Line of Duty's Martin Compston: 'When I lose that chip, I'll lose an edge'

If you’ve only ever seen Martin Compston in Line of Duty, playing DS Steve Arnott with his wide-boy Estuary accent, you’d be startled to meet him in person and hear his gruff, playful Scottish brogue. He’s played Arnott, whose accent he modelled on rogue bank trader Nick Leeson, for nine years, but even now at wrap parties crew are shocked to hear his real voice. He keeps up Arnott’s accent on set, only dropping it for ‘the wife and the family – the family wouldn’t speak to me otherwise!’ he laughs.

Why isn’t Steve Arnott Scottish? ‘It’s a question Scottish people cannae let go,’ he says. And it’s a question that’s only become more urgent since the phenomenal success of Line of Duty (the final episode of its sixth series attracted 12.8 million viewers). But he simply plays Arnott how he was written in the original brief. ‘If he was Scots my life would probably be easier,’ Compston grins.

Today Compston, 37, is also minus Arnott’s trademark waistcoat, which he chose for his character, who ‘does think he’s a bit of a ladykiller’ and ‘sees himself as a great detective, like Sherlock Holmes’. Instead he’s wearing a white T-shirt and sporting a beard almost as impressive as the one he has in his latest role, as a submariner in the BBC thriller Vigil. With his cheeky grin and boyish good looks, he’s dark and handsome, but not especially tall, standing at 5ft 8in – jokes about which creator Jed Mercurio added into Line of Duty’s script.

We’re meeting over Zoom, with Compston dialling in from his flat in Greenock, on Scotland’s west coast, where he’s been staying for the past few months with his wife and son while shooting another thriller, Amazon Prime’s The Rig. He bought the flat in his home town two years ago to be close to his family, who still live nearby.

Now he splits his time between here, ‘hotel rooms and serviced apartments’, and Las Vegas, where he has a home with his wife Tianna Flynn, 34 (whom he married in 2016), and their two-year-old son. Although as a family they try to stick together, especially since becoming parents. ‘It changes everything – your priorities and your life. Our family comes first,’ he says. He feels ‘very lucky she [Tianna] knows what stage I’m at in my career, it’s tough going for us, but it’s not always going to be this way.’

As we chat, Compston’s sitting in an unassuming, modern stainless-steel kitchen. Behind him is a view of the River Clyde and the submarine base, where Vigil is set. ‘A submarine is a glamorous or secret thing to a lot of people, but where I grew up you see them on a monthly, if not weekly, basis,’ he says.

He stars alongside Suranne Jones in the series, playing a sailor on a fictional nuclear Royal Navy submarine, on which a murder investigation unfolds. From the makers of Line of Duty and Bodyguard, it’s the kind of pacy drama at which Compston excels, and the type of role to which he gravitates.

Following his breakthrough performance as teenage criminal Liam in Ken Loach’s gritty Sweet Sixteen in 2002, he starred with Robert Downey Jr in the violently intense A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006), before playing Scotland’s most notorious killer John Burns in The Wee Man (2013). He has been DS Arnott since 2012, through six edge-of-the-seat series. ‘I’m better when I really have to get my teeth into something and focus,’ he grins. ‘With that emotional, high-octane stuff, you can’t half-arse it, you need to be on your game.’

Is he not longing for a sedate historical piece? He laughs. He did watch Bridgerton during lockdown. And was in talks for ‘one particular big’ period drama, but it never happened. He doesn’t sound too disappointed. So, if you’re longing to see Compston in breeches, you’ll have to wait, although in Vigil he does don a sailor’s outfit.

Vigil resonates with Compston on various levels. His late grandfather was in the merchant navy. After a few whiskies, he’d tell stories of his travels. Compston had ‘a wee moment’ after shooting a portrait for the show that mirrored one he has of his grandfather. ‘We’ve got his wee picture, just before he went to war. He doesn’t look that bothered, whereas I was worried about whether this hat made me look daft – just completely conflicting problems.’

He’s passionate about Scotland. ‘This is where I’m from – it’s who I am,’ he says, proud that Scotland’s come into its own recently with Indiana Jones, The Batman, The Flash and The Rig – set on an oil rig off the Scottish coast – all being filmed there. ‘We’ve always had these incredible locations, but people would come up, go on location, then leave and film the interior somewhere else. Now they’re staying to shoot the whole thing.’

