Ron Perlman and Holliday Grainger on The Capture Season 3

The following contains spoilers for The Capture (Season 3).

The playfulness to Ron Perlman’s Frank Napier came to the actor later; he didn’t enter The Capture (Season 3) knowing Napier was going to be funny. What drew him was its world: a pressure cooker of competing intelligence agencies, shifting enemies, and a rulebook that got more obscure as time went on.

Ron Perlman as Frank Napier in 'The Capture' — Ron Perlman as Frank Napier in ‘The Capture’

Holliday Grainger, returning as DS Rachel Carey for a third time, frames her season differently: as a portrait of what power does to a person; from fresh-faced command to slowly crumbling under the accumulation of moral weight. By the end of episode six of this season, she reaches a new low.

Fourth Take spoke to both ahead of the show’s US launch on Peacock.

Ron Perlman on Frank Napier’s playfulness and painted-outside-the-lines justice

The Capture Season 3 gives Frank a quality most of your starring roles don’t carry; a kind of lightness. Was that what drew you to the character?: Perlman is clear that the playfulness wasn’t the pitch. “It was more the situation that this character finds himself in,” he says. A world of overlapping law enforcement; local police through to the CIA’s London operation; grappling with enemies that have outpaced the rulebook. Frank’s job is to keep the world safe inside a framework that no longer quite fits the world.

The levity, when it arrived, was a discovery. “You see it in locker rooms,” Perlman says, “where the guys are constantly keeping everything on a very light level, knowing what’s at stake underneath.”

Frank and Rachel function less as allies than as enemies of a common enemy. Did you see a Frank-Rachel team-up coming before episode three?

Perlman sees the dynamic clearly, nodding that Frank has been in the game long enough to know that value systems face coastal levels of erosion. “Little by little you have all your resolve chipped away at, to the point where you rethink.”

What he recognises in her isn’t a threat: it’s a younger version of a position he’s already moved through. “I know you’re going to come around,” he says.

Holliday Grainger on Carey’s moral journey and how real The Capture actually is

Each season raises the stakes. How do you map that arc for Carey?: Grainger reaches for a political analogy. Think of any prime minister or president on their first day: young, full of conviction. Then look at the after pictures, four years later. “Haggard,” she says. “The moral weight of the world is on them, and you can just really feel all the depth of all the secrets that they’ve been told.”
How real is the show’s version of surveillance, counter-terror, and institutional overreach?: “When we were doing season one, we have advisors from the military and the police; people that have worked in counter-terror,” Grainger says. The technology in season one struck some viewers as far-fetched. It doesn’t anymore. “What you could only do on film sets you can now do in your front room.”

Holliday Grainger as Rachel Carey in 'The Capture' — Holliday Grainger as Rachel Carey in ‘The Capture’

The show’s thesis; that the gap between official narrative and operational reality is wider than anyone admits; has only become more credible as the years have passed. Just last week, a police officer was placed on leave for allegedly using AI to falsify evidence in a number of cases.

The laugh-cry at the end of episode six is one of the season’s defining moments. What’s going through Rachel’s mind?: “I think it’s a kind of disbelief,” Grainger says. Rachel is stoic through most of the season; she holds it together when the plot demands she shouldn’t. But the final episode forces her to reconcile with the mission she’s undertaken. “She realises what she had to lose and what she has to lose.”

Because Rachel doesn’t have much of a personal life, Grainger argues, what’s actually in play is her moral compass. And by the end of episode six, that’s exactly what’s at stake for Season 4 and beyond.

The Capture (Season 3) is available now on Peacock in the US. Check out the trailer below.