WITH his wiry frame, gaunt features and a mop of dark hair, David Tennant is a mirror image of serial killer Dennis Nilsen. Best-known for playing heroes in TV shows including Doctor Who and Broadchurch, the actor’s likeness to the villain made him the natural choice to play the lead in Des. ITV’s true crime […]
WITH his wiry frame, gaunt features and a mop of dark hair, David Tennant is a mirror image of serial killer Dennis Nilsen.
Best-known for playing heroes in TV shows including Doctor Who and Broadchurch, the actor’s likeness to the villain made him the natural choice to play the lead in Des.
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ITV’s true crime drama looks at how Nilsen strangled and drowned at least a dozen people before burning the bodies, hiding them under his floorboards or flushing the body parts down the toilet.
David, 49, went to extraordinary lengths to perfect his spine-chilling performance, but his initial decision to take on the role came after his similarities to the monster’s appearance were pointed out to him.
He said: “A couple of people had said, ‘Oh, he looks a bit like you’, which of course as an actor you say, ‘Really?’ And then you start investigating this story.
“I was 12 when he was arrested so it was a name that I was aware of — it had been in headlines. I knew he was a sort of bogeyman in the national consciousness.
“But the more I looked into it, the more I thought, this is a story that is worth telling.
“It’s tricky to get the balance right — you don’t want to slip into sensationalism.”
From 1978 to 1983, Nilsen lured young boys and men back to his homes in Melrose Avenue and Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, North London, with the promise of booze, food or a place to spend the night.
Des explores what drove him to kill, what allowed him to get away with it for so long, and looks at the investigation which saw him jailed for life in November 1983.
The three-parter also shines a light on the victims, which is why David wanted to do the role justice.
He said: “I did spend a lot of time studying him, listening to his voice, trying to think myself into that space.
“There is some footage of Nilsen you can watch and there’s a lot that has been written about him. There are people who knew him quite well, and you take all that in.
“What you don’t want to do is a Rory Bremner version of Dennis Nilsen.”
Daniel Mays, who plays investigating detective Peter Jay, said: “David delivers an utterly spellbinding turn.
“It’s unlike anything he’s done before.
“It really is quite a spectacular performance It’s the level of detail that he goes into.
“There’s one moment where he has to sign the police statement, and David got his phone and nudged me and said, ‘Does that look the same?’
“He had completely perfected Nilsen’s signature — it was absolutely identical.”
Nilsen’s killing spree only ended when police were called to investigate the drains outside his flat after they were found to be blocked with human bones and rotting tissue.
When he was arrested at his home — which reeked of decomposing flesh — cops found more human remains in his wardrobe and a boiled head still in a pot on top of his cooker.
Nilsen immediately confessed the murders to the police and initially claimed he could have killed as many as 16 people.
He gained the warped name “The Kindly Killer” because after murdering his victims, he often bathed, dressed and caressed them.
But David was comfortable taking on the role because the writers had avoided glorifying Nilsen, who was called Des by people who knew him.
The actor said: “I might have had reservations if we were presenting it as some sort of gothic horror piece. But we weren’t.
“After he was arrested, one of the things that Dennis Nilsen became obsessed with was ‘the legend of Des’.
“Even in prison, whenever he slipped out of public consciousness there was a sense that he wanted to get back into it.”
Which is why Nilsen contacted writer Brian Masters — played in Des by Being Human’s Jason Watkins — and helped him produce the 1985 biography.
The 81-year-old author’s book was used as source material for the show and he was on set during filming.
The other major character in Des, DCI Peter Jay, died of cancer in 2018.
The same year, Nilsen died of cancer aged 72 behind bars, which was a blessing for David.
He said: “When we started developing this he was still alive.
“I’m very relieved he’s not now, because I would hate for this to go out and for him to be in his cell imagining that we were in any way glorifying him.
“I’m sure he would have complained about everything we said and everything we did, but at the same time would have been rather smugly pleased that he was on television.”
The drama reveals some of the events in Nilsen’s early years which may have turned him into a monster.
He was born in Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, and raised in a broken home by his single mother Elizabeth.
The closest person he had to a father was his maternal grandfather who died of a heart attack while fishing in the North Sea.
After witnessing the dead body in an open coffin, the young Nilsen became increasingly shy, withdrawn and resentful of the attention his brother and sister received from his mother and stepfather.
He realised he might be gay in his teens — a terrifying prospect at a time when homosexuality was still illegal — and Nilsen claims he once fondled his own sister as he tried to make sense of his sexuality.
At the age of 14 he escaped his mundane life by enrolling in the Army Cadet Force before going on to join the Army.
In 1972 he moved to London and joined the Metropolitan Police.
From 1974 he worked in a Job Centre in North London where colleagues later said they could not believe mild-mannered Nilsen could have carried out such butchery.
Even more shocking was the fact that he did not provide the names and crucial information for all his victims.
He only identified six victims, with police confirming another two themselves. And no one could fully understand why he had carried out the murders.
David said: “I am not for a second saying we should empathise with Nilsen or forgive what he did.
“But I think it’s important to see that people are capable of malfunctioning so grotesquely. It is a part of the human condition.
“I felt moment to moment I could understand where he was coming from.
“I think what was difficult was joining the dots with someone like Nilson and I don’t know that he ever managed to successfully do that for himself.”
One suggestion is that Nilsen murdered the men because he could not bear the idea of them leaving the flat after spending time with him — hence the title of his biography Killing For Company.
A contributory factor was the fact that it was so easy for him to target men in London in the late Seventies and early Eighties without anyone noticing for a long time.
Many were vulnerable people who were in an unfamiliar city, homeless, going through psychological issues or, in some cases, struggling with their sexuality.
The drama shows that because the murder victims were all young men and boys, the killings and disappearances were initially dismissed as “gay crimes”.
For that reason the investigation never got to the bottom of how many people Nilsen had actually killed or who they were.
David said: “There is a story to be told about the victims and why people fall through the cracks of society. Plus, how Nilsen could murder so many men without being noticed.
“He shouldn’t have been allowed to murder all those people.
“Somebody should have noticed what was going on a lot earlier than they did.
“As a society we have try to understand why this happened and how to not have it happen again.”
NILSEN claimed his first victim on December 30, 1978, when 14-year-old Stephen Holmes came to his flat, drank until he fell asleep and stayed the night.
A year later, he killed 23-year-old Canadian student Kenneth Ockenden after offering to show him the sights of London.
In 1980 he murdered Martyn Duffey.
The starving and exhausted 16-year-old student was sleeping rough near Euston train station when Nilsen offered to put a roof over his head and give him food.
In the same year he murdered a further five people, although only one has been identified – 26-year-old Billy Sutherland.
In 1981 he took drifter Malcolm Barlow to hospital after the 23-year-old claimed his epilepsy medication had made his legs weak and left him slumped outside Nilsen’s home.
When Malcolm later went to Nilsen’s flat to thank him, he was killed.
A year later he met John Howlett, 23, in a London pub and used the lure of more booze to get him to go back to his home, never to return.
Then, in 1982, he targeted depressed gay man Carl Stottor, 21, who he strangled then revived. He later testified against Nilsen.
In the same year he killed Graham Allen, 27, after bumping into him as he hailed a West End taxi.
His final victim was 20-year-old Stephen Sinclair, who went back to Nilsen’s flat in 1983 with the promise of alcohol and a look at his record collection.
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