Viewers know actor Matthew Goode from the clean-cut, charming, posh and dashingly handsome characters he has played in films (Match Point, The Imitation Game, Brideshead Revisited) and television series (The Crown,Downton Abbey, A Discovery of Witches).

Now, at 47, Goode is going against type. In Netflix’s Dept. Q (available from May 29), the British actor steps into darker, more fractured territory as Carl Morck, a brash, cantankerous detective marooned in a cold case unit in an Edinburgh basement.

Adapted from the bestselling Danish novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen, the series follows Morck as he wrestles with both bureaucratic inertia and the ghosts of a past investigation that ended in tragedy. But unlike many crime shows, Dept. Q lingers in the aftermath, the psychological wreckage left behind. The show dwells in the moral residue of violence, tracing how trauma metastasizes across all those touched by the crime. What emerges is not a straightforward narrative of justice, but an exploration of memory, guilt and unresolved trauma.

Yet, in classic British fashion, a dry thread of humor runs through it all, just enough to illuminate the shadows. In the role of Morck, Goode makes the transition from dapper supporting role to arresting leading man, bringing depth and understanding to a complex character.

Dept. Q seems like quite a departure from your previous roles. Carl isn’t the charming character people are used to seeing you play. 

MATTHEW GOODE He’s quite a lot. It’s meant to be that way. As you discover with a lot of the characters [in the show], they’re all carrying a lot of personal tragedy and weight.

What drew you to this role at this time? 

MG I’d known Scott [Frank writer and director] for a long time. This is the second time he’s come to me with a role that I don’t think many other directors would necessarily have thought of me for. The first time, he asked me to play a bank robber in The Look Out, many years ago. This is very different and that’s thrilling. That’s all you want as an actor: to have somebody who has some faith in you and a great story, and when they bestow that honor upon you, that spurs you on to do something good, hopefully.

Carl seems like a very layered character… 

MG Yes, he’s got an awful lot to him. It’s difficult to talk about it because I don’t want to give anything away. But I was absolutely over the moon. And then, also, I remember early on in preproduction, Scott’s like, ‘Oh have I got a stable of race horses for you,’ and I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He goes, ‘The actors I’ve got around you, you better bring something because they’re going to kick your ass otherwise.’ And he’s right. One of the things I’m most proud of, or that Scott should be most proud of, is populating this show with five of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with, they’re all so strong. I’m talking about Chloe Pirrie, Kelly Macdonald, Leah Byrne, Shirley Henderson and Kate Dickie. They’re amazing. And then Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives, who I’ve loved for years, and Alexej Manvelov, who plays Akram, who, let me tell you, is a little drop of heaven.

These are actors whom we haven’t seen in leading roles, but they’re recognisable from so many shows and films. 

MG Yeah, I think that sums up all of us really. I mean, I’m not someone who does massively big roles, so I think that’s one of the reasons it’s so strong. We’ve all been doing it for so long and we don’t necessarily get this great material, so we’re straight off to the races, really. That experience really shines through.

At the end of the second episode, your character has a panic attack. How do you prepare for those emotionally heightened scenes? 

MG When you’re doing longform television, it’s a bit like sports psychology: you can’t get too caught up with where your end is going to be. If you start thinking about where the ball is going to end up, it will end up in the woods. It’s a huge amount of homework and you have to stay on top of your lines, especially if there’s going to be the occasional rewrite. But I suppose, for me, I took a lot of long baths. That was part of my process.

One of the things that was very interesting about the planning of it all was the fact that the character is originally Danish and in Copenhagen, but I’m English and I’m in Scotland. So Scott and I had some interesting chats about what the character’s socio-political background would have been like growing up. With any project I do, I like to create secrets and things from one’s own past that no other character knows, because that’s just kind of fun.

How did you navigate holding the emotional weight of what Carl has been through? Do you have a process of releasing this at the end of the day?

MG They were long days. If my call time was 6 – I burnt out after about three months so I had to change this – I was getting up at 4, running a bath – and the water was never hot enough for my liking – going through the lines, going through the next day’s lines, and trying to stay four or five days ahead. And then, if I was good, I would treat myself. I was watching Ken Burns’ Baseball. I had heard about this documentary, it’s hours long – it’s amazing, by the way. So my treat would be getting half an hour of that. Then, if I came home at 8:30 at night, I’d spend an hour and a half doing my homework, watching a tiny bit of sport and then getting in bed. It’s metronomically hard work, longform TV, when you’re at the center of it. But, as Billie Jean King once said, ‘Pressure is privilege.’

The series highlights the consequences of crime. Did working on Dept. Q reveal anything to you about the link between trauma and the body? 

