We didn't know it was the final season... but I'll always be Harry

Returning as the tough LA detective for the thrilling last series of Bosch: Legacy, Titus Welliver reveals his hopes for a film-length reboot, grief for his co-star... and why he nearly became an artist

- By Matt Nixson

TITUS Welliver is in New York where it’s “p***ing down” with rain and there is, he laments, “nary a place to get a proper cup of char”. Thankfully, he’s got a box of PG Tips and a kettle in his apartment (“English wife, English life,” he explains). But it’s striking to discover that this most American of actors is such a committed Anglophile.

“Oh yeah,” he continues; his mother, Norma Cripps, a renowned fashion illustrator, had perfect elocution. “So friends of mine would think she was English, but she also used a tremendous amount of British slang. I never heard her call an elevator an elevator. It was always a lift. We ‘took tea’; she referred to cookies as biscuits.”

No doubt that helped when Welliver met his wife, interior designer Samantha Edge, daughter of the late, great Moody Blues drummer and co-founder Graeme Edge.

“She would say, ‘You use a lot of English slang, why is that?’” he chuckles. “And it was all from my mother. ‘Fancy a cup of char?”

Disarmingly, he slips into an English accent. But then Welliver is one of Hollywood’s most versatile stars, known for everything from Deadwood to Lost and Transformers. For the past decade, he’s inhabited the role of LA detective Harry Bosch and, despite being a veteran of countless TV and film appearances over 35 years, the take-no-prisoners cop created by Michael Connelly has come to define him.

“It’s one of those rarified experiences where it’s all so incredibly positive,” he beams. “The response has been remarkable, I'll forever be associated with it.”

Fittingly, it was Connelly himself who had a hunch Welliver might be the man to play Harry, introduced in the writer’s 1992 debut novel The Black Echo, after seeing him in the pilot for the drama, Touch.