Peter Wight stars as Eddie 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 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.
What’s their relationship?
“It’s a curious relationship. They are friends and he knows her secret about being transgendered. When she finds her long lost son at the beginning of the series and gets drawn back in to the family aspect of her life with the kids all living on the small holding, he watches this with some alarm.
“He feels he’s losing her as a professional but it’s an emotional loss as well. Eddie’s quite isolated in his own way and Mia fills an important corner in his life – there’s a kind of father/daughter thing going on.”
How did you come to be cast?
“I was sent the first three scripts and when I read it I thought it was extraordinary – actually I thought this is either completely risible or utterly brilliant. In any case I found it very compelling. It was weird. I’d have a reaction saying, ‘This is really odd to the point of implausibility,’ and then something would happen and I’d go, ‘Oh I see’. It takes you in to a world that’s so bizarre but rather weirdly has its own logic.
“When the second three scripts came my character developed in a way that I hadn’t been anticipating. That was good because in the first three I think I was making him a bit too sentimental. Then suddenly it becomes Jacobean and he’s chopping up corpses and shouting a lot. That’s the other side of the coin.”
What struck you about the writing?
“It’s the wildness of Sean Conway’s imagination that I liked about it. It works on a knife-edge. It’s really pushing some boundaries but I don’t mean in the actual language of the scenes – it’s where his imagination has taken the story. The only word I can think of is quite wild.
“Sean is this quiet, unassuming bloke, but out of this mild chap has come this crazy, crazy stuff. He’s funny and alarming as a writer, with these out-there stage directions. It’s like stream of consciousness. You can hear his voice like you’re sitting next to him. It’s dangerous but it’s interesting, and the emotional logic of it hangs together.”
How do you describe the series?
“When people ask what I’m working on I’m a bit trepidatious – some people say, ‘that’s ridiculous.’ But nine out of ten people will also go, ‘My god that sounds interesting.’ It’s very different – it’s not like a crime series, not like a provincial series.
“I don’t know what you’d describe it as. Jacobean weirdness in a modern city, that’s what I’d say. It’s about Mia’s identity really. That’s its real focus. It’s not actually about the hits – they’re a bit of a sideline. She’s trying to get away from that because by the end she’s found something else – the kids, and her connection with them.”
Is the setting important?
“The fact that it’s Manchester is not important. That’s never mentioned. The setting is important only in the sense of the weirdness of the two worlds she’s moving between. On the one hand you have the big city and then on the other these kids are living in this ancient farmhouse on top of a bleak moor. Deals, money and Eddie are all set alongside this other life: isolated, way out in the countryside up on a hill, with this little group of strange children.”
How have you found working with Chloë Sevigny?
“She’s absolutely great. I’d seen her work and I knew who she was but she’s a bona fide star. I suddenly thought this is so weird for her – coming over from Manhattan for four months or whatever it was – and standing on top of a moor outside Manchester. She’d only been to the UK once or twice before. So talk about out of your comfort zone – physically and mentally.
“My first day on location I saw Chloe on top of this bleak moor. This cool, serene, American actress standing, smoking a cigarette surrounded by pig shit. If she wasn’t as cool as she is it could have been a nightmare but she threw herself in to it, got to know the kids, the crew. She was witty and a real worker. I was totally admiring of her. And she’s got this lovely quality as an actress that’s very vulnerable and endearing. That’s exactly right for Mia – hard but vulnerable.”
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Watch a video interview with Chloë Sevigny…