‘I live for playing cops and robbers!’ Martin Compston on love, Las Vegas and the new Line of Duty

He’ll soon be going back on the hunt for bent coppers – but not before a wild revenge tale of divorcees going rogue. The star talks feeling inferior to Meera Syal, his life in the US and why he’s thrilled to be typecast

While we embark on the inhumanly long wait for the new season of Line of Duty, which starts shooting in January, you’ll see Martin Compston – the show’s hero and true north – a number of times. Twice as you’ve never seen him before, and once, in Red Eye, in the form that you’ve come to know and love him: brisk and taciturn, brave and speedy, the man you’d trust to save the world while the dopes all around him can’t even see it needs saving.

But first, The Revenge Club, in which he is a revelation. The setting is a support group for divorcees, a ragtag gang united by nothing but the fact that they’ve been summarily dismissed by their spouses. “There’s no other reason for these characters to be in each other’s lives,” Compston says from his home in Las Vegas (more on that later – much more). “They’re all desperate and lonely and in dire need of companionship. They’re all, in their own ways, broken, which makes for this explosive mix.”