There is not only great anticipation about who will be the new James Bond in the spy franchise and succeed the great one Daniel Craig; a new actor is being sought for another cult role, but it is a television series.
Namely, Hercule Poirot, the famous pen detective, is returning to the small screen Agatha Christiethe BBC is preparing a new adaptation of her works featuring the self-proclaimed “best detective in the world”. It comes just over a decade after the last television adaptation ended its run on ITV, and the star of that series was the brilliant David Suchet.
Synonymous with famous detective
He played Poirot from 1989 to 2013 and became synonymous with the famous fictional detective, so for many who still enjoy constant reruns of that series, it is almost impossible to imagine anyone else in that role. The BBC has won a fierce “war” for the rights to the new adaptation and is reportedly preparing a three-season series. It is still not known which works of Agatha Christie with Poirot will be adapted, and it is not known who will play him.
According to the information published so far, filming will begin during the summer in Liverpool and northwest England, and the first episodes of the new series will arrive on the (British) small screens in the fall of 2027.
Poirot appears in 33 novels, 51 short stories and two plays by the famous British author. Over the years, he has been embodied in film, television, theater and audio versions by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Branagh, John Malkovich, Alfred Molina, Peter Dinklage… and replacing David Suchet in the role of Poirot will not be an easy task, no matter who gets it.
The most famous character
Poirot is Agatha Christie’s most famous character – appearing in her works from 1920 to 1975 – as a curious phenomenon that includes a waxed mustache and fastidious style of dress, as well as relying on logic, psychology and “gray little cells” to solve intricate cases.
His biography gradually developed in Christie’s works, he was presented as a former Belgian policeman living in England as a refugee after the First World War. He is portrayed as dignified, excessively meticulous, occasionally vain, talks about himself in the third person, which sometimes serves as a comic element, but also reflects his precise and methodical approach to detection.
Poirot became one of the most recognizable figures in detective fiction, his name being derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Hercules Popeau from Marie Belloc Lowndes and Jules Poiret, a retired French policeman who lives in London, from the work Frank Howel Evans.
He also had an influence on the early stories with Poirot Arthur Conan Doylewhich Agatha Christie wrote about in her autobiography, and the large number of refugees after the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 served as an acceptable explanation why such a skilled detective was available to solve mysteries in the English countryside.
She refused to kill him
After the first novel with Poirot, published in 1920, by 1930 Christie already found him “unbearable”, by 1960 she felt that Poirot was “an obnoxious, bombastic, tiresome, self-centered little guy…”, but despite this he was an immensely popular character with the audience, and Agatha later said that she refused to kill him because it was her duty to give the audience what it wanted.
When she finally killed him, and to the shock of the audience he became a murderer himself, in 1975’s The Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, the famous Belgian detective became the only fictional character to receive a front-page obituary in the New York Times.
The first actor to portray Poirot was Charles Laughton. He played him in the theater in London’s West End in 1928 in the play “Alibi”, an adaptation of the novel “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, and the play called “The Fatal Alibi” was performed on New York Broadway in 1932. A second play, “Black Coffee”, opened in December 1930 at the Embassy Theater in London, starring Poirot Francis L. Sullivan. The play was revived by The Agatha Christie Theater Company for an extensive UK tour in 2014, Poirot was initially played by Robert Powelland later took over the role Jason Durr.
Poirot was portrayed in the film Austin Trevor, Tony RandallAlbert Finney, Peter Ustinov, and Kenneth Branagh played him in the last three films, “Murder on the Orient Express” from 2017, “Death on the Nile” from 2022 and “Death in Venice” from 2023, an adaptation of the novel “It Happened on All Saints Day”, all three films were directed by Branagh.
David Suchet portrayed him in the ITV series for almost a quarter of a century; the last episode “Curtain” was broadcast on November 13, 2013. John Malkovich portrayed Poirot in the 2018 BBC three-part miniseries adaptation of The Alphabet Murders.
Who will be the new Poirot and will that choice be as controversial as the recent decision Peter Jackson that in the new film of the “Lord of the Rings” franchise Viggo Mortensen in the role of Aragorn replace Jamie Dornanwe’ll see.
