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Magpie Murders is back with the latest installment, Moonflower Murders. Like the first series, it follows Susan Ryeland (Lesley Manville), an editor, solving a real murder mirrored by a mystery in a client’s novel. Pippa Bennett-Warner plays Madeline, a character in the story within a story.
“I tried not to think about the play-within-the-plays type thing because what was happening to her was absolutely happening to her,” says Bennett-Warner of playing a fictional character, even within the world of the show. While the real mystery is happening in the present, Bennett-Warner’s character exists in the 1950s.
Says Anthony Horowitz, the author of the Magpie Murders book series, “We have a 1950s detective having a relationship with a 21st-century editor…there’s nothing on television that’s quite like it.”
Says Bennett-Warner of the period setting, “We’d look at the monitor after some of the takes and it just looked like it looked like a painting.” Adds Horowitz, “But…it’s not just about costumes and about weeks of makeup, although that is a huge part of it. It’s the performances as well. It’s the knowing how to be the ’50s woman.”
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He praises Manville and Bennett-Warner’s performances, saying, “If you’re going to talk about strong women in this show, we have two of the strongest women in the business, very different from each other, doing an absolutely wonderful job.”
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Horowitz points out that although the conceit of a story within a story is fun, there is a serious element to the series. It is, after all, about a murder. “A young woman has gone missing and…she knows too much and it seems that she may have been murdered herself,” he says. “She has parents and she has a, you know, a mourning husband and a child.”
Watch the interview above with Horowitz and Bennett-Warner for more on the series.
Moonflower Murders, Sundays 9/8c, PBS
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