In times hypersensitive to “authentic” portrayal, did the issue arise of Freeman “scousing up” and taking work from native Merseyside performers? Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardianīorn in Hampshire, Freeman delivers Chris’s whispers and screams in Schumacher’s Liverpudlian accent. ‘Being in the police was one long LSD trip’. There are moments of such different size and I wanted to get them all in.” Schumacher wanted to capture all the extremes of emergency police work: “One minute you’re speaking as gently as you can to a recently bereaved relative, the next you’ve got someone restrained on the floor and you’re screaming in their face. You’d go into a pub and there’d be a llama there for some reason. “Being in the police,” says Schumacher, “was like some long LSD trip. And it’s not: here’s a funny bit, now here’s a tragic bit. “What I loved about The Responder, from first reading it,” says Freeman, “was its world in which there are laugh-out-loud moments, but it so quickly turns into something else.
The Responder sits in the subset of roles – up there with Sherlock and Fargo – that ricochet between wit and grit. This part continues a performing curve that has seen Freeman rise from sitcom ( The Office, Hardware) through Hollywood Tolkien ( The Hobbit) to meaty dramatic parts, including a detective disciplined for breaking the rules while catching a killer in true-crime drama A Confession. “The producers deliberately shot the first part of The Responder as much as possible in order,” says Freeman, “which did really help establish the louring, foreboding sense something is about to fucking go off.”
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