Martin Compston: ‘I don’t have many regrets in life, but that does give me cold sweats’

He’s about to reprise the ‘Line of Duty’ role that made him a household name for the long-awaited seventh season, but first, the Scot is starring in a revenge thriller with a difference. He talks to Katie Rosseinsky about career near-misses, the ‘kernels of truth’ in the new ‘Line of Duty’ script and why he can’t wait for the World Cup

Picture this. You’re in a supermarket in Las Vegas, on the edge of Sin City’s party strip. Then who should you see in the queue but Steve Arnott from Line of Duty – although instead of nicking bent coppers, he’s stocking up on a few groceries. You’d be forgiven for assuming you were still feeling the after-effects of the previous night’s tequilas, but you’d be wrong.

It’s a scene in which Martin Compston, who has played Britain’s favourite waistcoat-wearing anti-corruption officer in Jed Mercurio’s blockbuster police drama since 2012, has inadvertently starred a few times. “You’re standing in the checkout lines and they’re doing the double, the triple and then the quadruple take, trying to work out if it’s you, because you’re standing there in shorts and flip-flops,” he says. “And also they hear the Scottish accent as well, it’s confusing to them.”

What is “some London detective” doing “standing in a Vegas shopping market”, sounding very Scottish indeed? When he’s not filming, or spending time in his hometown of Greenock, Inverclyde, 41-year-old Compston lives out in Vegas; it’s where his wife, the actor and events planner Tianna Flynn, hails from.

And so, aside from the questioning glances from tourists or the odd American fan, the star of the biggest British TV show of the past 20 years – 12.8 million of us tuned in for Line of Duty’s divisive season six finale back in 2021, making it the most-watched drama episode since modern records began –manages to maintain a pretty low-key existence.

You get the impression he wouldn’t have it any other way. Compston, who’s speaking over Zoom from a fancy hotel room, seems to wear all of Line of Duty’s record-breaking successes very lightly. He emanates an unstudied sort of affability, peppers conversation with “pal” and is quick to break into a grin – the antithesis of Arnott’s slightly standoffish, acronym-reciting arrogance, then.

Compston has starred in ‘Line of Duty’ since 2012 (Gareth Cattermole/Getty)

That amiability, though, is slightly incongruous with the main subject on our conversational agenda, which is, well, getting your own back. In his latest series, The Revenge Club, which debuts on Paramount+ this month, Compston plays the newly divorced Calum, who “feels like he’s lost a perfect family” and is being pulled away from his young daughter. When he joins a therapy circle for recent divorcees, though, he “meets this group of kindred spirits who are all lost and empty and broken”.

In the pub after their sessions, the chatter turns towards getting even: what if the group pooled their skills to exact a very specific revenge on each of their exes? “It gives them a spark back in their life, it gives them a purpose to feel useful again – and that can be quite seductive,” Compston says.

It’s compelling fuel for drama, he reckons, because “everybody has got a revenge fantasy somewhere, whether it be a school bully, or someone who made your work life hell, or somebody who crashed into your car and didn’t leave a note, whatever it may be. But most people are good people, so it remains a fantasy. You’d never act on it. But when you have people together who are egging each other on, things can quite quickly spiral out of control”.

Compston plays a newly divorced dad in ‘The Revenge Club’ (Paramount+)

As the group’s plotting starts to take a darker turn, the show dances from black comedy to “this sort of caper, like an Ocean’s Eleven thing” to murder mystery: “It’s bizarre at times to watch the tonal shifts, but I love it,” he says. Calum’s bond with his daughter, he adds, helped ground some of those more offbeat scenes. “I’m a father myself, so you can seize it and relate to it,” he says. “I mean, I don’t know what I would do if I wasn’t part of my son’s life, so you just try and think about it in that context.”

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The comic element, Compston admits, “was out of my comfort zone a wee bit”; the last time he had a crack at a comedy role was when he played a fellow Scot, the singer-songwriter Midge Ure, in a Live Aid parody as part of Sky’s Urban Myths series back in 2018. “People like Sharon [Rooney] and Meera [Syal, who play Calum’s fellow Revenge Club members] just have funny bones,” he says. “Their timing has precision, it’s laser-like, whereas I think for me, if I’m going comedy, I just need to really commit to the truth of it. I can’t be playing it funny. I’ve just got to play it real.”

