There is absolutely no shortage of crime dramas in movies, television and most recently in the podcast world. Ragdoll is the latest to enter the television realm as it makes its debut on AMC+ with season one.
Ragdoll the tv show, is based on a series of novels of the same name. The story follows three London police officers who are on the hunt for a particularly gnarly serial killer who has stitched together six different victims. This leaves the main characters of Detective Inspector Emily Baxter (Thalissa Teixeira), Detective Sergeant Nathan Rose (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), and Detective Constable Lake Edmunds (Lucy Hale) trying to solve a half-dozen killings while attempting to stop a further six from being killed.
“This being a crime drama the leads all come with their own flaws and points of view,” Thalissa Teixeira (best known for her role in Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw) told Remezcla in our one-on-one interview recently. “Many of the characters that Freddy ( reddy Syborn, writer of Ragdoll) have written all have their own idea on how to solve crime and their own idea of justice which means they all go off in their own directions to find clues and keep secrets from each other.”
The show is less about finding the killer’s identity, but more about how each of the characters go about solving the crime(s). It’s a point that Teixeria finds important to distinguish.
The actress spoke to Remezcla from London but grew up in Brazil. That is her culture, the colors, and the celebration of life in everything that she misses. Her move and experiences also afforded her a differing lens in which to see how diversity is portrayed in entertainment all over the world.
For her, while there are great strides being made, there is also a long way to go. “I think that the main thing that’s happening at the moment, and I am grateful for it, is that we are doing a lot of rewrites and new versions of older scripts written by older, long gone white men, to be honest,” Teixeria says. “It means that we are seeing these people on screen, which is an excellent thing. But what is happening, in my view, a lot is that we are seeing these people in a situation that just isn’t authentic to what their lives would have been, or what it is now.”
“Have your Downton Abbey’s, I love them. Have your shows with a whole white cast, that is not a problem for me at all,” she says emphatically. “What is difficult for me is that we are not putting the investment in telling the stories about people who are black, or brown.”
That is one of the things Teixeira loves about the character of Baxter so much. Pointing out that in the script it’s written that she is a young brown woman. “I was like ‘YEAH’ as I picked up the script, I was like ‘finally, this is for me!’ Rather than having to forget about my blackness or my brownness to play this role.”
No word on a season 2 as of yet. But, as a point of fact, there are three books in the series, so make of that what you will. As for the first season of Ragdoll, the first episode has just dropped and is streaming now on AMC+.