With a recent starring role in Murder Before Evensong and a stint in All Creatures Great and Small, Matthew Lewis is no stranger to a 5 drama. But now, he’s set to star in The Fortune, a twisty psychological thriller that’s all about inheritance, history and buried secrets.
In the series, Lewis stars as café chef Jimmy, who is happily married to Amanda (Eleanor Tomlinson) and together, are raising their son. Things seem pretty ideal for the pair until Amanda is paid a visit one day by a lawyer who informs her that she’s set to inherit the estate of a successful businessman.
The only problem is that Amanda has no idea who the man in question is and why he would be giving her all this money when he has a family of his own.
While Amanda tries to make sense of this sudden news, we do see that she’s not forthcoming with the news to Jimmy, something that Lewis himself didn’t really understand upon reading the scripts.
Chatting exclusively to Radio Times, the actor revealed: “Honestly, it was my very first question when I read the script, I was just like, ‘I don’t understand this’. I guess that’s a testament to my wife and I’s relationship. But I was like, ‘I don’t understand that’.
“So, I got on the phone with [director] Andy [de Emmony] and that was the bit that I had to get some clarity on. It’s quite necessary for the script that she doesn’t tell him. So then that becomes our job, as director and then, the performers to figure out what’s the motivation behind that? Like, what is it in our characters that has made that decision for her.”
He continued: “That was, admittedly, quite tricky to find that. But I think that through working through the characters with each other – Eleanor and I really spent a lot of time poring over these decisions because there’s a few things that Jimmy later on… where if Jimmy would just tell tell Amanda, they could solve a lot of issues but he chooses not to.
“And again, it’s trying to find the truth of that. Because people do dumb stuff all the time, particularly in relationships, and it’s just trying to find the truth of it. I think we got to a pretty good place.”
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As Lewis maps out, Amanda’s actions in the series aren’t always the most straightforward or crowd-pleasing but nevertheless, she goes to lengths to find out the truth about this mysterious man.
The synopsis for The Fortune reads: “Amanda Blakefield’s life is a happy one, with her husband Jimmy and their son Luke. But when Amanda is left an enormous inheritance by a man she has neither met nor heard of before, her life starts to fall apart.
“Amanda becomes embroiled in the world of the Worralls, where Martin Worrall is head of a family bound in past secrets. As Amanda is drawn further and further into past events and relationships, all of their lives are turned upside down.”
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The Fortune premieres on 5 on Tuesday 2 June at 9pm.
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