Turkish-French actor who played the dogged, philosophical detective Julien Baptiste in the BBC TV thriller The Missing
The Missing, which ran for two series on BBC One in 2014 and 2016, carried echoes of famous cases of children who had vanished while on holiday. This tense thriller, its action scattered across multiple timelines, was expertly acted by a high-calibre cast of home-grown stalwarts, including Keeley Hawes, David Morrissey, James Nesbitt and Ken Stott.
It was a less familiar performer, the Turkish-born French actor Tchéky Karyo, who provided the main point of continuity between both series, as well as supplying their moral centre. As the dogged, philosophical detective Julien Baptiste, he is first seen tending to his bees and contemplating imminent retirement. That is, until a cold case from eight years earlier re-enters his life.
Nesbitt plays a man whose five-year-old son was snatched from the (fictional) French town of Châlons du Bois, and who has returned to the area after spotting his child’s distinctive scarf in a recent photograph taken there. Baptiste feigns scepticism, but is soon making his own inquiries. During the original investigation, he had declared: “Sadly, we find [the boy] immediately or not at all.” His tenacity lends the series its momentum, his wisdom and humanity its depth.
