David Suchet, a classical and versatile actor who once performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, has portrayed widely-disparate roles, including Salieri in Amadeus, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, and the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller. But he is best-known for his definitive portrayal of Agatha Christie's brilliant sleuth Hercule Poirot, in 70 episodes on British television between 1989 and 2013.
In 2024, Suchet and his wife, Sheila, took an opportunity to follow in Christie's footsteps by recreating an international tour that the bestselling writer took in 1922, journeying to Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Canada. Suchet's experiences were the basis of a documentary series, and now a book, Travels with Agatha Christie (Hachette Mobius). He spoke with PW about his portrayal of Poirot, and that journey.
How did you come to portray Poirot?
I had done Blott on the Landscape—a 1985 television series)—that was the latest piece of my work that people really liked. The Agatha Christie estate saw me in that, and liked that my interpretation of the character was close to the character that Tom Sharpe had written. That led to my being interviewed by Agatha Christie's daughter (Rosalind) and her husband, and they subsequently said that one of the reasons that they chose me for Poirot was because I was a serious classical actor. I'd been with the Royal Shakespeare Company 13 years, and I had a reputation for in-depth characterization.
How did that reputation apply to Poirot? Christie is generally thought of as a masterful plotter, who devised original and jaw-dropping whodunit solutions, rather than creating memorable, well-rounded characters.
During that interview, Christie's daughter looked at me, and said, "My mother never wrote a funny, jokey caricature. We can smile with Poirot, but we must never laugh at him." She looked at me very seriously, and said, "You don't do that. We don't want that." And so I went to the books, and then I wrote down this huge list of his characteristics, and I got so impressed by the character and his many dimensions.
You hadn't been, before then?
The only knowledge I had of Poirot, before I started really reading her whole canon, was from recent previous incarnations of the role. I was actually in the TV film Thirteen at Dinner, but as Inspector Japp. Peter Ustinov was Poirot, and so I got a very good close-up view of Peter's interpretation. We became very good friends during the shoot, and during one lunch with him, he suddenly stopped, looked at me, and said, "You know, it's funny, looking at you, you could be Poirot—you look exactly like Agatha Christie's description." And at that time, I had no idea that I was ever going to play him, and knew him only as a caricature. When I got offered the role, I decided I would start reading her books, because I was not a great Agatha Christie reader. And I realized that what she was doing was not writing a caricature. On the page, he's full of complexity—he can be extreme, he can be comic, he can be very serious, he's compulsive, and he's very religious. Agatha Christie herself was a very devout Christian, and she made Poirot a very devout Catholic. Christie buffered his depth with whimsical humor, and she wrote him as a very kind person, especially to those below the stairs, so to speak.
Is it true that your brother advised against your accepting the part?
Yes, that's absolutely correct. I'd only known Poirot as a jokey figure, and that's why my brother said to me, "Cut David, he's a caricature—you're a classical theater actor, you know, you've played all the great Shakespearean roles. Look, he said, take my advice, don't touch it with a barge pole." He's dined out on that story, not me.
Turning to this book, which of the sites that you visited on this journey had the greatest impact on you?
There were really three, although only one really had to do with Christie—Victoria Falls. I'd never witnessed such a power of nature before, and it made me feel very humble, and it still stays with me. I can close my eyes now and hear and feel the shaking, the trembling of the earth, with the power of the water falling on rock. Because Victoria Falls are created from a fissure, the water hits rock, not water, and that's loud, and it produces spray, and it goes up into the air, and there are rainbows when the sun is out in the spray—it was a total immersion in nature. What it did for me was make me realize just how little we are as human beings, when we think we control the world. It was no surprise for me that it had the same effect on Agatha Christie. She said that this is one of the sites that she was desperate to revisit, and then later in her life, she wrote,"Well, I never went back, but I'm glad I didn't, because the memory of that first time can never be erased."
What other places made a deep impression on you?
One was New Zealand, when I met the Maori guide, Te Rua, who talked about his world, his faith, his philosophy, and his people. He took me to the Arahura River, where the Maori hunt for the pounamu, a sacred stone which is said to hold energy and contain a life force, which they have to be trained to recognize. At the end of my interviewing him, he actually gave me such a stone that was in the shape of a whale's tooth. He gave me that because he and his son were huge fans of the series, and because I was traveling around the former British empire, following in Christie's footsteps, and the whale is considered the greatest traveler in the world. He said that the stone will keep me safe, and I'm to wear it as often as I can next to my body. I was so touched. It was a genuine gesture of generosity and kindness to me to say thank you. It was also very humbling.
And the third place?
A destination that Christie would not have seen. She would not have seen what I saw when I went to the Saint Eugene mission, in Canada, and learned about its terrible treatment of indigenous people from two former students—Sylvia and Gordie. The teachers got rid of their heritage, their language, their costumes, their traditions. At the school, the students weren't allowed to speak to each other in their own language. And that was a shock to me—a reminder of the cruelty of the human being to other human beings.
You were visiting places that had been part of the British Empire; did your travels change your understanding of colonialism?
I've tried to avoid this, but I can share with you now that it came as a huge surprise to me, a realization that when I was at school, and I'm 80 in May, so I was at school in the '50s, we didn't have one lesson on the Empire. I knew a bit about Cecil Rhodes, whose desk I sat at on our tour, but I just knew him as a prime minister. I didn't know what he actually was responsible for—his legacy of institutional racism. I didn't know anything about the Saint Eugene mission school. I'm very uneasy with colonialism. I'm not proud of what we actually did. It just comes back to what I was saying to you before about the inhumanity and cruelty of humanity. We are capable of such love, such kindness, such generosity, such empathy and sympathy, and yet, we can torture and be so cruel to one another—it defies total understanding. and I feel that about the legacy of the Empire.
Did you learn something about Christie that you didn't expect?
I'd thought of her as the shy person who lived in an isolated world after becoming a success. She'd just published one novel, the first Poirot, at the time of her trip, and learned from her diaries that, as a young woman of 31, she was vivacious, she was extroverted— when traveling to South Africa, she played the piano on board, and sang to the fellow passengers, and danced with the crew while her husband, Archie, had an early night. She was possibly one of the first women to stand up on a huge surfboard. It became a passion for her, this dangerous, dangerous sport of surfing. It wasn't just pleasure. She loved being on the edge. So I got to know Agatha Christie on this Empire Tour in a way that I would never have while I was doing the series. I got to know her and to like her in a completely different way, and gained respect for her as a human being.
