Interview with Sanjeev Bhaskar on Unforgotten Season 6
In Unforgotten Season 6, DI Sunny Khan is finally back on solid ground after a rocky period of adjustment. With newfound confidence in his partnership at work, Sunny dives headfirst into a puzzling new murder case. In a new interview, Sanjeev Bhaskar discusses his character’s working relationship with DCI Jess James, some emotional moments from filming, and Sunny’s evolving relationship with the team’s pathologist.
[This interview contains spoilers for Unforgotten Season 4.]
Is it nice to have a more relaxed feel between Sunny and Jess this season?
It’s interesting because, yes, absolutely, if you get on, then everything becomes a little bit easier. But it’s also really great fun to play antagonistically with someone that you really like, because you can push it a little further and you can go a little further. So that was fun in Season 5, certainly for me. Sunny was carrying around a lot of grief in Season 5, which can be very heavy when you’re filming it. Somebody said that when you’re performing something intense, your body doesn’t know the difference. Your body doesn’t know that you’re pretending so it has to go through the weightiness of grief, or anger, or any of those challenging emotions, but it’s made a lot easier when you’re surrounded with people who you like. So that was an interesting place for me as an actor to be.
So at the start of this season, would you say we see Sunny starting to move his life forward?
Yes, Sunny is definitely in a better place and a little more hopeful. I think he has re-found, not that he ever lost enthusiasm for the job, but he’s re-found his enthusiasm for the work environment that he’s in, so he’s definitely in a better place than he was.
What was it like working with the guest stars?
It was just fantastic. It’s one of the joys of this series. MyAnna Buring and Max Fairley – I think it was Max’s first job. Elham Ehsas, Victoria Hamilton. It’s a privilege for me to watch them work, just be sharing scenes with them, but to be sitting a foot away from them, having to convey quite complex things, and watching them do it with such grace and skill. I remember that feeling, especially in Season 1, sitting across from these exalted stars – it was like having the best seat in the theater. You can see everything. The four of them, this time, with all the supporting cast behind them, were fantastic. You know, it’s lovely to initially see and hear real voices and see real people embodying these characters that you’ve read about on the page. But to share scenes with them is glorious. I was blown away in the scenes that we did together, and I would tell them that as well.
What about the locations this year?
I mean, the Marsh was freezing. Absolutely freezing. It was the first scene that we did. Boy, we were cold that day. It was thermos flasks and hot water bottles. But also, one of the storylines takes us to Ireland, which we couldn’t get to in terms of the whole team, but we shot in Wales. Wales was absolutely stunning. It was beautiful there, and we had a couple of Irish actors in the cast who said, “This is exactly what the bit of Ireland where story is set looks like.” I did wonder what the locals thought when a Garda car pulled up in the street. It took ages to get to, but once you were there, it was perfect.
After six seasons, what do you still love about Sunny? What keeps you coming back to that role?
It’s the layers. I don’t think we knew too much about him in the first three seasons certainly. The audience was beginning to get to know him, and therefore I was getting to know him, across four, five and now six. That’s Chris [Lang] writing Sunny, going into different aspects of his psyche, rather than just more information. There’s more about how he’s thinking or how he’s feeling than we did in the others. I am a very small cog in that beautifully intricate machine and very happy to be. And I realize how lucky I am.
We see Sunny out having fun with work colleague, pathologist Leanne Balcombe, played by Georgia Mackenzie. Tell us about that relationship.
Well, there’s a number of things. First of all, doing scenes with Georgia is always a joy. It’s always been a joy. In earlier seasons, when she came in, she was giving us the information about the body, and so there was a lot of info that she had to convey to us, which was all very technical, but it was always such a laugh when she came in. She’s just one of those joyous people that brings that joy with her.
But also, within the storyline, Leanne and Sunny were the last two people who ever saw Cassie alive, and that connects them. So in this season, we see them build on something, build on a connection that is not based on Cassie – it’s based on them as people and where they go with it. So, in that sense, there is something that blossoms there. But being Chris [Lang], there are also very heady cliffs that suddenly appear as well. It’s not plain sailing.
