Credit: Will Aldersley
4 min read
New Year, new Harlan Coben thriller to immerse yourself in. We spoke to star Rosalind Eleazar to find out what to expect from Missing You on Netflix.
Where will you be on 1 January 2025?
I’ll be on my sofa, with a family-sized bag of Chilli Heatwave Doritos, smashing my way through Missing You on Netflix (before turning over to The Traitors). An almost exact replica of how I welcomed in 2024.
The new five-part thriller is another adaptation of a Harlan Coben novel (the second-busiest man in crime fiction after Richard Osman). And like 2024’s Fool Me Once with Michelle Keegan, it’s a fun, compelling, twisty series with a woman front and centre of proceedings.
Missing You stars Rosalind Eleazar (who was excellent as a failed MI5 agent in Slow Horses) as Detective Kat Donovan. It’s her first lead role, which I’m as baffled to learn as you are. “You do feel a responsibility in steering the ship. In some ways you are the one that is responsible for your whole journey,” she says.
Kat is swiping through the apps when she comes across the profile of Josh (Ashley Walters, Top Boy) her former fiance that ghosted her eleven years ago, never to be heard from again. His reappearance causes her to fall back into the past and face up to some long-buried secrets, particularly surrounding the suspicious death of her father, also a policeman (played in flashbacks by Lenny Henry).
There’s a really evocative line where Kat explains that she knows what it’s like to have so much anger you could tear the whole world apart with your bare hands. “In some ways, that sums Kat up,” says Eleazar. “She has a lot of unanswered questions. We know that she doesn’t fully believe the circumstances surrounding her father’s murder. She’s trying to work out whether she is going mad or if there was something untoward about his murder.”
Credit: Netflix
Eleazar goes on to tell me about how she went about creating the character of Kat. “I did think about playing her in a way where she’s closed up, and quite fragile and vulnerable. But I think it’s more interesting if she picks herself up all the time, if she’s more of a survivor. It’s relentless what she goes through but I wanted her to be able to pick herself up. I have people in my life that when something really traumatic happens, you see them plunge for like five minutes, but then they come out of it and it’s like, what just happened? Most humans don’t stay in that state of being down all the time because we’re natural survivors.”
That sense of survival often manifests in a character that doesn’t always think before she acts. The sort of person that you scream: ‘Why are you going in there? And all alone?’ at the telly. I wonder if that’s a reflection of her? “I am quite impulsive,” she laughs. “I probably act before I think. So I enjoy playing characters that are a bit impulsive. I think they can be more interesting. The other extreme, is someone that really, really thinks about what they’re doing and that’s almost a psychopath in a way, which is also equally as interesting to play. In Slow Horses, Louisa is definitely very impulsive too, which I think is part of her charm.”
Credit: Netflix
Alongside the twists and surprises, it’s the drama’s exploration of grief that makes it particularly compelling. How it shadows you no matter what you’ve put in place to stop it encroaching on your life. It’s something Eleazar can relate to. “I’ve experienced quite a lot of death in my life and quite early on,” she explains. “I am always fascinated with how it manifests in the body. Some people do compartmentalise, and it comes up later, particularly if it’s happened when you’re young and you don’t talk to anyone. What’s interesting about Kat’s situation is that she has a lot of unanswered questions but she’s a very private person, and she doesn’t talk to anyone. She’s closed off – and it’s why she’s drawn to a friendship with Stacey (Jessica Plummer), who is really gregarious, and they don’t ever get deep.”
Credit: Apple TV+
We might not be all be able to relate to investigating the murder of our father, a former detective sergeant. There can’t be many of us who haven’t endured the reappearance of a romantic apparition from your past. And that’s that’s something the show’s creators lent into. “What is interesting is that although this is one of the most dark and brutal books of the Harlan series, it is also about love,” explains the show’s lead writer Victoria Asare-Archer. “I’m a big romance reader and the chance to marry this big, epic, romantic love story with some very dark, difficult and painful stuff was fun. There is a quote from the book that we kept trying to get in: Love blinds but not as much as wanting to be loved. That was the ethos of this series.”
While Missing You definitely stays on the dark side of that love story, after being an action hero in two big thriller series, Eleazar would love to embrace something softer for her next role: “I would love to do a romcom. So I’m putting it out there…”
Get her in Nobody Wants This series two, now!
Missing You is on Netflix on 1 January
Images: Will Aldersley, Netflix, Apple TV+
Sign up to Stylist’s weekly curation of the best TV, films, documentaries and more, and you’ll never wonder ‘What should I watch?’ again.
By signing up you agree to occasionally receive offers and promotions from Stylist. Newsletters may contain online ads and content funded by carefully selected partners. Don’t worry, we’ll never share or sell your data. You can opt-out at any time. For more information read Stylist’s Privacy Policy
Thank you!
You’re now subscribed to all our newsletters. You can manage your subscriptions at any time from an email or from a MyStylist account.