Cush Jumbo, pictured at Toronto's Shangri-La hotel in April, portrays a conflicted detective named June Lenker on Apple TV's Criminal Record, which is back for a second season.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
The journey to greatness for British actresses can take many paths, but playing a copper on TV has never hurt on the road to silver screen roles that win golden statuettes.
Think of Helen Mirren, whose run of Academy Awards nominations and eventual win began a few years after she started playing Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Jane Tennison in ITV’s police procedural Prime Suspect in 1991.
Or Olivia Colman, who wrapped the role of detective sergeant (DS) Ellie Miller on ITV’s Broadchurch in 2017 and immediately went to Los Angeles to collect her first Oscar.
Now Cush Jumbo – first flagged as “set to become one of the best actresses of her generation” by The Guardian when she was still in her 20s – has found a small-screen detective to really sink her teeth into.
The 40-year-old plays the complicated and conflicted June Lenker on Apple TV’s Criminal Record, which has returned for a second season.
Judging by a promotional tour arranged by Apple that took her in person to Toronto on the way to Chicago and New York, her DS-turned-DCI could be around even longer.
“I’ll essentially play a character until I feel like I have exhausted what there is to discover about them, which is why I love the theatre,” says Jumbo, whose stage roles in London since she moved back from New York in 2020 include Hamlet and Lady Macbeth.
“You know, if you’re doing a run of Shakespeare, you only really begin to solve the character in the last couple of weeks – and then the show closes.”
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Criminal Record, when it came out in 2024 (and landed on this critic’s year-end list), did not initially seem like a candidate for an open-ended run.
The show had limited series written all over it, set in an ugly-beautiful London, much of the action moodily shot in those three-dimensional concrete mazes known as council estates.
In that first season, Jumbo’s Lenker, who is Black, tried to reopen the case of a potentially wrongly imprisoned man and was blocked at every turn by higher-ranked detective Dan Hegarty (The Thick of It’s Peter Capaldi), who is white and dismissed the prisoner in question as a “poor man’s O.J.”
By the end, the cat had caught the mouse and vice versa and Jumbo, too, thought the “very London-centric” story was done.
But it took off internationally thanks to the chemistry and contrasts between the leads.
“Apple wanted a second one, so we had to find a reason for the two detectives to come back together,” she says.
Criminal Record jumps right into that reason in Season 2.
Lenker is monitoring a Muslim-led demonstration against Western imperialism for extremist rhetoric when a far-right mob breaks onto the scene.
A teenage boy is stabbed and dies in her arms – and, when Lenker starts to look into another young man she thought she recognized in the melee, she once again runs into interference from Hegarty. “Coffee?” he texts her.
The theme of the season turns out to be where speech crosses the line as Lenker and Hegarty team up to keep tabs on podcaster Cosmo Thompson (Dustin Demri-Burns), who rails against immigrants and Islam in videos recorded with vaudevillian flair from a mixed martial arts gym.
“Peter and I, we don’t think there’s any point shying away from the world that we’re reflecting back in a show,” says Jumbo.
“I think the success of Season 1 and the way that people responded to it was that they loved the grey areas of those conversations. We weren’t trying to make a polarizing show or a show that looked at goodies and baddies.”
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Jumbo brings her classically trained stage chops and highly emotionally expressive eyes to the part of Lenker on screen – but she and Capaldi are also involved behind the scenes as hands-on executive producers.
Capaldi, 68, met Jumbo on the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood nearly 20 years ago – this was before the Scottish actor played The Doctor himself, and Jumbo took off for the U.S. to play lawyer Lucca Quinn on CBS’s The Good Wife and its sequel The Good Fight – and they’ve been looking for opportunities to work together ever since.
The two developed Criminal Record alongside creator and writer Paul Rutman and producer Elaine Collins, who is also Capaldi’s wife.
Jumbo’s personal investment shows in an interview as she physically cringes when I describe the character of Cosmo containing hints of such real-life online hatemongers as Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate.
“I think we definitely wanted to stay away from those two particular comparisons,” she says.
For Jumbo, it was important that Cosmo – a kind of 21st-century resurrection of Archie Rice, the angry middle-aged music-hall man at the centre of John Osborne’s 1957 play The Entertainer – have a certain element of charm and his underclass entourage not be stereotyped.
“We have to believe that a young person could be sucked into that,” she says.
“I grew up in a very working class community in London – I don’t come from any privilege – and I think it’s super important to not treat audiences like they’re stupid.”
This dark, twisty season of TV, Criminal Record has ended up another thing Jumbo can’t show to her seven-year-old son – who has, to date, only listened to her work as the narrator in the new Audible recordings of the Harry Potter books.
Maybe a potential Season 3 will strike a lighter tone? “Peter and I are both only really interested in playing people that change,” Jumbo says. “But I don’t think it’s ever going to be a buddy cop drama.”
New episodes of Criminal Record land on Apple TV on Wednesdays.