“Where is Jessica Hyde?” This was the compelling question that met viewers of cult thriller Utopia when it debuted in January 2013. Armed with an ominous yellow sports bag, Neil Maskell’s lumbering assassin Arby was the one to ask it – and even though two seasons were all we got before Channel 4 pulled the plug on the show (bad ratings, apparently), Utopia is still rated as one of the coolest conspiracy tales by its fierce fanbase.
“I was just really interested in this notion of conspiracy theories, and it’s worth pointing out that since I wrote it conspiracy theories have gone unbelievably… I honestly wouldn’t write it today because they’re so mainstream,” says creator Dennis Kelly, speaking to NME on Zoom 10 years to the week since Utopia’s finale aired.
For the uninitiated, the story begins with rich guy Bejan (Mark Stobbart) acquiring a manuscript for graphic novel The Utopia Experiments Part 2, which is suspected to contain the molecular code for human sterilisation in its drawings. Arby and his partner Lee of The Network – a shadowy organisation seeking to acquire the code and hide it inside a vaccine for Russian Flu – are dispatched to snatch this gnarly comic, yet Utopia enthusiasts Wilson, Becky, Grant and Ian get in their way, putting them on a collision course with the aforementioned Jessica.
A luminous assault on the senses – shoutout to director Marc Munden and cinematographer Ole Bratt Birkeland – the series’ Watchmen-esque palette perfectly accentuates its, at times, cartoonish violence. Composer Cristobal Tapia De Veer’s kaleidoscopic score deserves a mention too; think a cappella vocals mashed together with whale song and clockwork-like techno.
“We were filming in these sort of remote or often derelict houses, or big empty factory spaces and we were all very new to the game,” Alexandra Roach, who plays Becky, tells NME. “We all really loved our characters and how they interacted with each other, they were just so bold.”
One extremely bold interaction occurs when The Network’s hitmen track down Wilson (Adeel Akhtar) at home. The ensuing torture scene saw Akhtar’s conspiracy nut – he has his own nuclear fallout shelter – get chillies, sand and bleach rubbed into his eyeballs before one is spooned out of its socket by Paul Ready’s dapper Lee. “I was having a drink outside a place in Manchester last summer with Adeel and someone came over and went, ‘Oh it’s you two!’ and we were like, ‘Look, we’re mates!’” cackles Maskell, who adopted a slight Darth Vader wheeze in order to play Arby (we later learn his father gave him brain-meddling inhibitors as a toddler). The Hijack and Kill List actor reveals he’d read about pulmonary blockages being commonplace among people who’ve been experimented on and that he was encouraged to run with this observation during rehearsals.
“When I first saw him and how he was doing Arby, I thought to myself ‘Well I’ve gotta really bring everything I’ve got,’” recalls Akhtar – but did he enjoy wearing Wilson’s post-spoon eyepatch? “If anything it’s helpful because you sort of have to angle your head a little bit. So if you’re aiming a gun it makes it look a little bit weird on camera.”
Meanwhile, Fiona O’Shaughnessy (who kindly speaks to NME on her birthday) entered a “very singular headspace” for the role of Jessica. Having been mentioned throughout the opening episode, she materialises at the front door of the gang’s hideout, her lemur-like eyes a conduit to this paranoid new world. The Irish actress was particularly fond of the humour in Kelly’s scripts, describing it as “a bit of a jellyfish” that “slides around and stings every now and then”.
Fresh out of drama school at the time, Roach remembers thinking: “‘Oh this is different to anything that I’ve read before’” and even cancelled a holiday in order to put “all of my energies” into nailing the audition.
Some sections of the viewership complained to Ofcom over Utopia’s graphic blood-spilling, yet Channel 4 refused to budge and stayed loyal to Kelly’s vision, with the writer claiming it was actually him and Munden that ditched some of their more lurid ideas. “There’s an outtake [from the eye-gouging scene] where a finger went into the eyelid,” laughs Kelly, before explaining how series one’s school massacre was “respectfully done”.
“We never really saw anything awful happen. It was about the consequences of that violence. It didn’t feel like Natural Born Killers, which is a film I’ve always fucking hated. ‘It’s so cool to shoot a gun!’ – the moment you start thinking it’s cool, I think you’ve lost your right to talk about it in the first place.”
Soon, the conversation switches to the axing of Utopia and a poorly received US remake from Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, which lasted just eight episodes on Amazon Prime Video. “I haven’t [seen the remake]” confesses Maskell. “I really wanna see [Christopher Denham’s interpretation of Arby] so there must be something buried deep inside… I should talk to [a therapist].”
Welsh actress Roach didn’t bother with Flynn’s version either, adding: “It’s just a tricky one. [Our Utopia] was cancelled after two series and not finished, not concluded, [so] I was like, ‘Oh maybe I’ll leave it.’”
Kelly, who was rather oddly invited by Amazon to help remake his show, goes on to highlight the streaming service’s lack of awareness. “Because the pandemic had just hit, I contacted them and said, ‘So I guess we’re not gonna do this?’ And they were going, ‘No, no, Contagion is number one on the Netflix charts!’ That was in the first week of the pandemic where everyone was still like, ‘Hey isn’t this cool’.
“By the time it actually went on everyone was sick to fuck of the pandemic and I think it was a bad time to have a show that was talking about something hidden in a vaccine…”
On Channel 4’s decision to turn the end of the show into an eternal cliffhanger, Maskell believes it was both “myopic” and “stupid” given the streaming boom that would follow shortly afterwards. “For it to continue making money what it needs is a conclusion, then it could be watched on something that surely they could’ve seen was round the corner,” he says, before suggesting a two-hour special could’ve tied things up.
“I think people sort of lost their bottle a little bit, because they just didn’t know what to do with it,” argues Akhtar, namechecking this year’s “really ambitious and violent” Mr And Mrs Smith series starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as evidence of modern audience appetites for similar fare.
If Kelly was ever offered the chance to finish off his story, he says he has something up his sleeve. “I get asked all the time about how I was gonna end it, but I’ve never told people because I think I probably do still hold out [hope]… there’s still a part of me that thinks ‘You know what, we might find a way to do it.’”
As for what she heard on the grapevine, O’Shaughnessy informs NME that Jessica might “discover she was carrying Ian’s baby”, but for now Utopia’s creator is satisfied with its legacy.
“We’ve had this underground thing where 10 years later I still get emails about it – and I suddenly find out that [directors of photography] in America, or directors and writers in Australia or Canada, or France or Belgium are inspired by it and that feels really good. I’ve got to say that feels amazing.”