Yahoo News The Tourist: Jamie Dornan took some convincing to return as Elliot Stanley
The BBC's hit drama returns for a second series, much to the surprise of its star
When The Tourist broadcast its final episode on 30 January, 2022, it closed with its lead character, the amnesia-struck Elliot Stanley, dying — or so it seemed — from a pills and booze overdose, having discovered the ugly truth of his real identity. And that looked like it really was it for The Tourist.
“It wasn't always an intention to do a second season,” its star Jamie Dornan tells Yahoo, nearly two years on from the screening of the UK’s most watched drama of ‘22, “so it feels very exciting to be back… and a little bit strange.”
Little was expected of The Tourist when it dropped on BBC1 on 1 January, 2022, but within a few episodes this quirky, Coen bros-esque thriller had become the water-cooler drama of the year, setting social media alight with its varied twists and turns. Critics loved it, audiences adored it and speculation quickly grew that maybe this wasn’t the last we’d seen of Elliot Stanley.
“I wasn’t into it originally,” Dornan says about coming back for a second stint. “But once I went out with Jack and Harry [Williams, the sibling writers of the show], and they laid out a plan of how we’d be doing it and where we’d be doing it, then I got on board with it pretty quick. So yeah, it wasn’t in the original plan but I’m very happy we’ve managed to do another series.”
When Dornan refers to ‘where we’d be doing it’, the answer, this time round, was Ireland. Whereas the first series had the rugged Australian Outback as its backdrop, the second season relocates the action to Dublin where Elliott (spoiler alert, he survived) and friend and sometime squeeze, former police officer Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald) go to find more answers to his murky past.
“The harshness of the Australian Outback was such a massive part of the show,” says Dornan, “and tonally added to the sense of desperation that Elliot was going through. [Series two is] still true to the tone and absurdity of The Tourist, but it definitely does feel different because of its geography.”
Among the new characters for series two is Ruairi Slater, a Garda police officer with a few secrets of his own, played by The Sixth Commandment’s Conor MacNeill.
“When Elliot goes missing quite early on,” the actor tells us, “Helen comes to me, but sadly the detective she gets lumped with is slightly terrified and a bit work-averse.”
MacNeill had watched and loved the first series, a fan, he says, of the Williams brothers’ “witty and funny” scripts.
“Real life is like that, isn’t it,” he suggests. “There are a lot of stock characters on TV sometimes, and the lads are writing to the absurdity of real life, and that’s why it works. They write so well that when you’re reading it, you’re really invested."
“It’s not one genre,” adds Danielle Macdonald, who plays Helen, one of series two’s few returning characters. “Jamie and I did the season before this but it still keeps us on our toes. You’re constantly trying to find the tone in every scene because it is very specific.”
For Dornan, The Tourist has proved a particularly challenging series, physically, though this season doesn’t require anything as nerve-shredding as the car crash that opened season one. “We took two weeks to shoot that scene,” he says, “I think [the Williams brothers] enjoy watching me have to go through these sorts of things, it’s some sort of exercise for them that they think is funny! I still feel relatively young and able bodied and I definitely fling myself around Ireland a fair bit in the second series and get roughed up a lot. That's a part of it that I sincerely enjoy!”
To say that there’s excitement about this second series of The Tourist would be putting it mildly. That first season was perhaps 2022’s most talked about drama, winning over audiences and critics alike and becoming one of iPlayer's most downloaded shows. This follow-up, then, has become one of the most anticipated TV launches of recent years.
“I was in America when the first series came out,” says Macdonald about 2022’s Tourist-mania, “so Jamie and Shalom [Brune-Franklin, who played Luci] were texting me saying, ‘This is crazy!’ But I came to the UK this year for the first time since it came out and I’ve noticed a lot more of a reaction. Coming to London and now Ireland, I was like, Oh, wow, they're all absolutely fans of The Tourist here. And it’s been a year, so if people are still remembering it, that’s a good sign.”
While series two may have a different aesthetic to that sun-dappled first series, it’s still very much the same show that over nine million UK viewers fell in love with in January ‘22.
“It’s visually different but not necessarily tonally different,” says MacNeill. “It still has a host of quirky and odd characters and it’s just as gripping and surprising.”
“Jack and Harry have a very specific way of writing,” adds Macdonald, “and season two has the same craziness and dark comedy, with an entirely new cast of characters.”
“We’re offering up something a bit different purely by geography,” says Dornan, who also has an executive producer credit on this second season. “I feel like the colour of the Outback, the scale of it and fear was a major character in the first series. We've taken that away this time and we’ve suddenly gone from the orangey dirt of the Outback to the lush green settings of Ireland.
"Particularly with the first episode, it's like a Tourism Ireland advert. It's different and I hope that people are on board with that and get the same sort of satisfaction. The humour is all there, and the story is as mad as the first series!”
The Tourist returns to BBC One on 1 January, 2024.
Read more: BBC Drama
