“Are you kidding me?” How Slow Horses’ Rosalind Eleazar took a sensational thriller | Television

Wwhen Rosalind Eleazar got married last year on a Greek island, she asked her agents not to contact her about work. But the day after the wedding (which took place in a mini-amphitheatre—”we’re so extra”), she was “extraordinarily hungover” when she got a call about a job: starring in Netflix’s new Harlan Coben adaptation, Missing You . Eleazar immediately bought the book and, to the mild annoyance of her new husband, the Italian producer and director Gabriele Lo Giudice (“he was not best pleased”), spent her honeymoon reading it. “The last five pages – are you kidding me?” She shakes her head with wide eyes. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that’s where it was headed.”

That’s a pretty typical reaction to a Coben story. Over the past few years, the mysterious American author has turned his bestselling novels into a hugely successful television universe: this year’s Fool Me Once is Netflix’s most watched show of 2024 with 107.5 million views. However, Eleazar is aware that critics can sniff at the glossy and endlessly twisted adaptations. “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions,” she says. “But a) there is something for everyone; and b) let it live in the space it is trying to live in. It doesn’t need to be compared to Succession.”

In Missing You, which airs a chilling five episodes on New Year’s Day, the 36-year-old, best known for Apple TV+’s spy thriller Slow Horses, leads a cast that includes Lenny Henry, Ashley Walters and Coben regular Richard Armitage. We meet detective Kat Donovan 11 years after the double trauma of her father’s murder and her fiance leaving without explanation. But when her ex shows up on a dating app, Donovan pulls the strings and uncovers the reasons for his disappearance and the truth about her father’s death. Of course, this being Coben, there’s also police corruption, multiple kidnappings, and Steve Pemberton as a creepy dog ​​breeder. “It’s relentless!” Eleazar says cheerfully. “What I like about (Donovan) is that she’s a survivor. She has these moments where she’s incredibly hurt, but she gets right back up. I think people in life do it much more than TV gives it credit for.”

Having worked on Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, which used colorblind casting, Eleazar appreciated Missing You’s approach to race: “It was just allowing a predominantly black cast to exist in the commercial world, have fun— yes, not funny, because it’s a traumatic story! But they just exist, and race is not mentioned my natural hair in shows, and those were conscious decisions.”

The daughter of a white British mother and Ghanaian father, Eleazar grew up in Clapham, south London. “I was very attached to my mother as my protector,” she says. “I never really felt like I fit in without being too violin-like. I think it partly has to do with being raised by the white side of my family. Some of my earliest memories are of people not believing that my mother was my mother, so I spent a lot of time trying to prove that she was.”

Eleazar and her mother regularly visited Ghana – “one of the most special places on the planet” – and after she graduated from the University of Nottingham with a degree in Mandarin and Spanish, she moved there for a few years. “One particular visit, (my dad) had said, ‘When you finish uni, why don’t you come and live here, get to know the family, get to know me?’ Unfortunately he died before then, but I decided to go anyway.” Several of her siblings are in Ghana’s film and television industry, and working for her brother’s production company reminded Eleazar of how much she had loved acting in school plays.She ended up moving back to the UK to study at Lamda in the middle of ​​20s, and since graduating her stage roles have included The Starry Messenger opposite Matthew Broderick and Uncle Vanya, for which she won the Clarence Derwent Award in 2020.

Now she and Lo Giudice live in East London, which is handy for the seemingly constant recording of Eleazar’s biggest hit to date, Slow Horses. With series five already finished and due to air next year, she is filming series six and is clearly enthralled by the show, which follows a gaggle of MI5 misfits led by Gary Oldman and Jack Lowden. “Oh my God, I absolutely love it,” she says. “You know what I find interesting about the slow horses? It’s that they’re competent but just reprehensible. You don’t want to go to dinner with them.” Her feelings about the cast itself couldn’t be more contradictory—they’re extremely tight-knit and hit hard by the show’s willingness to bump the main characters: “When one person gets killed, it shifts the energy.”

While Slow Horses was a sleeper hit, earning its first Emmy win (for writing) in September, Eleazar knows that Missing You couldn’t be more different: Eagerly awaited by millions of dedicated Coben fans ready for a post-Christmas hit by escapist excitement. “The fact is, people are swallowing it,” says Eleazar. “The numbers are insane. In a way, it’s a bit of a shame that it’s binged. You think, “wow, that’s just gone in five hours,” and it’s taken me five months and other people even longer to do. But look, this is where we are.”