Siobhán McSweeney (Lisa Davies) & Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Travis Davies)
Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue is a strikingly original and taut thriller series with a jaw-dropping reveal waiting at the end. A light aircraft carrying 10 people crashes in the Mexican jungle - and nine of them survive. But when, one after another, they begin to die in strange and violent ways they begin to realise that, for some inexplicable reason, somebody wants them dead.
As the story unfolds in flashback, we meet the survivors as they fight against the heat, a shortage of supplies, the many dangers of the jungle - and each other. The setting becomes increasingly tense and claustrophobic until finally the identity of the killer and the truth are revealed.
The series, written by Anthony Horowitz, stars Eric McCormack, David Ajala, Lydia Wilson, Jan Le, Adam Long, Siobhán McSweeney, Peter Gadiot, and Ólafur Dario Ólafsson. Let's meet them...
It often occurred to me that an airplane is a very interesting environment for a murder mystery. When you're sitting on a plane you could well find yourself next to a complete stranger for five, ten or fifteen hours. He or she may seem charming: a doctor, an entrepreneur, a teacher...or a murderer.
And now let's imagine that the plane crashes into the jungle and you manage to survive. Suddenly your relationship with the other passengers becomes even more critical. You're in a completely hostile environment. You don't have very much food or water. Everything is against you. And then, suddenly you realise that one of those complete strangers is a psychopathic killer. What do you do next? That was the start of the idea.
How did you settle on Mexico for the location?
My first thought was that I didn't want this to be a commercial airliner with two or three hundred people on it, because in order to make that drama I'd either have to have an enormous number of extras on the plane with nothing to do or I would have a great many dead bodies, which would be unappealing, to me anyway. So it seemed therefore that it would have to be a smaller 10, 12 or 15-seater plane and I began to ask myself where was it coming from with a limited range?
Central America seemed like a good idea. It was close enough to The States, the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) and even the CIA. I loved the idea of a very remote army base with images of desert and sea. I thought about a small plane travelling between Guatemala City and Houston and asked myself where it might crash. Well, half a million square miles of rainforest and jungle full of snakes, spiders and other dangers seemed like a good answer.