As a teen, Compston was focused on football, playing for Aberdeen’s youth team and eventually signing a contract with his local club, Greenock Morton. Then a teacher asked him to come along to an open casting being held at his school; the audition was for Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen, and Compston was eventually offered the lead role of Liam, a young delinquent who’s trying to get his life back on track.

The show shifts from comedy caper to murder mystery (Paramount+)

Sweet Sixteen ended up heading to the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 – the teenage Compston opted for a kilt for his first big red carpet appearance – and he has been acting ever since (although Loach apparently advised him to stick with football, because the industry can be so insecure).

He has worked solidly since then, but Line of Duty undeniably catapulted him into a different tier of stardom, one where he now frequently headlines big streaming productions like Prime Video’s The Rig or primetime thrillers such as ITV’s Red Eye, returning on New Year’s Day. And yet he almost had to pass on the role of Steve.

Around the same time Compston auditioned for Mercurio and co, he explains, he’d also been offered the chance to star as notorious Glasgow gangster Paul Ferris in the film The Wee Man. “I’d been really lucky to do a lot of indie movies, working with some great people, but they were all seen in indie cinemas and stuff,” Compston explains. “There was nothing that my family or my pals or the people I go to the pub with would particularly want to watch.” But playing Ferris, whose story “was just in our psyche”, would certainly be a hit with them.

So when Compston learned that the two projects would be filming at the same time, he told his agent, “if it comes to one or the other, do The Wee Man”. Thankfully, for him and for us, said agent “worked wonders” with the scheduling, and he could do both. “I don’t have many regrets in life, but that does give me cold sweats now and again, thinking about if I didn’t do that part and watching somebody else with this kind of career at the minute,” he says. “That would have been heartbreaking.”

With ‘Line of Duty’ co-stars Vicky McClure and Adrian Dunbar (World Productions/BBC)

Last month, after almost five years of speculation and contradictory “will they, won’t they” soundbites, the BBC confirmed that Line of Duty will return for a seventh season. For fans who were left nonplussed by series six’s big “H” reveal, and those who’ve been missing AC-12’s strange idiolect of catchphrases and police acronyms, it’s thrilling news. When I bring it up, Compston speaks with the relief of a man who no longer has to come up with endless variations on the theme of “maybe” when asked about the show’s future. “It is nice, especially just before you start a week of junkets, not to have to fib to everybody,” he laughs.

His co-star and close pal Vicky McClure, who plays Steve’s no-nonsense police colleague Kate Fleming, wasn’t so lucky; she ended up having to promote the latest season of her ITV thriller Trigger Point before the news was made official. “We delayed the announcement until after, and I felt for her, because I knew she’d have to play the game,” he says. The two of them, along with Adrian Dunbar, aka AC-12’s endlessly quotable superintendent Ted Hastings, “knew pretty quickly that we were gonna do one more, but we knew it wouldn’t be for a long time”.

Mercurio, meanwhile, was “always adamant we’re not announcing anything until we have a start of filming date and a script”. The “amount of distance” between season six’s finale and the next instalment, Compston promises, has given the showrunner “time to craft another brilliant story. You know, it hasn’t been rushed. It hasn’t just been ‘the last one was a massive success, so we’ll commission another season’.”

We knew pretty quickly that we were gonna do one more ‘Line of Duty’, but we knew it wouldn’t be for a long time

He’s read the first three scripts – the cast tend to receive them in two blocks of three, the first before filming starts and the second “some way through, because they can add to it and change stuff” – and has a “pretty well-defined” idea of the story arc. Not that he’s allowed to share it, of course, though the BBC has revealed that the series will focus on a charismatic officer accused of abusing his power to act as a sexual predator. Mercurio has, Compston notes, a knack for digging up “those little kernels of truth of something that’s really happened in police corruption, then he takes it and runs with it”; there will be “societal shifts reflected in this story”, he hints, “which is exciting to delve into”.

It’s “typical”, though, he adds, that he’ll be working on season seven when the 2026 World Cup is in full swing: as a former pro and proud Scot, he has “been waiting since I was 14” to see his national team qualify for the competition. Filming is slated to stop “just before the semi-final stage” and “not to get too down on us, but I think we might be out on our arses by then” (Scotland will be up against Brazil and 2022’s surprise semi-finalists Morocco in the group stages). But he’s still hopeful that he’ll “get the chance to nip to one” game during production. “I have to – it’s been so long waiting, I need to experience this.” Sure, Line of Duty might be a big deal and all. “But the World Cup? It’s the greatest show on earth, definitely!”

‘The Revenge Club’ is streaming on Paramount+ from 12 December