Adrian Lester: 'Riviera is Dynasty-sur-Mer'

Marble-decked mega-mansions, £50 million superyachts and the sun-kissed Côte d’Azur; no wonder Riviera, Sky Atlantic’s deliciously escapist new drama charting the dirty money of the super rich, has been described by producer, Krys Thikkier, as “the anti-Scandi noir”.

Exploring the rapidly - and often illicitly - made fortunes amassed by dealing in art, the last unregulated market in the world (and the third largest black market, behind drugs and arms trafficking) the glamorous 10-part thriller spins through so many twists, turns and family fall-outs that it has also been dubbed “Dynasty-sur-Mer”.

It’s a label that tickles Adrian Lester OBE, who plays dodgy art dealer Robert Carver, former flame of the show’s newly-widowed heroine, Georgina Clios (played by Julia Stiles, best known for the Bourne series).

“It is Dynasty-sur-Mer, a family with millions of dollars, pounds and euros involved, wondering whether they can they trust each other,” laughs Lester. 

Like its Eighties counterpart, “there’s a thread of thriller-esque unbelievability at the heart of it,” but the pacy plot and lavish setting - “scenery by nature and lighting by God” - should be more than enough to make the audience “forgive you for that and go, ‘I just had a great time watching it.’”

Spending a summer making it in Nice wasn’t so bad either, admits 48-year-old Lester, who still speaks with the gentle Midlands inflection of his native Birmingham. 

Created by Oscar-winning writer and director Neil Jordan, the series is based on an idea by former U2 manager Paul McGuinness, with the first two episodes co-written by Booker Prize-winning author John Banville and two episodes directed by Lester, himself.

Elements of the world of the mega-monied, however, proved tough to get to grips with. Lester often felt “outside of the window looking in. It took some getting used to, people spending a lot of money on things they thought were beautiful. I was just lost.”

During rehearsals, the cast were shown side-by-side pictures of an extravagant object and a piece of art and tasked with correctly guessing which was the most valuable; the diamond-encrusted watch, say, or the Jackson Pollock. Of the seven tests, they identified only one pair correctly - no wonder, really, given Lester’s usual environs of East Dulwich, though a charming slice of the capital, aren’t quite Cap d’Antibes. 

He lives there lives with his playwright wife Lolita Chakrabarti - whom he first met on the youth drama circuit in Birmingham when they were in their early teens - and daughters Lila, 16, and 13-year-old Jasmine. 

The family joined him for a break in shooting, chartering a boat around Monaco, Nice and on to Italy - a trip the girls largely spent “taking lots of snaps to share with friends”.

If they remain, in typical teenage fashion, distinctly nonplussed by their father’s fame, it has largely left Lester nonplussed, too. The son of Jamaican immigrants, he grew up with his single mother on a Birmingham council estate, and took up acting in his early teens before moving to London aged 18 to study at Rada (where he crossed paths with Chakrabarti again). He has worked steadily across television, stage and film ever since. 

Probably most widely known for his long-running stint as Mickey Briggs in BBC con-artist drama, <Hustle>, he garnered five-star reviews as Othello for Nicholas Hytner at the National.

It is in the quest for longevity, he says, that he keeps his personal life closed off in order to remain “chameleon-like”, giving little away about, well, anything, right down to his non-descript white t-shirt and black trousers. Doing the reverse, he believes, would be the “kiss of death. There are certain actors who, when they appear in a drama, you know exactly what you’re going to get. That’s not me - if that were my career, I’d find it boring. I don’t want to be pinned down.”

It’s a strategy that, if it leaves you feeling like you know less about Lester than when you first met, has paid off professionally. He has gone from con man to classicist and back again, picking up an Olivier award for his role as Robert in musical Company, a British Independent Film award nomination for his turn in Love’s Labour’s Lost with Kenneth Brannagh, which he only took “so I could dance in the style of Fred Astaire”. He will next be seen in Trauma, an upcoming ITV thriller opposite John Simm. 

For the all-singing, all-dancing Lester, though, there remains one area of his acting oeuvre untapped: action. In 2015 Anthony Horowitz, author of several ‘continuation’ Bond novels since Ian Fleming’s death, caused a furore by suggesting Idris Elba was “too street” to play 007, proposing instead that the role might be taken by the “suave” Lester. 

Previously tight-lipped on Horowitz’s assessment, today he admits, “it’s a shame it garnered so much negative attention.” Bookies are currently offering odds of 50/1 on him taking up the shaken Martini mantle, but he dismisses it as an annual hubbub: “The rumour mill gets started, and then you’re put on a list, people talk about it for a bit, and then it goes away.” He does admit, though, that “one day I’d like to run around after bad guys. The teenager in me is still there - just.”

He came closest to indulging his butt-kicking fantasies in Spiderman 3, the 2007 Marvel film starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, spending a week in LA dabbling in the land of special effects and, to his delight, getting thrown through a window. But the scenes were ultimately dropped; his appearance relegated “to the outtakes somewhere.” 

Ever methodical, Lester takes the lows as well as the highs in his stride, confessing that he is “one of those actors who does read reviews,” and sometimes amends performances accordingly. 

Yet for the most part, he responds to the rest of the world as he does those ever-bubbling Bond rumours. “I hear it, I smile and I move on.”

All episodes of Riviera will be available from tomorrow on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV.