Kathleen Munroe, left, and Luke Kirby star in Season 4 of Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. Both Canadian, the two have worked together before.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
It’s new cop partners, new scene partners on Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent this season.
After three years on the beat with Detective Sergeant Henry Graff, Detective Sergeant Frankie Bateman is returning to fight Toronto’s war on crime with a different case-solving consort: Detective Sergeant John Darcy.
That means that Kathleen Munroe, who plays Bateman, is working with a new co-star: Emmy-winning actor Luke Kirby, who plays the new detective who’s got her six in the Six. The switcheroo was precipitated by Australian-Canadian actor Aden Young, who played Graff, moving back down under at the end of a three-season contract.
“It’s totally bittersweet,” Munroe says in a video call interview from Toronto. “I miss my buddy Aden – and I also could not imagine a better partner than Luke in this scenario.”
Law & Order Toronto was originally built around Young as Graff. He was cast first, and then four actors came in to do chemistry reads with him. Munroe landed the part of Bateman after her fourth audition, she says.
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Matchmaking Monroe with Young’s replacement was a less involved affair: one and dun dun. The producers floated the idea of Kirby to the actor and she was immediately enthusiastic.
Kirby felt similarly about joining Munroe.
“Her intelligence and curiosity and complexity was something I was very drawn to,” he says, in a video interview from New York. “Knowing that she was going to be leading the charge on this show, I thought that I would be in safe hands.”
The actors, both Canadian, were not strangers to one another, having played a couple in a suicide pact who take a wedding party hostage in a particularly intense 2009 episode of the CTV cop show Flashpoint.
“We cried in each other’s mouths for weeks,” Munroe recalls.
In other words, no chemistry read was required. “I don’t know what he would need to prove ever, in anything,” she says. “He’s such a deft performer.”
Kirby joins the cast after Munroe’s previous co-star, Aden Young, departed the show and moved to Australia at the end of his three-season contract.Steve Wilkie/Supplied
Speaking to one actor right after the other, the complementary contrasts between Kirby and Munroe are apparent.
Kirby does his interview vertically on his phone, walking and talking his way through Prospect Park like he’s auditioning for an Aaron Sorkin TikTok series.
Munroe, on the other hand, stays stationary and horizontal, curled up on a chair at her home, occasionally chomping on an Ontario peach in between interview answers like a low-key Marlon Brando.
Even the main thing the actors have in common – being born in Hamilton – is a point of playful divergence.
“He will say, ‘I’m from Guelph’,” Munroe says. “That man was born in Hamilton, Ontario.”
“She’ll claim that I’m from Hamilton,” Kirby says. “I feel like it’s incumbent upon me to inform people that I was only there for 48 hours before going up Highway 6 to Guelph for the next, you know, 19 years.”
The onscreen dynamic between them as Bateman and Darcy is more subtly distinguished.
Law & Order Toronto’s original cop partnership of Graff and Bateman was a variation on the classic detective double act of Sherlock and Watson. Graff was always pulling out some esoteric fact to help solve a case, while Bateman was the one who excelled in the empathy department.
Both Munroe and Kirby say the new dynamic cannot be so easily defined.
“There was a real fluidity to it,” Munroe says. “There is a little bit of like a pull and a curiosity and a growing reliance on each other.”
Munroe, who knows the American Law & Order franchises well, says Bateman and Darcy are not like either of her favourite former pairings: Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe and Benjamin Bratt’s Rey Curtis from seasons 6 through 9 of the original series, or Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson and Christopher Meloni’s Elliot Stabler’s 12-year partnership – known to fans as “Bensler” – on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
The demanding shooting schedule of the police procedural, Kirby says, was such that he and Munroe developed their characters’ relationship and its progression as the season was shot, rather than planning it out much in advance. “It was just about sort of circling each other in the space and finding it inside the scenes.”
Both Munroe and Kirby say the new partners’ dynamic can’t be as easily defined as the show’s old duo.Steve Wilkie/Supplied
In this season’s opening episode (Oct. 1 on CITY-TV), Bateman and Darcy’s cop-partner meet-cute takes place in a coffee shop – when she interviews him as a witness to the shooting of a mob boss not knowing he’s an undercover police officer.
His cover blown, Darcy joins the Specialized Criminal Investigations Unit to help Bateman on this one case with his knowledge about the dead mobster. (Of course, it ends up being more than one case.)
Darcy’s ability to blend in and shape-shift after years in covert operations is a big part of how producer Tassie Cameron pitched Kirby on the character, the actor says.
“Darcy has maybe developed this kind of knack for switching his language depending on who he’s with,” he says. “He can adjust his behaviour and carriage to the level of whoever the suspect, to figure out a way to pin them down long enough to get them in handcuffs.”
In other words, Darcy is a performer – and performing as a performer is one of Kirby’s strong suits.
The actor first grabbed attention on the small screen in Canada in the cult classic Slings & Arrows playing a young Hollywood star recruited to play Hamlet at the fictional New Burbage Festival on the Stratford Festival-inspired TV series.
Years later, in 2019, Kirby won his Emmy playing the comedian Lenny Bruce on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
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Most recently, he starred as Jack McMillan, the artistic director of the New York Metropolitan Ballet, in Étoile, a short-lived Amazon Prime Video series created by Mrs. Maisel’s Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino.
Playing Darcy in Law & Order Toronto marks a switch from streaming serialized fare to procedural fare – one that Kirby embraced. “You’re not really meant to know too much about the character’s backstory, and it sort of affords the actor some flexibility from week to week of who they are,” he says. “I found that to be an invigorating exercise.”
Working out a new onscreen relationship was far from the hardest part of the fourth season shoot for Munroe. She suffered through a concussion (from a fall while hiking), a collapsed lung (asthma related), a broken foot (from dropping a cast-iron skillet on it, an injury written into the show) and then got mononucleosis (from sharing a water bottle at a line-dancing event).
Kirby showed up for her on set, she says, always present and generous amid her health challenges. “I give him his flowers in a huge way,” she says. “I never would have imagined needing anybody the way that I needed him in that role.”