Edward Bluemel leads BritBox's Poirot origin series Hercule — the cast list arrives with one nemesis left unnamed
The little grey cells, before they were famous.
Hercule Poirot has a face now. Two of them, technically.
The first is Edward Bluemel, 33, the Killing Eve and My Lady Jane actor who is officially the youngest person ever to play Agatha Christie's Belgian detective. BritBox released the first-look image last week: the mustache is there, the tailoring is there, and the whole thing reads as very carefully, very slightly wrong, in the way a young man's version of a fussy old man's look should.
The second face is the one we haven't seen: the "one particular nemesis" the synopsis mentions and then trails off on, ellipsis and all.
The basics
Hercule is a six-part origin series from Mammoth Screen and Agatha Christie Limited for the BBC in the UK and BritBox in North America, landing in 2027. It's set in 1920s London, built around three of Christie's early Poirot stories, and pitched as "an intimate study of Hercule Poirot, the man" as well as a portrait of Britain between the wars.
The people behind it:
- Written by Benji Walters (Code of Silence, Obsession)
- Jonny Campbell directs the first two episodes, Chanya Button the next two, Alrick Riley the last two
- Damien Timmer of Mammoth Screen, who also worked on the David Suchet Poirot for ITV, is an executive producer
- James Prichard, Christie's great-grandson, oversees it for the estate
Filming started in Liverpool this month.
The cast (roles: classified)
Deadline broke the ensemble at the start of August, and it's a proper British-TV lineup: Henry Ashton, James D'Arcy, Calvin Demba, Phil Dunning, Jack Gleeson, Tamsin Greig, James Nesbitt, Guy Remmers, Rebecca Rittenhouse, and Mawaan Rizwan.
Not one role has been disclosed. We know the show introduces Poirot to Captain Hastings and to Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard, and we know somebody in that list is the nemesis. That's it.
You do not cast Joffrey Baratheon in a Poirot show and then decline to say who he's playing unless you are enjoying yourself.
To be clear, I have no idea who the villain is. Gleeson could be Hastings. Nesbitt could be Japp. D'Arcy has "quietly sinister aristocrat" in his range and Greig has "woman who knows more than she's saying" in hers. The blank space is doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is make me look at every headshot like a suspect.
The Suchet of it all
Every new Poirot has to answer for David Suchet, who played the part for nearly 25 years and, for a lot of people, simply is Poirot. Prichard addressed it head-on in the casting announcement: "My father had the privilege of working with David Suchet for nearly 25 years." Now, he says, it's his turn to bring his great-grandmother's stories to a new generation.
The BBC's drama chief said they knew from Bluemel's first audition. Bluemel himself kept it short: "I can't wait to continue Hercule's legacy."
The smart move here is the one they made: don't remake the cases everyone knows. Go back before them.
Christie's Poirot books have sold something north of 750 million copies. The character has been played by Peter Ustinov, Albert Finney, Kenneth Branagh, John Malkovich, and about a dozen others. Nobody has done him young. Nobody has done him before he was a legend, when he was just a Belgian refugee with a very specific way of standing.
That's the pitch. That, and finding out who Jack Gleeson is.
