When Rosalind Eleazar got married last year on a Greek island, she asked her agents not to contact her about work. But the day after the wedding (which took place in a mini amphitheatre – “we are so extra”) she was “exceptionally hungover” when she got a call about a job: the lead in Netflix’s new Harlan Coben adaptation, Missing You. Eleazar immediately bought the book and, to the mild annoyance of her new husband, the Italian producer and director Gabriele Lo Giudice (“he wasn’t best pleased”), spent her honeymoon reading it. “Those final five pages – are you kidding me?” She shakes her head, wide-eyed. “I did not in my wildest dreams imagine that was where it was going.”
It is a fairly typical reaction to a Coben story. Over the last few years, the mystery US author has turned his bestselling novels into an enormously successful televisual universe: this year’s Fool Me Once is Netflix’s most watched show of 2024, with 107.5m views. Eleazar is aware, though, that critics can be sniffy about the glossy and endlessly twisty adaptations. “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinions,” she says. “But a) there’s something for everyone; and b) let it live in the space that it’s trying to live in. It doesn’t need to be compared to Succession.”
In Missing You, which drops a bingeable five episodes on New Year’s Day, the 36-year-old, best known for Apple TV+’s spy thriller Slow Horses, heads up a cast that includes Lenny Henry, Ashley Walters and Coben regular Richard Armitage. We meet Detective Kat Donovan 11 years after the double trauma of her father’s murder and her fiance leaving without explanation. But when her ex pops up on a dating app, Donovan pulls at the thread, unravelling the reasons for his disappearance and the truth about her father’s death. Of course, this being Coben, there is also police corruption, multiple kidnappings and Steve Pemberton as a sinister dog breeder. “It’s relentless!” says Eleazar cheerfully. “What I like about [Donovan] is that she is a survivor. She has these moments where she is incredibly hurt but she picks herself right back up again. I think people in life do that a lot more than TV gives credit for.”
Having previously worked on Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, which employed colour-blind casting, Eleazar appreciated Missing You’s approach to race: “It was just allowing a predominantly Black cast to exist in the commercial world, having fun – well, not fun, because it’s a traumatic story! But they just exist and race isn’t mentioned … Consideration was taken into culture and by our costume designer, like with what the aunties are wearing. I’m always pushing to have my natural hair in shows and these were conscious decisions.”
The daughter of a white British mother and Ghanaian father, Eleazar was raised in Clapham, south London. “I was very much stuck to my mum as my protector,” she says. “I never really felt that I fitted in, without being too violin-y. I think it’s partly to do with being brought up by the white side of my family. Some of my earliest memories are of people not thinking my mum was my mum, so I spent a lot of time trying to prove she was.”
Eleazar and her mother regularly visited Ghana – “one of the most special places on the planet” – and after she graduated from the University of Nottingham with a degree in Mandarin and Spanish, she moved there for a couple of years. “One particular visit, [my father] had said: ‘When you finish uni, why don’t you come to live here, get to know the family, get to know me?’ Unfortunately, he died before then, but I decided to go anyway.” Several of her siblings are in Ghana’s film and TV industry and working for her brother’s production company reminded Eleazar how much she had loved acting in school plays. She ended up moving back to the UK to study at Lamda in her mid-20s and since graduating, her stage roles have included The Starry Messenger opposite Matthew Broderick, and Uncle Vanya, for which she won the 2020 Clarence Derwent award.
Now she and Lo Giudice live in east London, convenient for the apparently constant shooting of Eleazar’s biggest hit to date, Slow Horses. With series five already completed and due to air next year, she is filming series six and is clearly besotted with the show, which follows a ragtag bunch of MI5 misfits led by Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden. “Oh my God, I absolutely love it,” she says. “Do you know what I find interesting about the Slow Horses? It’s that they’re competent, but just objectionable. You don’t want to go to dinner with them.” Her feelings about the cast themselves couldn’t be more contradictory – they are extremely close and hit hard by the show’s willingness to bump off main characters: “When a person gets killed off, it shifts the energy.”
While Slow Horses was a sleeper hit, riding word-of-mouth buzz to its first Emmy win (for writing) in September, Eleazar knows that Missing You could not be more different: eagerly anticipated by millions of dedicated Coben fans ready for a post-Christmas hit of escapist thrills. “The fact is that people do gobble it up,” says Eleazar. “The figures are insane. In a way, it’s a bit of a shame that it’s binged. You’re like, ‘wow that’s just gone in five hours’ and it’s taken me five months and other people even longer to make. But look, that’s where we are.”
• All five episodes of Missing You will be on Netflix on 1 January.
