This Thursday BritBox offers Americans the chance to puzzle along with “Ludwig,” David Mitchell’s hit detective series about a most unlikely detective.
Mitchell plays identical twins. John Taylor is a reclusive puzzle maker who publishes puzzle books under the pen name “Ludwig.” His twin James Taylor is a successful DCI (Detective Chief Inspector) in the Cambridge police force.
When James goes missing, his wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) asks John’s help. That means John shows up at the police station impersonating his brother, awkwardly at first, and invariably being sucked into cases and old-fashioned crime solving.
“I’d been saying for a few years I loved detective shows and whodunnits and would like to be in one, if at all possible,” Mitchell, 50, explained in a Zoom interview from London where he was costumed, in the midst of filming.
“So a producer I’ve worked with for years said, I’ll have a look ‘round. And in 2019 he sent me this two-page summary by a writer called Mark Brotherhood, which is what ‘Ludwig’ turned into.
“It was pretty full-formed on those two pages. I immediately thought, Well, that’s something I can play comically. A guy who looks identical to the policeman he’s claiming to be but is otherwise the worst suited person to work in a big, busy police station.
“I thought, If we have John doing that, it will be funny. And if that can be combined with an intriguing, overarching plot and intriguing weekly murder mysteries, which is what the plan was, I thought this could be, touch wood, a good show. And every script that Brotherhood wrote was a real page turner.
“So basically, from that two-page document, here we are.”
How do you become Ludwig?
“Basically, this is the story of a person who, by inclination, wants to work on their own, setting puzzles. But is forced into circumstances where he’s pretending he’s a chief inspector and that is a nightmarish plunge into his discomfort zone.
“That was what I focused on because that struck me as funny. But it’s also dramatic and it’s interesting.
“I thought a bit about how James and John both were faced with the same blow in their childhood when their father disappeared. And I thought John, he just disappeared into himself. He retreated from the world.
“Whereas his brother advanced into the world and decided to go out and solve problems in a different way. So I’ve got that in my mind.
“How that will manifest in a long conversation remains to be seen. But the idea that he’s a Puzzle Maker sort of explains his comfort in being an interior person who doesn’t really engage in the world.”
“Ludwig” streams on BritBox March 20