Who is Annika?
short | 04:44 | CC
Learn from star Nicola Walker and her colleagues what the TV series Annika is all about, what it’s based on, and discover why DI Annika Strandhed is such a breath of fresh air.
- [Nicola Walker] I play DI Annika Strandhed who works for the Marine Homicide Unit.
And this is a new unit that I'm heading up.
I should have got cupcakes.
- Part of the appeal for the team is they've heard about this kind of off the war, maverick detective and they all want be a part of it.
- [Nicola Walker] Annika's very unusual.
Actually, I can't think of many characters like her.
I don't need to be the first you call, but I definitely need to be in the top three.
She seems to me to be incredibly confident without ever being egotistical.
It's very appealing to play someone who is as playful as her and has invested in her job and her life.
But she's funny, you know, I like her, I liked her on the page, the first time I read her.
We're done.
Thanks for coming.
Especially you, you were a real treat.
- Annika's origin started on the radio and I was commissioned to write what started out to be just a couple of crime shows for a new female detective.
And then, because that was so successful and it did have an audience and we had Nicola right from the very start, it soon became clear that it was a bit of a no brainer to turn this into a TV show.
And that's where the journey started.
And so by the time we got to the TV we just knew exactly who she was, how she reacted and the kind of choices that she makes.
But now Annika and Nicola for me has all been sort of completely interchangeable really.
And a lot of how she and I talk outside of the show feels a little bit like material from Annika sometimes.
So it's been a really important part of the writing process.
- I don't know if we would ever been able to make Annika the show without Nicola Walker.
She is Annika.
She has her quirks and her wit and her literary brilliance down to a T. And, you know, she just is entirely relatable and we just wanna kind of be her friend and be with her all the time and we get her struggles and we get her daily grind and trying to be a leader and trying to be a mom.
And that she's sort of lonely in this unit and looking for a bit of romance.
And I think, you know, we just all empathize.
- [Speaker] Why don't you bring anyone home?
You know, like boyfriends?
- She's not troubled in that kind of conventional troubled cop trope.
What she does is that she sort of she rolls with the punches very much whilst at the same time being incredibly smart and solving crimes in particular ways.
So one of the things we were interested in was looking at crimes, which had this sort of more mythical or metaphorical sort of resonance, if you like.
And that her key to solving them is sort of in this kind of bigger context really.
So that her intuitions are really wide ranging.
- So I don't know if you are an expert on the history of harpoons, but I am, or rather Google is, and I can tell you that they date back to paleolithic times and there's a reference to them in the Bible.
And of course Herman Melville had a lot to say about them and Moby Dick.
- She'll draw on kind of literary works or she'll draw on, you know, sort of bits of history or she'll draw on, you know various sort of the history of navigation or something.
And we are interested in bringing that out so that it is not this a sort of forensics based show at all.
It's more about these sort of slightly more kind of human and epic kind of crimes.
And so they're solved in that way as well.
And so she inhabits that world.
And so it makes her a very sort of different and unique kind of detective.
- [Nicola Walker] It works for her personality.
She's got quite an odd way of looking at life.
She looks at, you know, through the books, she's read through stories, she's been told.
It all comes into the case.
The Marine Homicide Unit is by its nature, concerned with death, but Annika by her nature is concerned with life.
And those two things for her run together.
While she's investigating these sometimes appalling crimes, she's also investigating her life and lives of the people that she loves.
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