Richard Armitage would like to set the record straight about his infamous pillow humping scene in Netflix’s . “I know some people were like, ‘Ewww, this is not sexy.’” He makes a face and grins. “But that’s a weird reaction because it wasn’t meant to be sexy. It was about a guy whose obsession with a woman has taken him down the road to a point that’s freaking tragic. Sad. He was behaving like a dog in a way that was utterly degrading…”
The problem, suspects the 55-year-old actor, was “the difference in tone” between the disturbing plot of the 2023 series and “the way it was marketed as an erotic thriller”. He can laugh about it now, though. He reminds me that the show was based on Josephine Hart’s 1991 novel , “and in the print version the guy actually has sex with a chaise lounge”. He chuckles. “I remember talking to the director, thinking, ‘Well that’s going to be a challenge.’ So we came up with some other ideas and the pillow scene was kind of improvised.”
It’s typical of Armitage to commit 100 per cent to such a deeply unsettling scene – and for him to be cast as such a disturbingly intense character. He found fame smouldering darkly across the cotton looms of the BBC’s 2004 adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, before prowling moodily through the woodland as Guy of Gisborne in Dominic Minghella’s big budget, primetime reboot of . He achieved international stardom as steely-focused dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of .
Most recently he’s used that neck hair-prickling stare to lend tense credibility to hokily plotted TV thrillers including lead roles in Netflix’s and ITV’s . And we’re talking today because he’s at it again, playing the oddball-genius forensic pathologist at the refrigerated heart of new ITV case-a-week crime drama .
“The body will always tell me the truth,” whispers Armitage’s Dr Ethan Winter to the bodies of the murder victims he dissects beneath the grime-stained glass dome of the converted swimming pool he uses as a laboratory. He always formally introduces himself to a corpse, which comes off equal parts tender and creepy – especially when delivered in Armitage’s classy purr.
There’s a slow burn chemistry between rule-breaking Dr Winter and more sensible DI Bell (Annabel Scholey) as he showboats around finding microscopic clues or slipping into the diving gear he just happens to keep in his car boot to search for Awol body parts.
“It was fun to develop that frisson between the characters,” says Armitage. “It brought some humour because Ethan Winter is bordering on the obnoxious. He’s sometimes misogynistic in the patronising way he mansplains things to DI Bell.” He flags the moment Winter – a health conscious food snob – drops into Bell’s family home one evening and sneers at the takeaway pizza her family ate for dinner. “Making pizza dough is really easy,” he scolds her in a way Armitage says “deserved a slap in the face”. He shakes his head. “But he knows he is doing it to wind her up. He makes her some overnight oats too but he does it to show her how to do it properly, so that’s another overstep.”
Armitage admits to being a bit of a foodie himself. “A day has to start with eggs, not oats for me,” he says. But while they were shooting parts of in Belgium (the rest was shot on location in Bristol) he became enamoured of some of the local cheese served on set. “It was cheddary, but orange with little crystals in it. I went through the fridge looking for the label to see what it was called and get it in my suitcase when I came back to London.”
Armitage grew up in the undersung Midlands town of Leicester where Richard III’s body was discovered in a car park in 2012. The actor was born on the same day the Plantagenet king died at the Bosworth in 1485 and was named after him. He’s been on a long campaign to bring a non-Shakespearean version of Richard III to the screen, exploring whether he really did murder his two young nephews.
“I’m drawn to dark characters,” he says. “I have quite a dark side in my head and a vivid imagination that takes me to some extreme places. And I am here to explore the extremes of the human condition: grief, terror, violence…” He suspects the on-screen intensity that sends the adrenaline pumping through his thrillers might be the tension between his inclination to “really go for it” in scenes and his most-heard directorial note to “pull it back”. “I’ve got a tendency to think, ‘Put your back into it, Richard, grab that pillow!’ And maybe what you’re seeing is me holding it back while going further in my mind, behind my eyes.”
He’s much softer, warmer and funnier in real life. Certainly less cocksure than many of the characters he plays on television. I last met Armitage on the forest set of , just outside Budapest, in 2006. His wild man co-star, Keith Allen, had put on quite a noisy show during a press round-table and Armitage had slipped away afterwards for a quiet moment beneath the trees. We stood together and admired the light in silence.
