Who’ll do it? Actors line up for the title role as BBC reboots Poirot

All the suspects have been gathered and a solution to the mystery is mere moments away: the identity of the next Poirot is soon to be revealed. But the new Hercule will not look quite the way he did.

While much of the world has been distracted by the search for the new James Bond, Agatha Christie fans are solving a different riddle. They have been attempting to guess who will play the Belgian detective in an upcoming BBC television reboot – not to mention discovering where and when the series will be set.

Christie’s meticulous sleuth, famed for the deductive powers of his “little grey cells”, has been played by a string of middle-aged white men, from Peter Ustinov and Albert Finney to David Suchet and Kenneth Branagh. Even John Malkovich had a crack at it in the BBC’s 2018 version of The ABC Murders. At that time James Prichard, Agatha Christie’s great grandson and one of the custodians of the estate, said that each actor has emphasised different “idiosyncrasies and vanities” of Poirot. He added: “There is something in the core of Poirot that makes him Poirot.” Christie described him variously as “diminutive”, “fastidious” in his dress and as having an “egg-shaped” head.

So far all clues point to the newcomer being something of a surprise. The neat moustaches and pinstripe suit so closely associated with the role are likely to be discarded. Despite rumours the role will go to a younger-than-usual candidate, there are campaigns backing either Eddie Marsan or Peter Dinklage, who has already voiced the character for Audible, while other fans are divided between support for two Tobys: Jones or Stephens.

Actor and Christie superfan Alasdair Buchan believes the novelist’s whodunnits have never been more popular with younger readers and viewers. “It is like entry-level adult literature, with satisfying plots that are also somehow gently salacious and violent, but in quite a lower-case way,” he said.

Buchan, who recently starred in The Mousetrap in London’s West End, sees scope for bringing out modern themes. “I have always argued there are a lot of gay characters throughout Christie’s work, particularly lesbians – either a brusque elderly spinster or a blustering young woman in a tie. A new TV series that picked up on that would be really interesting. But you have to be careful not to update too much, or the plots just won’t work.”

Whoever is cast, the new series will be made by London-based Mammoth Screen, the company behind recent Christie adaptations including the BBC series And Then There Were None and Murder is Easy. The company’s founder, Damien Timmer, is also responsible for a string of episodes in the popular ITV series Poirot, starring Suchet, that ran from 1989 to 2013.

The secrets of the script are under lock and key, but the fresh adaptation, produced in collaboration with the company run by Prichard, Agatha Christie Limited, is due to be filmed in north-west England this summer. The writer behind the reincarnation is Benji Walters, who worked on the BBC series Noughts + Crosses, on ITV’s Code of Silence, and on Netflix’s Obsession and The Leopard. Walters will take the story into new territory, as the Malkovich drama did in flashback, or by casting against expectation.

Poirot appeared in 33 novels and 51 short stories and, in the last decade, has been played by Branagh in three starry movies: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and A Haunting in Venice. The BBC has committed to making several series and further opportunities for researching Poirot will come at the end of the summer when the British Library marks the 50th year since Christie’s death with a major exhibition, Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery. The show will look at how the prolific author’s life, travels and interests informed the creation of her seminal characters, including Poirot and Miss Marple.

Meanwhile BritBox is bringing two of Christie’s amateur detectives, Tommy and Tuppence, back to television. The duo were most recently played onscreen in period costume by David Walliams and Jessica Raine, but the new version, starring Antonia Thomas and Josh Dylan, is set in contemporary Hampstead, London.

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