Yannick Bisson’s riding a wave of great popularity aboard Bravo!’s Murdoch Mysteries express.
Yannick Bisson’s riding a wave of great popularity aboard Bravo!’s Murdoch Mysteries express.
Fans around the world are following the adventures of a Victorian era Toronto police detective now entering its fourth season. Bisson’s cool, brainy Murdoch is about as far as it gets from TV’s contemporary police: forensic science is primitive at best, psychological profiling unheard of and yet he is able to solve the most gruesome crimes with common sense and instinct.
The series is meticulously researched and its stories are as viable today as some of the events that inspired them were in the 1890’s.
Monsters and Critics - Detective Murdoch is an interesting character in this day and age – he’s courtly, mannerly, he doesn’t constantly gesture as actors do in contemporary roles.
Yannick Bisson - I definitely wanted to create a physicality for Det. Murdoch that was unlike myself and unlike modern day characters but also that would be apropos for the time. It was also a tool, a calling card to transcend his class and upbringing.
He is a fish out of water in a system that is predominantly WASP Anglo and he’s Catholic and so he has that something he exudes that overcomepensates a little bit. The system didn’t allow for the advancement of Papists. That was a reality.
The whole notion of Victorian sensibility cut both ways. There was the gender separation, being proper, class separation that if you’re watching the show you may not notice but we work hard on maintaining it.
M&C - Murdoch uses such interesting, old-fashioned phraseology, obviously. It helps us step back in time.
YB - It was new for me and I really enjoy it. That’s the part of the show I enjoy the most. You can really hear the writers’ brains ticking and all the reseearch and delving into the time period and it definitely makes my job easier.
M&C - Toronto is very much a character in the series, not UK or States.
YB - We had a very pedominant place in that time, along the Great Lakes, huge prosperity thanks to the shipping channel and all the ports along the way, Port Hope, Port Perry, Cambridge, Hamilton, Peterbroough places like that were firmly ensconced as part of the trade route and you can see it this day.
We shoot an hour out of town and there are all these beautifiul brick homes of the middle management of the time. It’s all gone now but the achitecture remains. And Buffalo! Buffalo was wealthy, and Allentown, Pittsburgh, all the cities on the trade routes.
M&C - Forensic science was in its infancy during the time of the Murdoch Mysteries. Todfay there is so a part of mainstream, modern consciousness thanks to police precedural shows.
YB - Everybody wants to get away with it, but ooooh, they don’t!
M&C – Murdoch is so sure of himself and part of that is his understanding of human behaviour. How did he develop that skill?
YB - Part of what I’m trying to with Det. Murdoch is to challenge his notions of things. He’s so sure of himself in so many ways and I wanted to have is to that these people and these characters and the reasoning for their crimes fly in the face of everything he’s known and thought.
I try to play Det. Murdoch as very certain about a lot of things, but being on a constant discovery. He is the cradle of emotion for the audience, he nudges then to the left and right and feel a little here and there.
In a way he becomes the calm in the centre of the storm, most of the time and also he is also the eyes of the audience. We’re going to do some different things too, so watch for it! All I know is that it’s going to be a little bit different. Definitely.
M&C - Murdoch is a religious man. He crosses himself at crime scenes; he has an immediate spiritual response.
YB - I wonder if you are confronted with that kind of huanity every day, if you would have those spiritual confrontations. It symbolises the spirituality that exists in all of us, despite the stripe or colour of whatever religion you can choose.
It brings the audience to that one point in each episode, ah yes, something has happened.
M&C – Your relationship with the medical examiner, Dr. Ogden, is a bit of a tease.
YB – It can’t happen at the moment, the things that are between them can’t be, and as a spectator, I don’t know that I’d want it to be because you have to turn the page. Many did it in TV and it was a dagger right through the heart.
That’s a standard thing we will have to avoid and also, you as a spectator will watch and root for them. It’s that savoury thing, if it happens too fast or slow, it’s not good, or not at all, it’s not good. I met my wife young, I married young, I was sure, I was certain and jumped in with both feet, and I’m glad I did to this day.
But all I can say is that the relationship between Osgoode and I will be more complicated.
M&C - The story lines are wonderfully diverse – from the elite world of international art theft, to the down and dirty traveling circus world to a Royal assassination attempt. That’s exciting stuff!
YB - To have our character mix with someone like Tesla, or to all of a sudden be having tea with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it’s funny and preposterous in some ways and completely possible in other ways.
Like we said, Toronto was a prominent place. Who knows? We mix it up in this ten year period, but a lot of things happened back then, it was a big deal.
M&C – tThere are some clever winks to our times, like recently when Murdoch said that everything would be miniaturised, like telegraphs.
YB - We have fun with it! It’s so much more fun when youre dancing around something everybody already knows! You’re sure not to lose anybody; everyone already knows eventually what’s going to happen.
M&C – The show’s seen all over the world. Are you thrilled?
YB - I’m told that’s a good thing! I’ve been part of shows that have had international sales but I’m not too savvy on that and what equates a success. But we are going to a fourth season and that ratings keep climbing in every sector is highly unusual. Most shows start hight and it takes a mathematical juggling act to make it and until that magic number for syndication comes, and well, anything can happen. We’re growing and still growing, and it’s a thrill to be involved in a project that people enjoy – and watch!
M&C – Does the idea of being seen around the world have an effect on you?
YB - I don’t know, I don’t know, sometimes it does sometimes it doesn’t. I’m happy to be working on a show I enjoy, my family watches in my own home country and that other people watch. Sheesh, man, what more can you ask for? It’s a grand slam.
Murdoch Mysteries will take it’s show on the road again this season, perhaps France, Italy, back to England, and if Bisson’s dream comes true, there will be a train mystery in the ordre of the Orient Express, ‘going into dark tunnels’, he says.
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