Vigil dramatically juxtaposes languid shots of the vast, cold Scottish sea with the mounting panic unfolding below the surface. ‘A proper claustrophobic thriller asking big, big questions,’ says Compston. One such question is whether nuclear ships should be based in Scotland, a debate about which Compston, a supporter of Scottish independence, feels strongly – agreeing with the SNP’s position that nuclear weapons have no place in an independent Scotland. ‘Scotland doesn’t need nuclear weapons,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t sit easy with me. It’d be money I’d prefer to see spent on schools and hospitals… we’re not planning to go to war any time soon. And if we were, I wouldn’t be planning on blowing up millions of people in another country. But I’m sure there are reasons for these things… power and government prestige.’

Vigil’s set designers built a mock-up of a functioning sub, so actors could move between the control room, quarters and ‘down below’, ‘so you could really get a sense of that world. Tensions must boil over, it can be quite a high-octane place to work,’ he says.

Compston spent his own lockdown in rather less claustrophobic conditions, posting Line of Duty skits from his pool in Las Vegas, where he’s had his place since 2019. ‘It was the most time I’ve ever spent there,’ he says. It was also his first Vegas summer: ‘I’ll never do that again! It’s between 45 and 50 degrees, it’s insanely hot.’

It’s hard to imagine a more extreme contrast than Greenock and Vegas, a difference exacerbated by the fact Compston is mega-famous in Scotland and relatively unknown in the US. Schitt’s Creek’s Stevie, actor Emily Hampshire (who stars with him in The Rig), described walking around Scotland with him as like being ‘with Justin Bieber’. Bars have named cocktails after him – the ‘Compston-politan’ – and there’s a mural of him on his local pub.

‘Growing up here I never thought anybody would want a picture or my autograph or do a painting of me,’ he says. ‘It can get a bit overwhelming.’ But he loves being here because it’s home, and he’s still close to a group of 10 or so friends who he grew up with, and has kept his ‘best pals since I was two – the four of us all went to school and played football together’.

By contrast, ‘what I love about Vegas is the anonymity’. Part of what attracted him to Flynn was that when he met her in 2013 – late in an empty hotel bar in LA, where she was working as a nightclub manager – she had no idea who he was. ‘It really helped that she just liked me for me,’ he says. ‘With actors, we’re all self-conscious and paranoid. I liked the fact that she had no scooby who I was, we just had a laugh, exchanged numbers and went on dates.’ They married at Compston’s family chapel in Greenock before a party at Mar Hall, Renfrewshire. The bride was stunning in white. The groom wore a kilt.

Today she’s ‘the biggest support in my life, the person I talk to most for advice, she’s the person to tell me to shut up and stop overthinking things’. Right now, she is with him in Scotland. ‘She really embraces life here,’ he grins, telling me she does a funny Scottish accent and is a fan of Irn-Bru, square sausage and rain. ‘It’s bizarre to me that she loves the rain – it drives me up the wall, ye cannae do anything! But she loves it because she didn’t get any growing up in the desert.’ Flynn grew up in Vegas – her family now live just a few streets from their house.

You can understand the connection Compston feels to Greenock. His story begins here – with an oil-rig welder-turned-taxi-driver father and a mother who was an office manager. A working-class family living in an area that, for all its breathtaking beauty, is one of Scotland’s most deprived. Although Compston insists ‘we never really wanted for anything – if me and my brother needed a pair of football boots we got them’. (His older brother Barry is now a carer.) Still, he admits, ‘growing up was rough and ready – I got myself into a few scrapes’. School ‘was wild. There was always somebody’s head going through a door or a fire extinguisher going off.’ Kids fought each other in battles that ‘must have looked like Braveheart, but it wasn’t really that bad’.

As a teenager his first love was football. He played professionally for his home side Greenock Morton, before signing for Aberdeen, but he longed to play for Celtic. He was also ‘book-smart’ and good at English with a self-conscious love of performance, fostered by a teacher who encouraged him to read out loud in class. But it wasn’t until he was 15 and he saw Ken Loach’s My Name Is Joe on a double date at the local cinema, that he imagined becoming an actor. ‘It was people who spoke like me. I didn’t know we could be on the screen… I was thinking, “I could do that.”’