MG That’s very interesting. It’s more to do, as you say, with the long-term effects. I’ve had friends who have worked on the murder squad. Some of their stories were absolutely harrowing, and it’s stuff that doesn’t go away: recurring nightmares and all these kinds of things, because of just how stressful that kind of job is. Really, what you come away from watching this show with is that there are people out there literally putting their lives on the line. Obviously this is not based on a true story, but those people out there exist. It sort of makes you go, ‘Thank god.’

I’ve only seen the first two episodes but there seems to be a real camaraderie between Carl and Akram. How did you build that dynamic?

MG I find if you’ve got great respect and camaraderie and proper friendship in real life then magic can happen on the screen. Because there’s trust that’s created. On the second day after the read-through, I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ He [Alexej Manvelov] was just going over lines, so I said, ‘Why don’t you come meet me at this French restaurant and we’ll go over lines together and we’ll hang out?’ We went for lunch and we were still there in the evening. We might have had four or five bottles of wine but we were just laughing hysterically and that’s what’s so great. We’re both very different to our characters, but he’s the perfect foil for Carl. This is a dark show – not in the horror way, more in the [sense of a] thriller – but there’s also a lot of humor. A lot of that also comes from the strength of the female characters, I mean Leah Byrne really blew my mind.

It feels necessary to have moments of humour in the darkness, especially given our current state of the world. But that dark humor is also quite a British and Australian thing… 

MG Yes, completely, we excel at gallows humor. Also, Jamie Sives, who was literally my partner in crime in this, is so funny. I’m very protective around this… It’s the first time I’ve really wanted to call it an ensemble or, like, a company. I feel like that for the first time since I did theatre, which was a fucking long time ago. That’s why I’m desperate for a recommission, because there are many more books. I want to see what Scott can do with the script, and challenge these actors and myself, obviously, even further. I miss them. I normally don’t like watching myself, and I still don’t like watching myself, but I love watching what the team did. I’m so fond of them.

Carl’s look is a departure from the clean-cut style of your previous roles. Was there any sense of freedom in this, or were you hesitant, knowing so many people would see you looking very different? 

MG My wife didn’t like it…

The beard? 

MG Yes, because it’s a bit ticklish on her nose, so that wasn’t great for her. However, yeah it was freeing. To get to behave and say those kinds of lines and hopefully bring a character that’s very three-dimensional, that’s very blocked, very aggressive and also strangely brilliant. There’s a kindness to him. But yeah, I did feel free, and yet at the same time, after seven months… There is a little bit of osmosis that happens. There was a short-temperedness that would seep in a little bit. I was quite glad, as was my family, to take a bit of time off afterwards.

That short-temperedness or reactivity is quite typical in people with PTSD so it makes sense it would be quite difficult to get rid of. 

MG Absolutely. But, it does get to you a bit. I think also, when you’re the lead in something, which is a wonderful thing, but it fucks you up after nine months. You get to the end – I was ill at the end, I actually had to re-voice because I lost my voice.

How did you get started in acting? I read that your parents weren’t in the industry. 

MG Not professionally, no. My mum was pretty amazing. She galvanised our local village and directed amateur dramatics. So I grew up watching amateur theatre. My dad also played at folk clubs, he was a musician – well, he was a geologist but he loved to play folk music. So I suppose I inherited it. I played a lot of sports at school and that was my main focus, but I studied drama. Even by the end of my second year I didn’t know what I wanted to be. But our flatmate got into a show, and he wasn’t even studying drama, he was studying English. So I thought, okay maybe I’ve got a shot. I went and auditioned at Webber Douglas and got in. I couldn’t afford it, I had to get a career development loan. My parents helped me out with rent – contrary to popular opinion, I’m not manor-born [laughs]. Luckily it all worked out. But the fear never stops.

How do you navigate that fear? 

MG You’ve done it before, and the fear is about the unknown, so better to have humility, I think, so long as it doesn’t turn itself into self-sabotage, which it has done occasionally. Then sometimes, such as The Offer, it was after the pandemic and I was just about to get into a financial pickle, probably, and then this gift came. And it scared me, it scared me a lot. I didn’t have an option, I mean how could I turn this down? It’s such a great part and Dexter [Fletcher, producer] convinced me. Because I didn’t see myself as being able to do that part at all. I always take a bit of convincing.

Who is your Mastermind? 

MG That’s an impossible question. Right now, it’s Scott Frank. But I have many. Ken Burns is a Mastermind and I love him because he’s my treat when I’m working. It depends what genre, because then there’s literature and that opens up a whole can of worms. I still haven’t read a novel that is as affecting and as brilliant as A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I fucking love that book, it’s some of the best prose I’ve ever read.

Dept Q. is is released on Netflix on May 29. Grooming by Sven Bayerbach. In the first image, Matthew wears a hoodie by Celine Homme, T-shirt by Hanes, vintage jeans from Contemporary Wardrobe Collection and watch by Omega.