Have you ever wanted to see John Simm play someone you absolutely do not like and absolutely do not want to like – who you want to abhor and who makes you physically cringe? Then Crime may be just the thing for you. Because this one is very different from the kind of roles we typically see him in!
It’s actually somewhat of a rare occurrence now that we see John in something where he isn’t the lead or part of the main ensemble cast. And perhaps one might think that his role as Gareth Horsborough might not be much to look at because it’s not that meaty, but I implore you not to dismiss it so easily. Not if you want to see the true marvel of all the things that John can deliver and the different skins he is able to wear as an actor.
Fair warning upfront: The rest of the blog post contains themes of child abuse and paedophilia. And with that I shall also issue a spoiler warning. Please skip the rest of this review if you don’t wish to know how the criminal case gets solved.
At its core, the Scottish-flavoured crime series builds on the tried and tested formulas of a good whodunnit mystery, where the audience follows Edinburgh-based DI Ray Lennox as he and his partner are trying to find the abductor of a young girl gone missing – hopefully in time to save her life. But with the source material being an Irvine Welsh novel (the author of Trainspotting), I think you can guess that it’s not going to be your basic, run-of-the-mill detective drama.
Crime is bleak, gritty and brutal. The characters are all, in some shape or form, fucked up and massively flawed – particularly main protagonist Ray Lennox. Beaten down by a demanding job that takes an emotional toll with every new case, Lennox’s childhood trauma is all-pervading, tainting not only how he now approaches his work. Even before he takes this case, he can barely keep his life together, not just because of a nasty drug habit he drags along. And then this case of a young girl gone missing threatens to unravel the last threads that are holding together his fragile but thin cloak of sanity he’s desperately trying to wrap around himself.
There’s a sense of dystopia in everything we see – corruption and parasitic politics in a police system that individuals are powerless to change. A dog-eat-dog world, particularly for Lennox’s young, career-focused female partner who has to learn the hard way that you can’t climb the career ladder unless you play the unsavoury internal politics game. Please bear with me; I’m getting to where John Simm comes in because there’s the crime that this is all about…
What makes Crime special to me as a John Simm fan is that, for a change, this is a TV series where John isn’t playing the lead and he’s certainly not playingthe good guy or the redeemable guy. Which isn’t to say that his role is any less powerful – quite the opposite because John plays Gareth Horsborough, the perpetrator whom the public has given the moniker ‘Mr. Confectioner’.
Horsborough is the vilest kind of criminal you can imagine. A serial rapist and killer of fifteen young girls he kidnapped and violated over the years. And now that he’s been caught, he’s still playing mind games with the police force, most of all with DI Lennox and his all too evident childhood trauma.
Most of the scenes with John that we get to see are of him locked up in an interrogation room, being interviewed by police officers. But even though he should be at a clear disadvantage in this scenario, he knows he is not. He holds the power over the information whom he killed and where their bodies are buried, and the police desperately want that information. So Horsborough toys with them, and he does so with a quiet but menacing intensity that makes your hairs stand on end.
While you watch Horsborough play his psychological mind games with the detectives with cutting precision, you, as a viewer, can’t help but alternate between morbid fascination and sickening revulsion, because here sits a man who brutally abused and killed over a dozen children, yet you want to watch the whole thing play out, you want to see him dissect and take apart Ray Lennox piece by piece until it all comes to a head.
And that, it very much does. It grips a clawing hand around your throat in a way that you can’t look away, that you feel the pain and the emotion practically radiating through the screen. You can feel both Lennox’s agony and Horsborough’s sick, twisted pleasure roiling in your gut, and can’t help but wish that this vilest of creatures gets what’s coming to him.
And this is what makes John Simm such a powerful actor, because even when he plays a man you absolutely abhor, there is still raw power and emotion in that performance, and perhaps even a tiny shred of humanity he manages to instil in this deeply despicable person. You’re certainly invested, even if it’s not in a way that you end up loving the character, but you may just end up loving the way that he brings him to life, that makes you burn with a soul-deep hatred for this horrid criminal.
