Liev Schreiber, Zazie Beetz, Stephen Graham and Rory Culkin on Nocturne: Nordic noir and courtship with a serial killer

Created for television by Rowan Joffé and developed by John Hlavin, who serves as showrunner, Nocturne adapts Lazarus and The Sandman, two novels in the acclaimed Joona Linna crime series by Swedish husband-and-wife writing team Alexander Ahndoril and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril, better known as Lars Kepler. Premiering this Friday on Apple TV, the series follows former homicide detective Jonah Lynn as an imprisoned serial killer’s shadow falls across his new home. I spoke with the show’s stellar ensemble including actors Liev Schreiber, Zazie Beetz, Stephen Graham and Rory Culkin, about their experiences adapting the crime thriller for television.

The small-town crime drama has enjoyed a healthy resurgence of late, from HBO’s Mare of Easttown (2021) to Task(2025), both eschewing the abstracted trappings of a metropolitan killing field to capitalise on the intimacy of provincial Americana. Nocturne, however, draws more directly from the American tradition of adapting Nordic crime fiction, exemplified by AMC’s The Killing (2011), itself based on the Danish series Forbrydelsen (2007). As its lead star and executive producer, Liev was attracted to the genre’s capacity for making misery communal.

“Nordic noir is probably one of my favourite genres,” Liev says, explaining that the challenge lay in transferring its ethos across the Atlantic. “We were talking before about reading the books and how we could smell the snow, the solitude and the space. How we would do that for an American audience was a real challenge.” Moving the story from its original Scandinavian context into Maine before settling on western Pennsylvania gave the adaptation a distinctly American geography without surrendering its Nordic existentialism. “How do we adapt this very Nordic sensibility to an American sensibility?” he asks. “That bleakness, that sense of despair, that sense of human frailty is not just in one character. It’s spread around.” 

Best known for the titular fixer in Ray Donovan, the saboteur Victor Creed AKA Sabretooth in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and his Best Picture winning turn as Boston Globe editor Marty Baron in Spotlight, the actor now plays Jonah Lynn, an ex-soldier turned homicide detective, who abandons Philadelphia for what he hopes will be a quieter existence. “Tall, white, kind of mopey, right about everything,” is how the books describe the original Joona Linna — Liev chuckles at how that sounds like a description Zazie would likely furnish him with. Asked how he attempted to make the character his own, Liev says, “Honestly, I don’t believe as actors, we really have a choice. We make every character our own because we portray them. I think I’m someone who is driven by a certain level of fear or anxiety. And those were the things that spoke to me about Jonah’s character.”

Researching the profession meant confronting repeated exposure to death. Liev met Pittsburgh homicide detectives in a bar late one evening, where a conversation about their first and most recent encounters with deceased people unexpectedly became the emotional core of his preparation. “It was very emotional and very moving to hear these people talking about how they’ve become inured to death,” he says. “I thought that was a really interesting place, especially in the tradition of Nordic noir, to begin this exploration of these characters.”

I first saw Zazie in FX’s Atlanta (2016), which remains one of my all-time favourite shows, and have since caught her in Deadpool 2 (2018) and Joker (2019). Here, Saga Bauer is The Silence of the Lambs by way of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with Zazie playing the FBI agent who must disappear into the role of an undercover psychiatric patient to get inside a serial killer’s head.

“I was very inspired by Girl, Interrupted,” she explains, recalling how the 1999 film’s atmosphere informed her understanding of vulnerability and instability. She also consulted mental health professionals to understand more about schizophrenia and watched YouTube videos in which people documented their experiences, including active episodes. “This was a great spectrum of experience and I needed to decide what kind of version of it Esther would have. It was fascinating and it grew my empathy a hundredfold. I really wanted to emphasise the vulnerability of this population,” she says.

Stephen’s Jurek Walter is the malignant intelligence around which the series’ various anxieties gather. The Emmy-winning British actor’s credits span his turn as Al Capone in 2010’s Boardwalk Empire and his critically acclaimed role in Netflix’s Adolescence (2025). Here, he plays an imprisoned serial killer whose ability to read and manipulate other people makes physical confinement an inadequate guarantee of safety. The Hannibal Lecter comparison is difficult to avoid, but Jurek’s particular strand of evil lies in the attention he gives his targets — in this case, Rory’s psychiatric-ward worker Karl.

As Rory describes it, there is an erotic charge to Jurek’s ability to make another person feel uniquely understood. “I think Jurek’s presence is soothing in a way,” he says. Karl works upstairs amid the ward’s noise and disorder before being assigned to Jurek downstairs, where “it’s suddenly very quiet” and he encounters a man who is measured and patient. “There’s something seductive about it. The way Jurek looks at him makes him feel special,” says Rory.

Both actors readily embrace a queer reading of that parasocial dynamic. “There’s nothing more exciting than a crush,” Rory says. “You can’t get the person out of your mind. Every other thought is about them, even if you don’t want it to be.” Jurek’s attention leaves Karl feeling seen, but the intimacy is inseparable from the possibility that he is being expertly handled. Culkin admits that the experience followed him home after filming, with some nights leaving him struggling to sleep because he could not stop thinking about the day’s scenes.

Stephen confirms that the blossoming chemistry was deliberate. “There was that kind of sexual ambiguity between the two of them,” he says. “Because of his upbringing, Jurek is a great manipulator and can understand a person within just a few seconds of meeting them. He can really get inside their head because he’s a great reader of the human condition,” Stephen adds.

The intensity between Stephen and Rory was also cultivated away from the cameras. “We would go on dates all the time to art museums,” Rory smiles. “I think we were on the same page creatively,” he remembers thinking as they discovered which artworks neither particularly admired. Stephen confirms that the time together fostered genuine affection and mutual respect. “I love watching him as an actor,” he says of Rory, describing how he sometimes became so absorbed in his colleague’s work during rehearsals that he forgot he was supposed to be participating in the scene. He also fondly recalls an opening scene in which Karl attempts to get under a bed after Jurek collapses from an injection. Rory kept getting physically stuck. “He couldn’t get out onto the bed… I’d have killed you by now,” Graham laughs, remembering his colleague apologising in increasingly exasperated terms as the crew repeatedly reset the scene.

Though Jurek’s sinister influence hangs over the series even when he’s nowhere to be seen, Zazie says Stephen never attempted to maintain that suffocating presence between takes, preferring to preserve a more convivial atmosphere on set. “I think Stephen is like a very big teddy bear,” she chides. “He doesn’t want to be an as***le on set. He is a man filled with life and charisma and has a sort of ‘life force’ intensity, which I think he channeled into a different place for Jurek.”

Nocturne premieres on Apple TV on October 30

Published – October 28, 2026 10:39 am IST