ITV’s Dark Heart is finally set to hit screens this week two years after its initial pilot launched on ITV Encore.
The gritty drama follows DI Will Wagstaffe, who investigates a series of horrifying attacks with his team.
However, lead star Tom Riley has admitted that the show was originally much “more gruesome” than we’ll actually see on screen.
“I was surprised – initially, I know when we were on ITV Encore, they were looking for something a little bit grislier and darker and something that kind of pushed the boundaries of what was allowed,” he said on Graham Norton’s Radio 2 show.
“I think when we moved onto ITV I thought, ‘Oh some of this is going to change’. And I think we have, we cut some of the more gruesome elements – so it was worse.”
Dark Heart writer Chris Lang recently opened-up about bringing the series (adapted from the Wagstaffe series by author Adam Creed) to the screen, and the bumps in the road following the closure of ITV Encore.
“There was a contractual obligation to allow them to be able to show it for 18 months, I think,” he told Digital Spy. “We would’ve gone to a series quicker if there hadn’t been a tie-in with Encore for a year or so. But that gave us time to start getting our ducks in a row.”
He added of re-cutting the original pilot and re-shooting some scenes for ITV: “ITV Encore asked us to be pretty experimental, and to make it noisy, splashy, provocative – because a tiny channel like that is trying to attract attention.
“And then, when it gets picked up as a mainstream 9pm show on ITV, you’ve got to change certain things, because that [old version] would not work on a mainstream channel.”
Dark Heart begins on Wednesday, October 31 at 9pm on ITV, with episode two following the next day (Thursday, November 1 at 9pm).
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