Another spiky and difficult female detective? That’s just the way Anna Samson likes it

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The Return to Paradise star loves being difficult on screen – and she’s thankful for the women supporting her off screen.

The line of female detectives on screen is long and distinguished: Helen Mirren’s DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, Brenda Blethyn’s DCI Vera Stanhope in Vera, Gillian Anderson’s DSU Stella Gibson in The Fall and Mariska Hargitay’s Captain Olivia Benson in Law & Order SVU.

They were women who were built tough and didn’t take any nonsense, even if that meant staring down sexism and harassment on the job. They also paved the way in how female detectives – and no-nonsense female characters in general – could be seen on screen.

Stepping into that detective line-up is no easy task, but it’s one Anna Samson has relished ever since she took on the role of Detective Inspector Mackenzie Clarke in Return to Paradise.

“Everything I do, whether or not it’s deliberate, some is, some isn’t, is going to be informed by the female detectives we’ve seen on screen,” says Samson. “And the audiences will bring the female detectives that they know to the screen as well.

“What I like is that there’s flaws that I’m allowed to bring to her that I perhaps wouldn’t have been allowed if I was portraying a female detective in another era. She’s allowed to be more difficult. She’s allowed to be spiky. She doesn’t have to be smiley. She doesn’t have to be a people-pleaser. She doesn’t have to talk herself down.”

Samson is talking during her lunch break, while shooting season three of the popular cosy crime series, the Australian spin-off of the long-running Brit series Death in Paradise (fondly referred to by cast and fans alike as the Para-verse). Today, filming is taking place in Stanwell Park, a small coastal village just north of Wollongong on the NSW south coast, where a blue weatherboard building is used as the exterior of the Dolphin Cove police station (the interiors are shot in a nondescript office block in Sydney).

Samson has spent the morning questioning a suspect – the scene I watched was a classic cosy crime trap, where the suspect denies all knowledge of the murder, before inevitably…

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