The trailer for the BBC’s highly-anticipated thriller series Inside Man has finally dropped, and as could have been predicted, it’s trending online.
The story follows four wildly different characters: there’s an English vicar (played by David Tennant), an inmate on death row (played by Stanley Tucci), an investigative journalist (played by Lydia West) and a maths teacher, who is stuck in a cellar (played by Dolly Wells).
“There are moments that make murderers of us all,” says Tucci’s character Jefferson Grieff as the trailer opens. We see Grieff in a high detention prison, and then Tennant’s character outside a church speaking to the congregation.
“No one is safe from the worse that they can do,” Grieff then says. The screen then cuts to back-to-back scenes of someone holding a hammer, someone looking at a golf club, someone opening a roll of duck tape, people looking strangely at each other on the tube, the vicar leaning on a table looking distraught, and repeated knocking at a door.
The trailer ends with some ominous words: “Everyone is a murderer,” says Grieff. “You just have to meet the right person.”
Inside Man has been cloaked in secrecy since it was announced last year, so naturally the trailer release has caused a stir online.
“David Tennant AND Stanley Tucci??? I think I died and went to heaven,” commented one fan on the YouTube video, while another said: “You see David Tennant; you don’t think you just watch.”
The puzzle presented in the one-minute trailer is how each character’s seemingly separate lives will end up becoming entangled. The four-part series has been written by BAFTA and Emmy award-winning writer Steven Moffat who also penned Doctor Who, Sherlock and The Time Traveler’s Wife.
Paul McGuigan, who directed the 2020 BBC One miniseries Dracula, is behind the camera, and Sue Vertue, who previously worked on some episodes of Mr. Bean, The Vicar of Dibley, Sherlock and Doctor Who, is executive producing.
“I just read the script and wanted to be part of [the show],” said Tennant to the BBC. “It’s very particular to Steven Moffat’s brain.”
Tennant, who most recently had a cameo role in Netflix’s fantasy horror The Sandman, said: “From my character’s point of view, it’s a story about a man who, in pursuit of doing the right thing, makes a series of catastrophically bad decisions.”
“These two very distinct storylines are both entirely plausible, textured and fascinating in themselves and they are running side by side. It’s very difficult I think to immediately imagine how they will ever come together on different sides of the world, for these characters living entirely separate existences, they couldn’t seem to be more different,” he added.
Speaking to The Guardian, Tucci said: “One of the overriding themes of the piece is that we are all murderers. We could all potentially kill somebody. And I do believe that.
“I’m not a true crime guy. I hate that stuff, to be honest. I once dated somebody who loved watching all those documentaries about serial killers. I couldn’t stand it. I played a serial killer in The Lovely Bones and doing the research alone was f**king awful.”
Tucci also has a role in the forthcoming Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody, playing record producer Clive Davis.
