WHY DAVID SUCHET MAKES THE PERFECT POIROT:

It is no doubt as Poirot — a role that he has played repeatedly on television over a period of 25 years in all of its incarnations in the voluminous canon of the writings of Agatha Christie — that Suchet figures most prominently in the public imagination. The screen enables a far wider circulation than the stage. Suchet estimates that at one point ‘Poirot was being watched by 750 million people worldwide’.

He prepared for the role with meticulous care:

I read every book and made a dossier of all Poirot’s characteristics: his clothes, his move from wearing a pocket watch to a wristwatch … how he refused to eat two boiled eggs that were not the same size.

And at the beginning of each new series:

I would get out my cane, in my house, walk around the garden like him, speak out loud like him, attempt to look at the world through his eyes. And if I had two boiled eggs at home, even though I’d never insist on their being the same size, I’d notice if they weren’t.

Like Poirot, Suchet is a perfectionist. He is also a successful and happy man. One finishes reading his book with the feeling that he fully deserves the rewards that his professional life has brought him.

I can’t think of any other actor attached to a long-term TV or movie franchise who aged into his character; invariably, it’s the reverse. Roger Moore as James Bond, William Shatner as James Kirk, and, because M*A*S*H the TV series ran far longer than the actual Korean War, Alan Alda as Hawkeye Pierce all aged painfully out of their characters. Even James Earl Jones’ previously stentorian voice sounded a bit shaky as the otherwise mighty Darth Vader in 2016’s Star Wars: Rogue One. But Suchet started playing Perot, who would have been in his late 50s, if not older during the show’s 1930s setting, when the actor was 42. He last played him at age 67. It also helped that as both the character and actor aged, the series took a darker and more serious tone when it was rebooted for its ninth season.