How do you see that transition between the first book and The Silkworm? Can you give us an overview of what The Silkworm is about?
The three books, Cuckoo’s Calling, Silkworm and Career of Evil, all feel like they have very different tones and they’re set in very different worlds.

Whereas in Cuckoo’s Calling they moved in a kind of young society, The Silkworm is set in the publishing world, which is presumably something that JK Rowling knows quite a lot about. It exists more in the imagination and the grotesque, rather than the social realism of The Cuckoo’s Calling.

How does Robin’s character move from the first book to the second book? Is she on her own journey now?
When we first meet Robin in Cuckoo’s Calling, she’s quite recently moved to London and is at the beginning of her finding herself as an adult in the career she actually wants. It’s her first steps into becoming the person that she wants to be.

At the end of The Cuckoo’s Calling Robin is no longer a temporary secretary, she’s a full-time secretary, so she’s got a slight promotion. But by the end of The Silkworm, she’s on a journey into proving that she is more than just a secretary – she’s not just vaguely interested, she wants to be on the ground. She’s smart and she’s intuitive and she wants to put those skills into practice. She wants to be a detective.

When we move to The Silkworm from The Cuckoo’s Calling we are moved to another side of London life. What was it like taking the characters into these new environments for the second story?
We’d been filming in Soho a lot and bits of Kensington and east London for The Cuckoo’s Calling. When we were filming on the rooftop of the publishers, I realised that I myself hadn’t been to that part of London for a while, and you stand there going, God, London is actually beautiful, it’s epic. The skyline of the buildings next to the River Thames has such a grandeur and a beauty to it – it’s very different to Catford!

Is it true that you shot some scenes at the publishers of the Galbraith books?
Yes, going there was great, because we definitely saw a copy of Silkworm there.

What was a good scene from The Silkworm that indicates the differences between The Cuckoo’s Calling and this new story?
The Roper Chard party feels like Strike and Robin are entering a different world than we’ve seen them in previously, one of glamour. That was interesting to shoot.

There’s a lovely scene that you do at the bar, which shows her in a slightly different light.
Yeah, quite savvy and self-confident. Showing a far more knowing side of Robin than we’ve already seen.

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It’s rare that TV Magazine has witnessed the actors in a telly drama visibly excited as they recall their first meeting with the show’s writer.

But then, not every actor gets the chance to work on three adaptations of JK Rowling’s novels.

“I met her in the toilet,” laughs Holliday Grainger, 29.

“The person who flushed the chain at me was JK Rowling!”

Tom plays private eye Cormoran Strike while Holliday is his assistant, Robin Ellacott, in the dramatisation of Rowling’s three Strike novels, which were written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
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J.K Rowling’s crime series Strike based around gruff detective Cormoran Strike makes its debut on BBC One this month.

Holliday Grainger, who plays his tough assistant Robin Ellacott, tells Francesca Gosling about the pleasure and pressure of taking on a Rowling character and finally ridding herself of a corset.

WHAT SORT OF PREPARATION DID YOU DO IN ORDER TO PLAY ROBIN ELLACOTT?

As soon as I got to the final audition stage I started to read the novels and, because JK Rowling writes so fantastically vividly, we were all completely entranced by the world of Harry Potter, you already get a strong impression of who her characters are and the tone of the world they embody. I felt like I had such a clear impression of who Robin was and she felt like somebody I knew – like a mate. A lot of people recognize bits of themselves in her and I certainly did.

I felt like I had such a clear impression of who Robin was and she felt like somebody I knew – like a mate. A lot of people recognize bits of themselves in her and I certainly did.
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