Incredibly, shortly after, Loach came to Greenock looking for an unknown to cast as a troubled working-class teenager in Sweet Sixteen – a film shot on Greenock’s council estates. Compston’s teacher encouraged him to try out. At the auditions, he saw other kids in blazers, doing vocal warm-ups, and thought, ‘What the f—k are you doing? People from here don’t do vocal warm-ups.’ He remembers ‘acting hard’, intimidating people ‘because I knew they weren’t from where I was from. It was surreal. It just felt really natural,’ he says modestly of his electrifying performance. ‘I’m so lucky that he [Loach] was casting a film. At that time. When I was that age. I’ll be forever grateful to him.’

The role won Compston most promising newcomer at the British Independent Film Awards in 2002, and made him the toast of Cannes Film Festival. He then decided to give up professional football, despite being encouraged not to by Loach. ‘He said, “You can have all the talent in the world in this job, but unless people take a chance on you…” I think he realised it’s quite cut-throat.’

Unlike children from acting dynasties who breeze into plum roles, it was ‘definitely a slog’ for Compston. Initially he battled preconceptions: ‘People thought I was that kid [from Sweet Sixteen]. So that was pretty tough.’ He never went to drama school, but saw his role in Monarch of the Glen (2003-2005) as an opportunity to learn on the job from actors such as Tom Baker and Susan Hampshire.

He feels there have been positives to fighting for what he’s got. ‘When I lose that chip, I’ll lose an edge. While I keep thinking, “You’re working class, you’re a wee short arse, you shouldn’t be here,” as long as I don’t think I belong, then there’s going to be a bit of an edge to me. When I go on to most jobs, I feel like I’ve got something to prove. And it keeps me ticking over.’

Did he ever regret leaving football? ‘Not the way Scotland played,’ he laughs of their performance in the Euros, before pointing out that as a footballer he’d be retired by now. ‘I still feel like a young actor, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I completely made the right decision.’ He cherishes his career for giving him the opportunity to travel and meet his wife. ‘All that kind of stuff would never have happened.’

As we’re wrapping up, it’s time for my Line of Duty questions. ‘No comment, no comment, no comment!’ he laughs. After six series working with Vicky McClure (DI Kate Fleming), Adrian Dunbar (Superintendent Ted Hastings) and writer Jed Mercurio, ‘the four of us will be pals for life’. He has no idea if the show will return, but points out that Mercurio always takes a couple of years between series to recalibrate his plot.

He’s picked up so much from working with all of them. From Dunbar he’s learnt that ‘life begins at 60. He’s got a zest for life – he’s infectious to be around.’ McClure is ‘one of my best mates, somebody who I go to for advice, we speak probably every other day’. Mercurio, he laughs, ‘loves torturing Steve slash me… Every year I say to him, “What’s next? Am I getting framed for murder or am I being thrown over the stairs?”’ In the last series, Mercurio slid a joke into the script about Compston and Stephen Graham’s heights, calling them ‘short arses’. ‘That made me laugh,’ says Compston, revealing Mercurio removed it at one point ‘because he thought I was p—sed off!’ But Compston is good-humoured enough to have put it back in.

On social media some fans were disappointed by the sixth series’ undramatic ending. ‘People have invested so much time in it, they’re more than entitled to their opinion,’ he says, admitting that, as Arnott, his pride was dented at having missed the culprit, the blundering Buckells, who was the ‘fourth man’, ‘H’, who’d been under Arnott’s nose all along. ‘How does that make us look?’

Incredibly, Compston almost missed out on playing Arnott. He was offered the role just as he was cast in The Wee Man, about John Burns, a character Compston grew up knowing about and was desperate to play. He told his agent to turn down Arnott if the timing clashed. ‘Luckily my agent managed some wizardry because, God, if I’d turned down Steve Arnott… that would have been rough… I get the fear now and again thinking how close I was to not doing it.’ I start to get the fear too, as he says it, and wonder if he hadn’t taken the role, would it have been worse for him – or us?

Vigil starts on BBC One and BBC iPlayer at 9pm on Sunday 29 August, with episode two on bank-holiday Monday, 30 August, at 9pm

This interview was published in the August 14th issue of The Telegraph magazine