Mystery stories demand teamwork to protect the secret, says Eric McCormack

Mumbai, Oct 15 (PTI) Actor Eric McCormack says he is a fan of the mystery genre as part of the fun is keeping viewers guessing about who the culprit is and working as a team with co-stars to protect the secrets of the story.

McCormack, best known for starring in popular series "Will & Grace", currently features in mystery thriller series “Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue”.

The show, which premiered on BBC One and iPlayer last month and is now streaming on Prime Video in India, follows nine strangers who find themselves marooned in a Mexican jungle after an air disaster.

As they begin to die one by one, the survivors must race to uncover who among them is the killer.

“As an actor, I love (the genre) because it is necessarily an ensemble. It requires a group of actors working together to mislead the audience, to create the secret of who's the killer or who's doing it, which has to be protected.

"And that's how I play a scene. We can easily give it away by making the wrong choices. So, it's a real ensemble effort to keep the ball in the air and keep the audience guessing,” the actor told PTI in a virtual interview.

The actor said his all-time favourite thriller is the 2002 action thriller “The Bourne Identity”, headlined by Hollywood star Matt Damon.

The film, which went on to spawn a successful franchise, is acclaimed for its tightly woven narrative, centering on Jason Bourne, a CIA assassin suffering from dissociative amnesia.

“The first one is a murder mystery. The mystery is who is he? He's trying to figure out who he is, and I've always loved that. Anything where someone is searching for clues, and in the case of that film, he's constantly searching for clues about himself, the parts of his self he can't remember, so that's one I love,” said McCormack.

“Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue” is helmed by Brian O'Malley and Viviane Andereggen.

The show features McCormack in the role of a former doctor and medical equipment salesman, Kevin Anderson.

The actor described Anderson as a “loner”.

“There is a plane crash, and that usually brings people together, then maybe slowly they start to distrust each other. But this group of people doesn't trust each other from the beginning. Everyone's got secrets. Nobody wants to even say their name, let alone where they're from, which is a really weird way to begin a show.

"Like, you suddenly go, ‘I don't trust any of these people, how did they all get on this plane at the same time? What are they hiding?’ I think that was the most attractive part,” the Canadian-American actor said.

In real life, the actor said he’d like to think he’d cope with a crisis more effectively than Kevin does.

“If there was such an emergency, I hope I'm better than Kevin was. It's one of those situations, you don't know how you're gonna react. But what I came away from this is that it's always the people that work together that are gonna survive, not the loners,” he said.

“Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue” also features David Ajala, Lydia Wilson, Jan Le, Adam Long, Siobhan McSweeney and Peter Gadiot. PTI KKP RB RB