Get to Know Maigret’s Leading Man, Benjamin Wainwright
If you love crime dramas, now’s the time to get to know leading man Benjamin Wainwright, who picks up the iconic Maigret mantle in the new and contemporary adaptation of Georges Simenon’s famed detective series. Meet the British actor, outdoorsman, dog dad, and Francophile playing Chief Inspector Jules Maigret on MASTERPIECE on PBS.
I understand that over 100 actors auditioned for the role of Jules Maigret! What was it like for you to audition and find out you’d landed the role?
Well, it’s incredibly competitive and you never really have an inkling—even if you’ve done a good audition, you don’t know who’s been in before you and who’s going in afterwards. And not being much of a name myself, I always feel like an underdog. So to get a role like this, it’s quite life-changing. And to be leading your own show, it’s a hell of a step up, but it’s really satisfying to have a seat at the table and be like, “Oh, actually my opinion has some weight, finally.” That was great.
But the casting process, in a way, was incredibly brief—I sent in a tape, I went for a recall, and thought it had gone away. And then I was on holiday, actually in France at the time, and had just had a really hellish journey through a hailstorm, and I missed a call from my agent. I called him once we got to the flat and he said, “You’ve got Maigret and you need to be in London on Friday.” I was like, “I’ve just got to the Alps and you’re telling me I’ve got to go back.” But this is always the way for actors: just book a holiday if you want a job. So yeah, I was in France, and we spent days reorganizing our life and working out who was going to look after the dog and that kind of thing. It was great news.
How wonderful that you were in France when you found out you’d snagged the role of the iconic French detective!
I have such a soft spot for France. I speak French, I’m a real Francophile. It’s weird how these things trickled down into how I would then interpret Maigret—I think it’s helpful, and it makes me feel a little bit less like an intruder on this job and more like it belongs to me. And we had other French speakers on the set, so it was quite fun to be able to be like, “There’s a little reason, maybe, why I got this part.”
With authentic French woven into Maigret, in the TV news, in the text messages, it’s great that you are a French speaker.
Our writer and director, Patrick Harbinson, speaks French, I speak French, Reda Elazour, who plays Lapointe, speaks beautiful French, and is half French, so we were all there keeping an eye on the details. But I’m coming still from a foreigner’s perspective, I’m like a tourist. I love France from a tourist point of view. We filmed in Paris and Budapest, which is an incredible double for Paris.
Do you have a favorite French food?
I mean, it’s a cliché, but I have at least one croissant a day, sometimes more. I really do. It’s embarrassing, but I love them. Budapest has incredible patisseries, bizarrely—I think because the croissant, they say, was originally invented in Vienna, and it learned it from Vienna, so there’s amazing bakeries there. And I spent a lot of time trying to find which was the perfect croissant in Budapest. So it sounds like a made-up answer, but Ijust love a massive croissant, and cheeses, all of the old-fashioned, really unhealthy French stuff, and strong, thick black coffee, all of it.
Besides the search for the perfect croissant, what did you get up to when the cameras weren’t rolling?
It was a very sociable cast, and bizarrely, we had a producer who was absolutely so keen on badminton—which is a very weird racket sport—that he insisted we played every weekend. And it got incredibly competitive. Some of us had played before, some of us hadn’t. And it became a bit of a Sunday routine as in we go and play a few hours of badminton. So that was good fun. And Budapest is a very cool city to explore. There’s flea markets, there’s the beautiful Danube snaking through the city. We were on boat tours and off into the Buda Hills and stuff. And it’s an incredible culinary destination, so a lot of very good dinners.
Was there anyone on the cast who surprised you in the badminton games?
I’ll tell you what, Kerrie Hayes, who plays Andrea Lucas, was a complete beginner at badminton, but became so committed that now back in the UK, she’s started her own badminton club because she couldn’t find one where she lived, and is now pioneering a badminton league. And the producer, Tim Whitby, is an absolute shark, just dead-eyed competitor. He and I had some vicious, vicious games, especially weeks where he’d been pissing me off for one reason or another, we’d get quite feisty on the court. So that was good stress relief!
Aside from your love of France and your newfound love of badminton, what else can we learn about you?
Well, I’m a bit like Maigret in this respect: I am always trying to get away from people. I live in the countryside now, an hour outside of London. And I love the outdoors. I love mountains. I love the coast. I have a dog that requires a hell of a lot of walking and running, and keeps me very busy.
I think through my encounter with France as a kid, camping in Brittany and messing around on boats and stuff, and then going to the mountains in the winter and skiing—I have a very idealized view of France in that respect. But all of my hobbies are very much tied to the outdoors. Yeah, anything like bikes, running, I climb. Take your pick. If you get around a countryside area on it, then I like it and probably, I do it.
Is there a certain mountain or excursion that you’d love to experience some day?
Yeah, there’s a ski mountaineering route in the Alps that is a week, where you go from hut to hut and you climb up on your skis and you ski down and you climb up and you ski down on repeat. I’ve done a bit of it before, and I’ve climbed Mont Blanc, which is a two-day trip, but I’d love to do a proper expedition like that. Or Japan—I’d love to ski in Japan before everything goes and climate change threatens it all. But I really like getting places under my own steam, I guess, is what unites it all. I think it’s too easy to fly around nowadays, and you don’t connect A to B, and I do. I like to move at a human pace, I guess. I’m quite old-fashioned.
