It’s always daunting moving to a new place, but finding out your neighbours are swingers is a whole other ballgame. School sweethearts Evie and Pete, played by Eleanor Tomlinson and Alfred Enoch, have a baby on the way and move to a sleepy northern suburb to start their new life together as a family.
But their dream of picket fences and manicured lawns goes disastrously wrong when they get too close to the couple living opposite them, Becka and Danny.
“Danny is a man that maybe appears like an alpha male,” reveals Sam Heughan, 43, who plays Danny. “He and Becka have this unique relationship that perhaps is an open relationship where they have certain guidelines. I think Becka is definitely the one that has driven that, and she has her own set of rules that Dan struggles to live up to.”
“We find out Danny’s a man of the law,” continues Sam. “He’s a man of rules, but he’s always in those grey areas. And as the season goes on, he begins to really deteriorate and to push the boundaries.”
The six-part Channel 4 thriller is adapted from Dutch series New Neighbours and sees Evie and Pete experience a devastating loss shortly after they move.
What happens to them pushes Evie to confide in yoga teacher Becka, played by Australian actress Jessica De Gouw, 35.
“Oh Jessica, what a woman,” says Eleanor, 31. “She and I worked very closely on creating the bond between us, which is somewhat the gateway to all of this that sort of ensues.”
However, it’s the growing bond between Evie and hunky traffic cop Danny that sparks a dangerous chain of events.
For two stars of the show, Eleanor and Sam, appearing in The Couple Next Door meant breaking away from the roles in period dramas that they’re known for. Eleanor played Demelza Poldark in Poldark for four years, while Sam continues to star as Jamie Fraser in Outlander.
“Evie, she’s very complicated,” says Eleanor. “I wanted to somewhat break away from what I’m known for. That’s what I always strive for and this was a real challenge to kind of flex some muscles.”
“Following on from Eleanor, I’ve been working on my other show Outlander for a decade,” continues Sam. “And it’s hard to find roles that are, perhaps not only different, but also fit into a time period. I just finished shooting the last season of Outlander, so this fitted in perfectly.”
For filming, the cast went to Leeds, the Netherlands and Belgium, which meant a lot of time was spent together.
“I think it’s incredibly rare to get a cast of four people who got on so well immediately,” says Eleanor. “So there was really no building of trust. It was already there, and we just had a hoot. We speak pretty much every day, even now.”
However, all the moving around and hearing various dialects proved challenging for one Scotsman.
“For me, the accent was a tough one,” reveals Danny. “I had to do a northern, or Leeds accent and we were filming in Belgium and the Netherlands most of the time. So you have a lot of very different accents in your ear.”
How To Get Away With Murder star Alfred, 34, plays Evie’s husband, who can’t help but worry about the growing closeness between his wife and Danny.
“Pete is always on the back foot,” explains Alfred. “He lets these things fester and he doesn’t quite say what he wants or say what he means, so he makes these little snarky comments. He gets dragged along quite a bit, and his only recourse is to ironise.
“Playing him was somewhere between really enjoyable and quite confronting and frustrating. I enjoy putting these characters in such extreme situations that it really allows you to find out what’s beneath the mask.”
Sam also hints that there will be lots of twists and turns as the story progresses.
“In every episode, your allegiances will change,” he says. “One moment, you’ll think someone’s in the wrong, or someone’s in the right, and by the end of the show, your perception will have completely changed.”
The Couple Next Door begins Monday 27 November, 9pm, Channel 4
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