Kevin McKidd has landed the lead in ITV’s four-part drama The Only Suspect just as he prepares to leave Grey’s Anatomy after 18 seasons in May. The British actor will front the thriller, which follows a suburban couple whose ordinary life masks a devastating secret.
The project puts McKidd at the center of a story that opens in the sweltering summer of 1995, when a man buries a body during a violent storm in Camden, then jumps 30 years ahead to a heatwave in a very different world. At the heart of it is Alex, the young man who buried the body, and Beth, his devoted partner, whose life in a leafy London suburb is upended as an abandoned railway track where the body was hidden is turned into a nature trail spearheaded by her.
For McKidd, the timing is striking. He is set to exit Grey’s Anatomy at the end of its 22nd season in May, and the new ITV role gives him a lead part built around a man trying to outrun his past. Kim Raver is also leaving the medical drama at the end of the same season.
Working with ITV, McKidd said, feels like coming home. He described Alex as a complex, multilayered role and said he was eager to collaborate with director Farren Blackburn, Red Planet Pictures and the ensemble of British actors attached to the production.
The Only Suspect was adapted by Simon Ashdown from a novel by Louise Candlish and ordered by ITV drama chief Polly Hill and drama commissioner Huw Kennair-Jones. Red Planet Pictures, which is producing the series for Fremantle, previously adapted another Candlish novel for ITV with Our House in 2022, and Fremantle holds international distribution rights. Belinda Campbell and Tom Mullens are executive producing, Blackburn is directing and Sumrah Mohammed is producing.
Kennair-Jones said Ashdown had turned Candlish’s bestseller into a thriller built to keep viewers on edge, while Mullens called it another riveting Candlish story and said the team was excited to reunite with ITV after Our House. He also said McKidd is leading a cast that will help bring the twisting story of a man trying to escape his past to life. Filming begins in London this spring, and ITV is betting the answer to its central mystery will travel well beyond the suburb where it begins.
