 female viewers. He has worked with exhausting regularity since then, notching up credits as the imperious dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit film trilogy; inscrutable MI5 spy Lucas in the TV series Spooks; the deliciously villainous Sir Guy of Gisborne in the BBC's Robin Hood; and the special-forces hard-man John Porter in Chris Ryan's Strike Back. Most recently, he starred in two Netflix adaptations of the Harlan Coben novels The Stranger and Stay Close. He is a consistently reliable screen presence: he often plays macho heroes with an interesting, sensitive side and was particularly excellent on stage as tormented visionary Astrov in Ian Rickson's 2020 West End revival of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. But with gre){kind=link}
The North and South star has won a legion of fans for his tough-guy screen roles. So why does he feel so unfulfilled?
If anyone had asked Richard Armitage 10 years ago whether he’d ever thought about writing a book, he’d have laughed. “I’d have said, ‘I’m not clever enough’,” he tells me. “I always feel a bit of an underdog when it comes to intellectual pursuits. I didn’t graduate from Oxbridge, like so many of my peers at Lamda [the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art].”
Yet here he is, the author of an atmospheric, icily tense audio-thriller, Geneva, about a Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist, Sarah, who is slowly losing her memory. The story, released earlier this month on the online audiobook and podcast service Audible as an “Audible Original”, takes in dementia, Big Pharma and biotech; Armitage narrates alongside Nicola Walker, his voice as soothing as melted chocolate.
“Audible asked me if I wanted to write something,” he explains. “I’ve narrated quite a few books for them and I think they checked the algorithm and realised I score quite highly with crime thrillers. They’ve seen I have an audience.”
Armitage, 51, says this in a self-effacing way. He’s been a fixture on the small screen since 2004, when he emerged as the brooding mill-owner John Thornton in the BBC’s adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South, delighting a generation of (let’s face it) female viewers. He has worked with exhausting regularity since then, notching up credits as the imperious dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit film trilogy; inscrutable MI5 spy Lucas in the TV series Spooks; the deliciously villainous Sir Guy of Gisborne in the BBC’s Robin Hood; and the special-forces hard-man John Porter in Chris Ryan’s Strike Back. Most recently, he starred in two Netflix adaptations of the Harlan Coben novels The Stranger and Stay Close.