How Alfred Molina found his superpower in ‘Three Pines’

It was his 16-year-old granddaughter who asked just the right question.

“What’s your superpower?” she asked Alfred Molina.

Mr. Molina plays Chief Inspector Armand Gamache in the new TV series “Three Pines,” out Dec. 2 on Amazon Prime Video.

The British American actor had, by his own account, been “waffling on” to his grandchildren about the complexities of the character, based on the award-winning detective books set in rural Quebec by Canadian author Louise Penny.

Then he found her answer. “Empathy.”

And so it is that Mr. Molina, best known in America for his role as the villainous Doctor Octopus in the “Spider-Man” franchise, has taken on a role that was originally conceived by Ms. Penny as the embodiment of goodness and decency.

“And that’s modeled right from the bat,” says Ms. Penny of a mystery series that’s always been far more than a whodunit. “And I don’t think there’s a time that we’ve ever needed that more.”

From the very first scene of the eight-episode series, the cameras narrow in on Inspector Gamache’s eyes, eyebrows furrowed, looking out at a protest in front of Quebec’s police headquarters. Officers are shoving a group of Indigenous women who demand the police look for a missing girl. Finally, he can’t take the abuse of power. He walks outside and pulls the officers off, driving the girl’s family home and launching one of the major throughlines of the series, which run alongside the “weekly murders” that he and his team set out to solve.

Mikael Theimer

Award-winning author Louise Penny has written 18 novels about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and the rural Quebec village of Three Pines. When she began, she was told no one would read a novel set in Canada. A TV series based on her books, "Three Pines," debuts Dec. 2.

Through it all, says Mr. Molina, Gamache is “seeking to understand why people behave the way they do, which I think is a kind of offshoot of goodness in a sense.” 

“It is understanding that all of us are capable, given a certain set of circumstances, of doing something terrible. ... So he’s much more interested in why things happened rather than how, where, and when.”

Far from worrying about whether “goodness” is interesting enough for audiences, Mr. Molina says Gamache’s humanity has made it one of the best roles he’s played.

Fans around the world are waiting with equal anticipation – and dread – to see how the TV show compares to the beloved characters of their imaginations who populate the fictional town of Three Pines in now 18 books. Ms. Penny’s latest, “A World of Curiosities,” also came out this week to rave reviews. (The Monitor highlighted it as one of November’s best books.)

The author’s many fan pages are full of speculation about whether the televised “Three Pines” is too dark – it can be, according to Ms. Penny – or whether Gamache can match their expectations without being himself Quebecois. Mr. Molina intentionally decided not to feign a French accent so as not to pretend to be representative. He didn’t know the books before he was asked to play the role but now counts himself a fan. 

“I don’t watch adaptations because the books are always better,” says Chief Inspector Gamache fan Karen Scott from Oshawa, Ontario, who doesn’t have an Amazon account but says an author endorsement would make her sign up. “I’ll watch it only if Ms. Penny endorses it.”

The perfect chief inspector

Ms. Penny says that watching 2 million of her words and the last two decades of character development translated to the screen – especially Gamache, whom she modeled after her late husband, Michael Whitehead – was fraught.

“It was awful, awful, awful,” says the award-winning author. “But the cardinal sin and something that would have been unrecoverable would be miscasting Gamache. They had to get that right.”

In the end, she says, Mr. Molina was perfectly cast.

The TV “Three Pines” (rated for ages 16+ by Amazon) is different from the welcoming village of found family she created, “but the good far outweighs what I would consider to be the flaws,” she says.

Fans will also be offered a completely new storyline and perspective that appear nowhere in the books. The Indigenous story – from that first scene – and a murder case that revolves around Canada’s brutal history of residential schooling for Indigenous children are central to the series.

Not only does the storyline bring Canada’s current reckoning to an international platform, but it’s also done with nuance and authenticity – thanks to work the team did with Indigenous actors, the director Tracey Deer, and consultants. In the series, Sgt. Isabelle Lacoste is played by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers alongside Mr. Molina, who says learning this history was a listening process.  

It’s the reason Amber Dowling, an entertainment writer in Canada, gave the show a rave review in Variety. “They actually take their time and they incorporate it; they layer it in. It’s not just one story,” Ms. Dowling says in an interview. “The Indigenous throughline, I feel, is the big story. That’s the story that’s informing the main characters. And I feel like the murders of the week are what’s informing the town characters.”

When Ms. Penny was trying to publish her first book, she was told that no one would want to read a crime novel set in Canada. In the end, what readers often say they love best is its celebration of Quebec (Ms. Penny was named to the Order of Canada in 2013 for her contributions to Canadian culture).

In the adaptation, produced by Left Bank, which also produced “The Crown,” fans will get to revel in that. They will recognize the pretty Eastern Townships outside Montreal where Ms. Penny lives, the characters, and their gathering spot at the local bistro, where a sense of community is cherished more than in the rest of North America. And viewers will also see a Canada that has abused and terrorized Indigenous populations, a damning look that is too often swept under the rug. 

“If we lose sight of goodness ...”

Ms. Penny says the series in the end achieves what she set out to achieve 18 years ago. “The thing that keeps coming back and that is for me the spine of the books, including [“A World of Curiosities”], and the TV series, is the quote from [the poet W.H.] Auden to Herman Melville.”

It inspired the entire series, and she quoted it once to the Monitor in a profile in 2018, but after so much has happened – the pandemic and dangerous political polarization – it feels even more pertinent. “Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge. His terror had to blow itself quite out / To let him see it.”

“The books and the TV series are about terror,” Ms. Penny says, “but they are equally about goodness.”

And Gamache is the perfect vessel for that message. “He understands that there’s a duality, that we’re all complex,” says Mr. Molina. “But if we lose sight of goodness, not just as a characteristic, but also as something to be aimed at, something to be hoped for, then we kind of lose a lot of our own humanity.”