot, kicks off in pubs, sleeps with horrible women. Just to try to get his head around it. But he knows that she’s trans, yet he’s fallen in love with her. That’s what makes their story so compelling.”
And her other secret – that she’s a hit woman?
“One of the great things about playing this part is that Ben’s totally unaware of anything that’s going on. There’s a scene when he comes round and Eddie, Mia’s handler, arrives. He asks Mia what she does for Eddie and she says, ‘I’m his bookkeeper at the Chinese restaurant.’ Ben doesn’t bat an eyelid. He’s completely unaware of it. Doesn’t have a clue what she does.”
What were your first impressions of the script?
“When I got the script I read it and I thought, this is like nothing I’ve read before. It’s a very bizarre set-up. You get to grips with it and then something will make you go, ‘Is this for real?’ But essentially it’s about the relationships Mia is trying to embark upon with her family. She’s struggling in this closed, blinkered community that she’s found herself in. That’s believable. Then on top of that you have the thing about her going out and killing people, which is really exciting and fresh.
“I was so taken in by it. No surprise I guess as it comes from good stock, it’s created by Paul Abbott and Sean Conway’s done a fantastic job. Then you learn of the talent doing it and it was one of those jobs where I was thinking, ‘Oh please let me have this.’”
What was Chloë Sevigny like to work with?
“You’ve got to approach it as you would any other job or any other person. We all know who she is and what she’s done but you meet the person, they become just another friend on set and you just get on with it.
“Because of the nature of our relationship within the series you have to get on with each other the best you can – thank god she was lovely to get on with and professional.”
Did you show her the delights of Northern England?
“She did come over my way in Blackpool for an evening and I took her out with a couple of my mates who own bars. I thought I’d take her out and see what she thought. That’s one of the great things about her: she’s open to pretty much anything.”
How did you come to be cast?
“I went to Manchester for the audition, walked in and met Hettie [Madonald] and Juliet [Charlesworth], and left the room feeling I’d done really well. We did the scene where Mia tells him she’s a transsexual.
“It was a heavy scene but Hettie just said think how you would feel if you were in a relationship and then they just turned round and said, ‘well listen – I’m a man’. You go off your gut and that’s what I did.”
What do you think of Hit & Miss so far? Let us know below…
Watch a video interview with Chloë Sevigny…