The Cast

(slow piano music) - My names Jamie Sives and I'm playing the character of Jake.

- My name is Ruth Bradley and I play Angie.

- My name is Sian Brooke and I play Claire.

- My name's Emun Elliott and I play Kenny.

- My name's Ellie Haddington and I'm playing Sheila.

- My name is Bill Patterson and I'm playing the part of Roy.

- My name is Moyo Akande and I'm playing Tina on "Guilt."

- "Guilt" is about two brothers, Max and Jake, who, on their way home from a wedding one night, knock an old man over and kill him, and try and cover it up.

- Jake is one of two brothers.

Him and Max have an estranged relationship.

- They've grown up apart, to all intents and purposes, really having kind of minimal contact since quite an early age.

- Well, he's kind of a sort of Hibs supporting, fading rocker, who has a vinyl store in Leith.

It's kind of written for me.

Yeah, I've got a lot for free in this one.

- Max is a commercial lawyer who has a big office in the city, and he's married to the very beautiful Claire.

And they have a big house, he drives a Jag, and he loves all of that.

- In this world, her and Max have been married for many years, and she sort of got lost in this material world, and actually, that's not her.

And so she's trying to sort of find a way out of it.

- As the story opens up, the world opens up, too.

You start to meet more characters, like Jake meets Angie, who's the niece of Walter, the man he's just killed, and falls in love with her.

- A little bit about Angie.

She is, I think, at a crossroads in her life.

- Every single relationship in the story becomes very complicated.

- I love all this stuff with Mark.

It's like a real clash they have.

And yeah, there's some similarities between them.

- Tina is a character that I've never come across before and have never had the opportunity to play.

She's intelligent, but she's also very mysterious and alluring.

I thought, "Ooh, right, I wanna dig deeper with her.

I wanna find out what's going on."

So with Tina, what you see isn't necessarily what you get.

- Kenny is a private investigator.

He's a family man, and he works with Max quite a lot.

- You're sacked.

- Emun, who plays Kenny, is extraordinary.

- (laughing) Very hard to keep a straight face with Emun.

- He's like a really memorable character that I think the audience is gonna love.

- The cast that we're showing for today is Scotland's.

We had to open it up and we had to think outside the box a little bit.

- It's not usual suspects.

It's this great, really thought about, considered casting.

- It was very clear to me that I wanted to cast against type.

That was great fun, because then you start to realize the wealth of talent you have here who maybe don't get considered for those kind of roles.

And actually, what we did sometimes, was cast a role, somebody in a role, they should playing the hard man, but instead they play the inept lawyer.

- Even though you will know some of their faces, the what they're doing isn't what you know them doing.

- I used to play quite a lot of not very nice men over the years, and I'd kind of drifted away from them and played nicer people.

And I thought that'd be quite nice to go back to playing somebody who has absolutely no redeeming features.

- Whatever character I'm playing, I have to find some redeeming features within them.

And I can find quite a lot of really good things about Sheila, although there are quite dark sides to her, which makes it a very exciting role to play.

- Having just played the wooliest of all human beings and there's Dad in "Fleabag," we didn't really know what he feels about anything.

I like the way that Roy knows exactly what he says and who he's frightening by saying it.

- For me, casting is all about having big ideas on what is the most unusual way of looking at this, and what's the most diverse way of looking at this, but also, what's the kind of chemistry you're trying to create.

And every single relationship we had in this show, I think, has been really beautiful calibrated and the casting's been really well done.

(upbeat music)