How do you serve up Agatha Christie to the Netflix generation?
This was the challenge laid at the foot of Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall, The Tourist director Chris Sweeney and exec Suzanne Mackie (The Crown), who responded with a cinematic vision, evoking the Sean Connery James Bond Era, Hitchock’s North by Northwest and the production values of The Crown, Chibnall told us.
What has emerged is Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, which stars Helena Bonham Carter, Martin Freeman and Mia McKenna-Bruce.
“This was about choosing the right material in the first place and then asking what the big cinematic version of that was,” Chibnall said in advance of today’s Netflix premiere. “We weren’t going to do this quietly, we wanted to make it a visual treat for Netflix, giving it a blockbuster ‘Hitchcock Hollywood’ vibe that is a thriller but has humor and visually lavish set pieces.”
Having just set up her Orchid Pictures label, Mackie tasked Chibnall with selecting a Christie book that would work for Netflix. After exploring the canon, he felt The Seven Dials Mystery had the global relevance that would suit a streamer perfectly. The book is neither a Poirot or Marple but follows amateur sleuth Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent and her efforts to uncover espionage and murder linked to a mysterious Seven Dials club in London.
The novel visits several splashy locations and ripples with international conspiracy, which didn’t land so well with several critics when it was published nearly 100 years ago. The Times Literary Supplement said at the time that Christie had “deserted the methodical procedure of inquiry into a single and circumscribed crime for the romance of universal conspiracy and international rogues.”
Chibnall, on the other hand, thinks Christie was simply ahead of her time.
“You could argue in 1929 she was writing a modern, cinematic script and it was the people reviewing it who were behind the times,” he added. “From the start this was very clearly a conversation about what Agatha Christie is for the streaming era. We didn’t want to replicate what other [networks] have done so well and so definitively.”
McKenna-Bruce, a BAFTA Rising Star who broke out in Molly Manning Walker’s hit indie pic How to Have Sex, said she “fell in love with Bundle, and Chris’s scripts, immediately.”
“I’ve always liked the adaptations but had never read an Agatha Christie book,” she added. “I always feel quite intimidated by [adaptations] but having read Seven Dials the thing that stands out most is just how funny it is and how it feels.”
Bundle is a plucky character who gives off the vibe that she can take on anything but McKenna-Bruce said she was mainly drawn to her ability to connect with people. “You can see that immediately in the series,” she added. “I love people and that’s why I love acting and I saw that with her and wanted to run with that.”
Saying “Yes” was made all the easier for McKenna-Bruce by the “epic” cast, which includes Bonham Carter and Freeman. Harry Potter star Bonham Carter plays McKenna-Bruce’s mother Lady Caterham but in a nifty bit of gender-swap casting she was actually Lord Caterham in the books. “The Agatha Christie estate is very open to these things,” added Chibnall. “We discussed it with them and said we can see how the piece is evolving and it gives a richness and truth to these characters.”
“Me and [co-star] Edward [Bluemel] were like what??,” McKenna-Bruce said of the moment Chibnall gathered them and told them he had landed Bonham Carter for the role.
On Freeman, who plays Superintendent Battle, a character who appears in multiple Christie novels, Chibnall said his “dance between humor, truth and intelligence is gorgeous to observe.”
Franchise potential?
‘Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials’. Image: Simon Ridgway/Netflix
Without giving too much away, Seven Dials concludes with a neat sequence that could lend itself to sequels, and there is also another book in which Bundle appears, The Secret of Chimneys, which was published four years earlier than Seven Dials.
With Rian Johnson’s Knives Out franchise bringing the punters to Netflix, is Chibnall, who thinks Johnson has “reinvented the genre for the 21st century,” mulling an expansion of the Netflix Christie universe?
“At the moment we just want to put this out in the world and see how it goes,” he said. “We might have further conversations but this is a complete and satisfying three episodes. It feels like a big movie and at the end of that I hope you’re hungry for more but you should feel like it’s a resolved story as well.”
Next up for McKenna-Bruce, whose star has been soaring since How to Have Sex, she is playing Lady Jane Andrews in ITV’s The Lady, which tells the story of Prince Andrew’s ex-wife’s former royal aide who was convicted of murder. After that, she will be Ringo Starr’s first wife in Sam Mendes’ Beatles epic.