Life is getting very complicated for Lawrence Shepherd, the anaesthetist on medical drama Monroe. John Byrne scrubs up as Tom Riley – who plays Shepherd – explains why his nice-guy character’s breaking bad.
It’s always interesting in a TV show when a good guy goes bad. Take Monroe’s Lawrence Shepherd, for example. The anaesthetist to and best friend of neurosurgeon Gabriel Monroe began season two finding life with aloof heart surgeon Jenny Bremner – just back at work after maternity leave - and their son Louis more of a strain than he ever expected, so much so that he found himself looking for comfort elsewhere.
Long before season two began, actor Tom Riley (who plays Lawrence) and Monroe series creator and writer Peter Bowker agreed to explore the consequences of his character cheating on his fiancée.
“Following the first series I met up with Peter to discuss Shepherd,” recalls the 31-year-old thespian. “Peter had great ideas about where he wanted to take the character and how his relationship with Bremner would play out across the second series.
“Although Shepherd’s a good guy, he does have a lot of bottled up anger inside of him, so it was interesting to think, ‘What else could we do with him?’ Typically bad guys in shows are painted as darker characters but what if someone nice like Shepherd made a mistake, what would the fallout be? I thought this was a really interesting premise for my character and I felt excited about the challenge of bringing these ideas to life.”
The current run of Monroe saw time move on 18 months for the characters, and much has changed for Shepherd, who moved in with Bremner and started a family. “It’s all happened very quickly and it is difficult for them, but for the sake of their son, they’re trying to make their relationship work,” says Riley.
“The reason I care about Bremner and Shepherd’s relationship is because they’re both quite damaged individuals who have become experts at coping with that damage. Shepherd gives the outward appearance that he is able to charm and chat to people and be laid-back and good-natured when actually he finds it quite difficult to express himself properly. Bremner is completely closed off and can’t give him what he needs. They’re two people who are actually missing each other’s marks constantly.
“For me, Shepherd is like a lot of guys who get to a certain stage in their lives when they realise they’re not really where they want to be. Perhaps their life hasn’t panned out how they wanted but they’re making the most of that. Consequently, Shepherd has a lot resentment and anger building inside, which he tends to repress.”
Whatever happens to Shepherd, Riley is already tied-down to his next project, Da Vinci’s Demons. That’s being written by David S Goyer - co-writer of recent Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises – and is a joint venture by Starz Entertainment and BBC Worldwide Productions. And even when he was filming the second season of Monroe on location in Leeds, Riley was in training for his next role, playing one of art’s greatest names.
“I’m playing the young Leonardo Da Vinci in a historical fantasy which follows the ‘untold’ story of the world's greatest genius during his turbulent youth in Renaissance Florence,” Riley explains.
“Whilst filming Monroe in Leeds I was travelling to and from London to have meetings about the show. The role of Da Vinci requires me to be physically fit and the training schedule, balanced with Monroe, took it out of me slightly.
"A personal trainer would come up to Leeds and make me do an hour-and-a-half of training every other day and forty-five minutes on the days in between. It was hard to go home after a twelve-hour day filming and then physically work out for an hour-and-a- half, but I did it.”
This week on Monroe
Monroe (James Nesbitt) is reeling from the failure of a recent brain tumour operation. Just as he’s promoting Springer (Luke Allen-Gale) to the position of registrar, he’s starting to question his own abilities as a neurosurgeon.
Shepherd (Tom Riley) and Witney (Christina Chong) are facing the uncomfortable fact that she’s slept with her boss’s partner and he’s slept with Bremner’s registrar. Shepherd’s first instinct is to tell the truth, but for Witney that prospect is the most horrifying thing she’s ever heard – professionally, it could ruin her.
It’s a difficult day for inspiring the confidence of new patients, but they have to try. Monroe’s next patient is Alex Schofield (Gwilym Lee), a mummy’s boy with a benign tumour in his spine.
The slightest misstep in surgery could mean paralysing the young man for life, so Monroe takes the unprecedented step of inviting Shepherd to use an MEP machine to test the strength of electrical currents running through Alex’s spine.
But the technology invites trepidation and Monroe halts the operation early, leaving the majority of the tumour in Alex’s spine. It takes the heat of an emergency to get the neurosurgeon back on track – a gentle rugby fan with a knife in his brain.
Bremner (Sarah Parish) and Witney face one of the more exotic entries in the heart surgery handbook – Tetralogy of Fallot. This complex condition is afflicting a five-year-old Pakistani refugee, Yalda Sahni (Sophie Mohammed), and the surgeons learn once again that no matter how far ahead you plan, matters of the heart are never simple.
In crisis, Shepherd and Bremner go to counselling to patch up their difficult relationship, but find there are no quick fixes.
Monday, UTV