If you want to start looking for John in this series, he is actually only in four episodes – two of which only feature him very briefly. The bulk of his performance is in episodes 5 and 6 of series 1. He does return in episode 2 of series 2, but it’s only one short scene and one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot at the end since the second series is about another case unconnected to the Confectioner.
Knowing that John often picks his projects based on the quality of the scriptwriting, it doesn’t take a leap to figure out what drew him to this role, although he’s talked about that it was challenging to get into the mindset of such a disturbing human being.
In my search to find relevant press articles that reference the series and in particular John talking about it (which is either a deserted wasteland or I’ve not looked in the right places), I stumbled across this statement from 13 years ago:
“I wouldn’t usually cry at something like [Etre et Avoir] but now anything to do with kids…” Like child pornography, he says. “I just can’t…” He is lost for words. “I just can’t deal with it. It makes me angry; really, really, really angry. I can’t tolerate that.” We agree there is almost always something to empathise with in people who have committed a serious crime, even murder. But paedophilia is different.
“I think it would be difficult for me to play such a part,” he says. “I always have to find something in the character to empathise with, something I can make likeable in some way. I don’t think I could do it.” It seems more a strength than a weakness, this admission that art cannot always take precedence over life. (Source)
Makes you wonder what he was trying to tease out of Gareth Horsborough that’s likeable doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s that he tries to find human connection in wanting to relate to Ray Lennox. Perhaps it’s the fact that, in the end, he has the integrity to at least honour the agreement they had to let justice prevail. More likely though, judging by what John himself has said about Horsborough in a Telegraph article, there is nothing to empathise with, and that was actually the challenge.
[Simm] prefers to see the characters he plays simply as acting exercises in understanding. “Hamlet, Macbeth, [Crime and Punishment’s] Raskolnikov, Caligula: the fuck-ups are simply more fun to play. The point is to always find the humanity where you can.” He’s careful never to push it too far. “Some actors take the part home with them. But I go down the pub and have a beer. You have to remember it’s not you.”
The one exception was Crime, the 2021 TV adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s foul and filthy detective caper in which he played – in a turn of wincingly mesmeric grotesquerie – the psychotic paedophile Mr Confectioner. “He had a milky eye, so I tried to shed him each night when I took it out,” Simm says, squirming. “But it was very hard. I always said I’d never play that kind of part. I find it abhorrent; I’ve got kids of my own. To be honest, I only took it because it was so different from [ITV crime drama] Grace.” (Source)
There are others who agree with the sentiment, for instance the Portsmouth news website Star & Crescent that said, “The most commendable performance in Crime is John Simm’s. His turn as the worst villain imaginable is spinetingling. His screen presence alone is enough to make you uncomfortable – then he opens his mouth, and you’ll find yourself shaking with anger, fear and disgust.” (Source)
Crime is dark, unflinching and certainly not for the faint of heart, and it’s definitely not feel-good television, but it’s an acting and storytelling marvel, also thanks Dougray Scott who deservedly won an Emmy and a BAFTA Scotland award for his performance as Ray Lennox.
Starring in Crime are Dougray Scott in the lead role, as well as Joanna Vanderham, Jamie Sives, Michael Abubakar, Gordon Kennedy, Angela Griffin and Ken Stott.
Crime is available to stream on ITVX and paid streaming services like Britbox, Apple TV or Prime Video and may be available locally from other sources. I couldn’t find any DVD releases except for Germany, and I can personally attest that the German DVDs are barebones with zero extras.
Fair warning, since this is a Scottish series, you should expect lots of Scottish accents, some of which may be harder to understand than others. John’s character is from Leeds, however, so you’ll hear him speaking in a familiar Northern accent.
Also posted on the John Simm Society blog
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