Leicester actor Richard Armitage lands role in huge new Netflix crime drama Stay Close

Former Spooks and The Hobbit actor Richard Armitage is to star in a new eight-part crime drama on Netflix.

The Leicester-born star will appear in Stay Close, written by thriller novelist Harlan Coben, who has already worked with Netflix on Safe and The Stranger - which Richard also starred in.

The new drama explores how the people close to us could be concealing dark secrets, and how our past can suddenly unravel around us.

The series focuses on four people – a documentary maker called Ray played by Armitage, who once showed a lot of promise, alongside working mother-of-three Megan (Cush Jumbo), detective Broome (James Nesbitt), who is unable to let go of a cold case, and Lorraine (Sarah Parish), who is an old friend of Megan’s who turns up out of the blue.

Creepy scenes in the woods and a twisty script are just two elements you’d expect in a Coben story.

Richard, 50 who played the lead character Adam Price in The Stranger and also appeared as Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit, said: “The prospect of coming back to work with these guys again got me through lockdown, because I just thought, ‘There’s something on the horizon’, and I was able to study the book, and tentatively chat to them over that period of time and figure out what we wanted to do.

“One of the things that they were very nervous about was asking me to come back and play another character so close in their production, and just how do we make him very, very different to what we’d seen before.

"Obviously, it’s a different character, but he needed to look and feel different, and his trajectory was going to be different.

“Harlan’s work really translates brilliantly into a screenplay and lends itself to a limited series with an ending, and I think weaving a complicated storyline is what he does best. And it works really well with Stay Close.”

Stay Close launches on Netflix in the UK on Friday, December 31.