Mandy Rice-Davies

The Serpent's Ellie Bamber on serial killers, Dominic West and Mandy Rice-Davies

• “My generation has a huge hunger for true crime stories,” says Ellie Bamber. “Perhaps we’re more keenly aware now, that parts of us all are dark and flawed? But our interest in serial killers is about looking beyond that, peering into acts that are incomprehensible, picking through the brains of these mad individuals…” With her bubbly attitude – and endearing tendency to use quaint terms like “super duper” – the 23-year-old actor doesn’t strike me as murder junkie. But she assures me that she spent lockdown watching shows like Netflix’s Mindhunter (based on real-life FBI profiler John Douglas) with friends via Zoom – “so we can analyse things together”. According to AskWonder, the average consumer of TV crime series is a college-educated millennial woman (18-34 years) who is more interested in psychological analysis than action. They’re drawn to survivor tales and more likely to engage with true crime when the victim is female. And Bamber – best known for playing a winsome Cosette in the BBC’s 2019 Les Misérables – has a plum role in the latest TV series to tick all those boxes. The Serpent – an eight-part BBC drama written by Ripper Street’s Richard Warlow and filmed mostly in Bangkok last year – is a darkly seductive dramatisation of the crimes of Charles Sobhraj, the Vietnam-born French psychopath who murdered an unknown number of western tourists on the hippy trails of south-east Asia in the 1970s. Handsome and manipulative, he “befriended” travellers in Thailand, Nepal and India, often offering them cut-price jewels and lavish hospitality. Then he would drug them with anything from diarrhoea-inducing pills to itching powder before robbing and, in around 24 cases, killing them. He bludgeoned, stabbed and shot his victims, then often disfigured their corpses. Because his victims were mostly “longhairs”, prone to wandering off grid, the authorities didn’t pay much attention.