“That’s quite me,” he laughs. “This isn’t a name drop, but when I did The Hobbit, Evangeline Lilly noticed that when Stephen Colbert came to New Zealand – there was this massive party, with everybody drawn to him like moths to a flame – I was just leaning on the wall, miles from the epicentre, just watching.” He shrugs. “That’s sort of how I approach life.”
At school, he recalls feeling “like I was biding my time, flying under the radar”. So his former classmates wouldn’t have guessed he’d become famous? “No. I don’t think they were paying attention to me at all and that was the point.” He didn’t like ball sports, worried about not being clever enough and spent his evenings alone in his room, reading or playing his cello. “I loved the way learning an instrument is all drill, drill, drill until you reach a flow state.” He smiles a little ruefully at not getting as good as he hoped to be. “I saw Yo-Yo Ma at Carnegie Hall once, playing the and it was everything you can dream of: both effortless and effortful at the same time.”
Armitage came out as bisexual to his parents at 19 but many fans of his straight, romantic roles were surprised when he revealed he lives with a male partner (dividing his time between London and New York) in 2023. Did he ever make a decision to hide his sexuality from the public? He shakes his head. “I was never fully asked the question,” he says. “I felt that if people were not going to ask, then I wasn’t going to volunteer the information because it wasn’t something that was bothering me.”
He points out he comes from a generation of celebrities who believe in “the idea of a private life. I mean it’s called that because you don’t have to share it in public. I think that people in the public eye have the right to have a part of themselves that is not on offer.” He fears that younger generations “will have no concept of what that means because everything is filmed and captured and everything is content, from your breakfast onward.” For actors, he thinks this can really mess with the audience’s ability to project characters on to them.
“There is a delineation between ‘movie stars’ and actors, too,” he suggests. “‘Movie stars’ are projecting a version of themselves on to the big screen, which is why I think they’ve traditionally been seen as fair game.” The actor Armitage most admired as a young man was Gary Oldman. “I remember thinking at the time that I don’t really know anything about his private life. I don’t know if he’s married. I don’t know if he’s got kids. I don’t what his fashion choices are…” He laughs. “I find it really odd when you see all of these respected actors in the front row of fashion shows. That’s not the job! Why are you there? Because you’re going to get free clothes?”
He also isn’t keen on talking politics. “As an actor, my job is to entertain people. You hope everybody watches your show, no matter which side of the political landscape they sit. I don’t want to alienate any of the audience.” A shrug. “It’s a bit like when a new government comes in. It’s like they’ve got to govern for everybody. They have to, even if they don’t like the opposition. You have to be centrist.”
He’s aware that Ed Sheeran has made it a challenge for artists to remain apolitical and shudders. “We did an exercise in drama school, about ‘berserking’. That’s when the energy rises and people charge as a mob to attack, and even as an exercise you feel it’s really frightening.”
Does he feel the tribal temperature of politics rising in America right now? “Well, I live in New York, which is its own entity, and we’ve got [Mayor Zohran] Mamdani who’s incredible, charismatic.” But he doesn’t love the “whip crack corporate culture” in the city. “If the sun comes out on a Friday afternoon in London, people will leave their desks and sit in a park and have a laugh. In New York they will all stay in their offices until 8pm.”
He also feels that the Broadway theatre scene is “incredibly commercial” and that stage plays are seen as “after dinner entertainment”. “Times Square is so loud and brash and it’s popcorn and M&Ms and McDonald’s and the lights. When you walk out of that into a quiet theatre to watch Death of a Salesman, you’re sort of fighting this energy that’s very hard to calm. Whereas London, you’re sort of primed for the theatre because theatreland is so elegant. The play will be the main event.”
Off screen, Armitage has built an impressive career as an audiobook narrator and novelist. The clever chicanery of his debut thriller, (about a Nobel prize-winning scientist suffering from Alzheimer’s), was praised for its strong female heroine. The second, , explores what happens in an English village when a feature film sets up production and raises the ghosts of a local child murder. “Writing puts me in that flow state I used to get playing the cello,” he says. “I can get lost in it and that makes me so happy.”
I realise our call has overrun and let Armitage get back to his peaceful flow. “Yes, best get on,” he chuckles. “Those pillows won’t dry hump themselves!”
‘Winter’ is on ITV1 on Wednesdays at 9pm