Samuel Barnett

The Brit actor who’s taking Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently stateside

- Richard Edwards

It’s fair to say that anyone who’s read Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently novels would be unlikely to picture the man now playing the holistic detective on TV in the role. “When I was auditioning for the part and reading the books, I was thinking, ‘I look nothing like how I picture Dirk Gently,’” laughs Samuel Barnett. “He’s older than me, he’s quite portly, quite scruffy, he wears this big overcoat…” But Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, the new BBC America adaptation that’s landing in the UK on Netflix this month, is like no incarnation of the character we’ve seen before. Relocating Dirk to Seattle, the eight-part series has been reimagined by Chronicle scripter Max Landis – though Dirk’s methods still focus on the interconnectedness of all things. “I know my Dirk is a little different,” Barnett admits, “but what Max Landis has done is absolutely capture the spirit of Dirk, the way Dirk’s mind works, and the way his universe works.”

The show’s set in Seattle, but you’re playing a British Dirk. Was he always supposed to hail from the UK?