James Nesbitt has said he tapped into his own experiences as the father of two daughters in his new role in Run Away, the new Netflix thriller about a family who are torn apart after their eldest daughter goes missing.
The Ballymena actor, who had his breakthrough with TV drama Cold Feet and more heavyweight roles such as Bloody Sunday, plays Simon Greene, a seemingly happy family man whose life is thrown into chaos when his daughter Paige disappears.
The eight-part Run Away is the latest Netflix adaptation of a book by prolific author Harlan Coben and it also stars Good Will Hunting star Minnie Driver as Green's wife, Ingrid, Ellie de Lange (Wolf Hall, The Serpent) as Paige, Gavin and Stacey star Ruth Jones as private investigator Elana Ravenscroft, and Alfred Enoch (The Couple Next Door, The Critic) as Isaac Fagbenle, a detective who gets involved after Green becomes a suspect in a murder.
Nesbitt (60) has two twenty-something daughters, Peggy, who is an actress, and Mary from his marriage to Sonia Forbes-Adam. He is also co-parenting Fiadh, the three-year-old daughter of his new partner, Katy Gleadhill.
The tagline for Run Away is "How far would you go to bring her back?" and speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, Nesbitt said, "Harlan was talking about the origins of this story and it was something between him and his daughter, a personal family thing that upset him and the idea came to him - what would happen if your daughter disappeared?
"I tapped into the fact that I am a father of two girls and you go to a place that you don’t necessarily want to and it very rarely happens but you need it. You are struggling and the light is falling and you haven’t quite got to a place, so, yes, I am sure at times I would have thought about my own personal situation with my girls."
However, Nesbitt adds that he didn’t always want to go to such a dark place when he was playing the part of Greene.
"It’s very painful but it helps and you realise that you would actually do anything," he said. "Because if you’re powerless, guilty vulnerable lost . . . 'where is she? What is she doing? What have I done wrong?’ . . . you will do anything."
Greene and his family, including Ingrid, his son, Sam, and younger daughter Anya, are left in disarray following Paige’s disappearance. Feeling guilty and powerless, he tries to hold things together.
Then a year after she vanishes, Greene spots a strung-out and battered looking Freya busking in a local park and approaches her. However, he ends up being confronted by her very unsavoury partner and it turns violent.
It is the start of a very dark chapter for Greene as he is sucked into the criminal underworld where the baddies have names like Rocco and he becomes the prime suspect in a murder.
Run Away, which was filmed in Manchester and around North West England, is yet another Harlan Coben adaptation and is just one of a staggering 13 titles churned out by the bestselling author screened by Netflix, including Missing You, Fool Me Once, Gone For Good, The Stranger, and Stay Close,
And like all of Corben’s work it has one hell of a twisty and sometimes ludicrous plot - nothing as it seems and Nesbitt admits he was constantly guessing at what was coming next.
"It does get pretty bonkers but it’s believable, the sense of shock my character has," he says. "With Harlan, you queue up for a ticket for the rollercoaster and it just goes on for longer than you think it will. When I got the script, I said when do we start?
"It’s interesting because when you film things out of sequence, which we did a lot with this show, it was so important to have a producer on the ground where I could ask ‘where am I? What have I done? What have I not done?’
Nesbitt adds, "I think the important thing about Harlan is so much of his work is family-based and character-lead. Yes, they are thrown into extraordinary circumstances and places, and alleys and tunnels none of us would ever want to visit, but at its core it’s about emotion and people and parenting. A father has lost his daughter and wants to get her back."
It is violent and emotionally charged stuff but there is also quite a lot of dry humour on Run Away, with Ruth Jones, almost unrecognizable as the quirky private detective Elena Ravenscroft, getting most of the laughs.
"The relationship between Simon and Elena is very important," Nesbitt says. "Ruth and I bizarrely had never met before, let alone worked together. When you get to my age, you think you’ve worked with everyone, I’ve met everyone. Simon and Elana are thrown together from very different backgrounds.
"Chemistry is unbuyable and when me and Ruth met, we just clicked and that meant our characters were able to navigate their journey, starting out with scepticism and suspicion and becoming people who need each other."
He adds, "We were able to locate some humour and you have to because if you didn’t have a little bit of light, you won’t get up in the morning, you’d give up. The Elena and Simon story is important and I am just so, so delighted it was Ruth. She’s tremendous."
The Elana/Simon relationship is not the only double act in Run Away. Greene also has a sparky chemistry with his lawyer, Jessica Kinberg, who is played by a no nonsense Tracy-Ann Oberman (Friday Night Dinner, Toast of London).
"She’s great. Tracy-Ann is hilarious," Nesbitt says. "It’s great to do shows with someone like Tracy for me, who is in every day and goes to some dark places in this show. She comes in and makes you laugh and you realise it’s just pretend."
Nesbitt’s character on Run Away is definitely from Northern Ireland. At one point, he offers to send "a bucket of sh***" to the funeral of one of his enemies and the actor says he tweaked the script to being his own sense of humour to the show.
"Truthfully, I’m 60, most of the characters I’ve played as Northern Irish because I wanted to," he says. "As a child, I was brilliant at accents, I can do accents. I grew up in a place that the world saw and heard that accent as only connected to conflict and I wanted to change that in a small way.
"I very much tweak things to make it sound believable coming out of my mouth. To say I’m going to send a bucket of sh*** to a funeral is funny ."
Run Away debuts on Netflix on 1 January 2026
