Apart from Stockwell Tube Station, in southern London, there is a mosaic wall of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician who was shot by the police 20 years ago. Under the smiling face of De Menezes is a single word in austere white capitals: “innocent”.
As the mural was unveiled in 2010, this innocence had been firmly established. The 27 -year -old was wrongly identified as a member of an Islamist group who had tried to trigger explosive devices on buses and trains on July 21, 2005, two weeks after the fatal terrorist attacks on July 7. A chaotic metropolitan police surveillance operation had led a man without blame followed and killed. And yet, a feeling of Menezes could have invited in a way his fate lingered in the collective memory.
“Everyone I talk to who remembers that this time believes that he did something to confuse the police,” said actor Russell Tovey, who plays the assistant assistant then assistant, Brian Paddick SuspiciousA dramatization in four parts of the murder of De Menezes. “Why was he running? Why does it jump the barriers? Why was he wearing a bulky coat? “
These rumors, repeated in the first media, were reconstructed from the stories of disconcerted passers -by who had witnessed the assault police through the station. An investigation by the Independent Commission for Police Complaints, published in 2007, concluded that the MET had not only failed to correct these inaccuracies, but in some cases had helped to spread them. Images of video surveillance of the station would show Menezes to collect a free newspaper, calmly walking at the ticket barrier and descend the escalator. He wore a denim jacket. He wore nothing. All this is faithfully reproduced in the series, with the Brazilian actor Edison Alcaide playing Menezes with a sweet grace in the glimpses that we see in his daily life, and in the horrible moments before his death.
For Tovey, Suspicious I felt like a way to restore the truth of what happened. “We are now in a post-truth world, where there are alternative facts, and whoever is stronger or has the most disciples, their truth is in good faith,” he says. “I think we have to dramatize these stories because it seems to be the way the truth is discovered. You look at the post office scandal (told in the Hit 2024 series Mr. Bates vs the post office), Or Adolescence. People learn and are educated by art more than they are by government rhetoric. So we have to continue to tell these stories. »»
Paddic, that Tovey plays, was one of the first to challenge the official story of what was known to Menezes, and when. He said publicly that Ian Blair, then commissioner of the Met, must have been aware that an innocent man had been killed in the hours after the shooting; After all, Paddick himself had been informed. The IPCC finally approved the Blair version of the chronology. Paddick, feeling sidelined after being transferred to a “non-work”, resigned from the Force in 2007.
Tovey sent a message to Paddick after obtaining the role of saying that he would play him. The couple met in the Lord House, where Paddick is now as an unconnected member. “We discussed the details of the case, but its memoirs covers this story,” explains Tovey. “I wanted to see what he looked like as a person, the way he was held, the way he drank his coffee. And the big note he told me is that throughout his life, everyone said he was sitting as if he had a rod in the back. You can read everything on my face, when it was just stoic, gives nothing. ”
He plays Paddick as he sees: “heroic, inspiration”. Blair, who is also sitting in the Lords, obtains less favorable treatment, as is Cressida Dick, who supervised the pursuit of De Menezes before getting up to become a Met Commissioner in 2017. “I really hope that it will have a great politically impact, that it has a great socially impact and that people are held responsible,” said Tovey.
The actor, 43, speaks with mastery and emergency on almost everything, but a recurring thread is art and his transformative possibilities. “Noël Coward said:” The work is more fun than fun, “he said. “And I get such joy of what I do.” For seven years, he has co-hosted a podcast, Talk about art (24 seasons and counting), which aims to demystify the world of visual art through conversations with artists, academics, collectors and conservatives. “Art has never been given to us,” he says. “It has never been given to Me. I had to fight for that, you know?
Having grown up in Essex, his school years concerned “survival”. “I was very cheeky, naughty, always trying to make everyone laugh, then I went out of the class and to leave:” I really want to be back there, to hear about war poets “. But if I had shown an interest in poetry, then I would have been called Gay or Boffin or I would have been targeted. ”
At 18, he was stabbed in the head, in an attack not caused against a train. “For years and years, I crossed the road if there were a group of guys,” he said. “I remember being at the bar that evening, and there was always a feeling that at any time, someone could bottle you without reason. It was culture in Romford – there was just violence in the air, constantly. ”
Every evening and every weekend, Tovey went to the Drama Club. “The theater was the thing that changed my life,” he says. “This is where I met my tribe and I realized that it was OK to have interests apart from what we said as young men that we could be interested.”
He worked in adolescence, but his career really took off in 2004 with Alan Bennett History boysPlaying the worker and underestimated student Rudge, taking him from the National Theater to Broadway and beyond. “The script is the thing,” he says. “The way I can enter a script is with a dialogue – I know in the first two pages if I am.
Tovey was released at the start of his career and said that playing gay characters put all these considerations with a clearer goal. “These roles had to have the impression of being there only for good,” he says. “There must have been a reason, there must have been something that changed.”
He participated in the 2014 HBO series LookA magnificent representation anchored of gay life in San Francisco. The program was canceled after two seasons. “It was a genius and it was before his time,” says Tovey. “There was so much less queer content. Will and graceWhat obviously had an impact for me was an incredible representation. I loved Will and grace. But this show was such an opposite and tonal energy. »»
If Look So he did not find his audience, “what is exciting about television is that he lives,” says Tovey. “There is any new generation that found it and who are” where was it? ” ». Because it's so contemporary. “
He feels something similar Suspiciousthat it could have the power to awaken the imagination of the public. “Jean Charles de Menezes is not only a name and a victim. He was a living and existing person with thoughts and feelings that were loved. I have exceeded this fresco outside of Stockwell Station hundreds of times, and I still stop and I always look at it. I hope people will pay tribute to him and his life. ”
“ Suspect: the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes' is on Disney + from April 30
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