There’s something unforgettable about Kris Marshall’s face. Early in his career, when he was showing up in Love Actually and advertising campaigns for BT, people stopped him in the street. These days, the ‘Don’t I know you from?’s are pretty much daily. ‘I can grow a beard or my hair, but if I make eye contact or people hear my voice…’ says Marshall, 51, trailing off with an awkward laugh. He’s even started speaking in a Northern Irish brogue when checking in at hotels to avoid recognition. ‘I think my fake accent is convincing, but my big fear is that one day the receptionist checking me in is from Belfast.’ He owes this fame to his role as bumbling Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, first in the hit BBC series Death in Paradise, then in its equally popular spinoff Beyond Paradise, which has just returned for a third series (episode one aired on Friday). Marshall took over solving murder mysteries on a Caribbean island in 2014 from Ben Miller, the show’s first star – and he proved such a ratings success they created Beyond Paradise specifically for him, in damp Devon. Yet when he first auditioned for Death in Paradise in 2013 they turned him down flat. ‘I didn’t even make the final four,’ he says. Newly married, with a three-month-old baby and his US sitcom Traffic Light recently ended, he needed a job. Then, ‘Ten days later they phoned to say, “We’ve made a mistake” and that changed ten years of my life.’ In an age of falling viewing figures, Death in Paradise banks more than seven million viewers an episode. Yet when he arrived in Guadeloupe, where it is shot, its success wasn’t certain. His predecessor Miller had fled because the heat and the distance from his family (Guadeloupe is more than 4,000 miles from the UK) were too much. Marshall’s wife Hannah and son Thomas, by then one, were able to come with him but the island heat really was extreme: it can reach 32C, never dips below 25C and is humid all year round. The police station they filmed in had no air conditioning. ‘It would get to me,’ he confesses. ‘I threw stuff. Chairs would go flying, and whiteboards, too. It’d get inside your mind.’ These days the drama is a juggernaut and has cemented Marshall’s status as a star. ‘When I joined the show, Guadeloupe was not a massive tourist destination. I went back to shoot a few scenes last year and found Death in Paradise bus tours. I was having breakfast in the hotel and someone walked past wearing a T-shirt with my face on it. It’s like being Mickey Mouse at Disney World.’ Not that he’s complaining. He thinks he’s been extremely fortunate in life. Back in 2008, when Marshall was 35, he was on a night out in Bristol when he was hit by a car. ‘For some reason I jumped,’ he shakes his head. ‘I don’t know why, just luck. If you’re hit by a car the worst damage is when you fold forward and your head hits the bonnet. That’s what kills people. Because I jumped, the car spun me off to the side.’ He spent a week in intensive care with a collapsed lung, a damaged hip and a nasty head injury. ‘I was intubated and sedated and all that kind of stuff,’ he says with a grimace. ‘I wouldn’t say it was touch and go, but it was pretty bad.’ The following year he met a yoga teacher, Hannah, the sister of a boy he knew from school in Wells, Somerset. She helped him with his hip, they fell in love and in 2012 they married. They have two children, Thomas, 12, and Elsie, nine. ‘I don’t want to be saccharine and say, “It’s amazing, I changed instantly”,’ he says, smiling. ‘I’m nearly 52 and it seems weird to say, but it’s a work in progress – parenthood, responsibilities and growing up.’ Marshall was born in Bath in 1973 while his serviceman dad was stationed at RAF Lyneham. The family moved to Canada in an aircrew exchange, then back to the Cotswolds when he was five and his dad became navigator with the Queen’s Flight. ‘The aircraft flew the Queen and Margaret Thatcher,’ he says. ‘When I was a kid, he would go away for weeks on end then walk in wearing his Top Gun flying suit with the peak cap and the gold braid. That made an impression on me as a young boy. I even joined the air cadets to be like him.’ Marshall’s parents divorced when he was 14, and he was packed off to board at Wells Cathedral School. ‘The first couple of years were tough,’ he says. ‘I’d been at a village school in Laurie Lee country, climbing trees and running through cornfields. Then I was in a dormitory with ten other big boys. It was a baptism of fire. There was an undercurrent of violence at the boarding houses. Some people had a brilliant time and others had a terrible time. I had both. It’s not something I miss.’ He started rebelling in small ways. He hid a motorbike in a bush at the top of the rugby fields and raced it to London. Once he was hauling it out and a neighbour thought he was a thief, so called the police and he was arrested. In the end, when he was 18, the school threw him out at the end of the Easter term. He still sat his A-levels, which he failed spectacularly. ‘I was working at an insurance company, didn’t revise, spent part of my maths exam drawing a calculator… It was a disaster.’ His plan was to ‘maybe go and work in the City’. He shrugs. ‘I was a rebel without a Porsche.’ Instead, he fled to Hong Kong where his father had moved. The welcome was less than warm. ‘I’d wasted all his money,’ Marshall sighs. ‘It was a complicated relationship for a while.’ Fortunately, his dad still supported him. Marshall spent a year at drama school back in the UK, which he hated: ‘Everyone was into Les Misérables. It wasn’t my scene.’ And so, he says, he entered his ‘Withnail and I’ years and moved to Slough. ‘The only place I could afford on housing benefit,’ he explains. ‘I was living with some very questionable characters. I came back home once and there was half an ear that someone had bitten off on the floor. You had to be up early in the morning to get your dole check – it used to come through the post and if someone got it before you, they could cash it at the post office and be drinking your dole money down at the Old Navy club.’ He was always getting into what he delicately describes as ‘high jinks’ – including hiding under the bed from landlords and stealing the clock hands from the town hall. ‘I was a tearaway, but I was also rushing around trying to get work.’ He drank a lot, he says, but, ‘I couldn’t have been an alcoholic because I didn’t have the money. All the time I was trying to get money to do anything.’ He joined travelling fairs, worked in a toothpaste factory and was fired from a job at Iceland for wearing blue sunglasses on the till. Then luck smiled on him again, while working in a bar: a customer gave him a phone number for an agent who got him a job in a touring theatre company, the now-defunct No. 1 Tour. He started off as an extra and within months was playing the leads in regional theatres. ‘I loved it but no one’s going to come to Chesterfield on a Thursday night to look for actors when they’re casting Fellini’s new movie.’ He gives a wry smile. ‘I saw an advert for a production of Journey’s End in London, which ended up at the King’s Head Theatre in Islington and that’s where I was spotted.’ From there he worked at the National Theatre, got bit parts in films and starred in the TV sitcom My Family. At 27, his face was out there. He played the hopeless fop Colin Frissell in 2003’s Love Actually, which made him pretty huge. His character heads for Wisconsin, where his English accent is enough to get him into bed with January Jones, Elisha Cuthbert, Denise Richards and Shannon Elizabeth. All at the same time. Really? He pauses. ‘I mean, it’s a film that has a life of its own now,’ he says carefully. ‘It wouldn’t get made now. Times change, but I will never slag it off because it opened doors for me in the US. I would be a fool to say anything negative. Although I will say that they filmed it in the UK. Wisconsin was Epsom Racecourse with fake snow. And they flew the American actors over, which I reckon cost a lot more than flying me to Milwaukee. I was miffed.’ The only two questions he’s uncomfortable with my asking touch on the wild era that came next. The first was his six-month drink-drive ban in 2011 after being discovered asleep in his Jaguar in a Tesco car park. He told the police he’d been drinking and thought he was being responsible staying in the car rather than driving home. It seems a reasonable thing to do, I say. ‘Yeah, I’m not sure I’ve got anything to say about this,’ he shakes his head. The second is his former friendship with actor-turned-right-wing activist Laurence Fox. They met in Prague filming the 2002 First World War horror film Deathwatch, partied in the cast hotel, then both starred with Billie Piper, who Fox subsequently married (they later divorced), in the play Treats and stayed friends. ‘I have no comment about Laurence,’ his face is stony. ‘I haven’t seen him for years and I mean literally years, so I don’t really have any comment at all.’ At almost 52, he feels age sneaking up on him. He surfs, skis, does a little yoga and runs, although when he reaches four kilometres, he’s noticed, he gets a terrible pain down the side of his knee. He sighs. ‘There are bits that I feel are starting to fall off. ‘My knees are all right overall, although I do need to run or they get noticeably weaker. There are a lot more MRIs when you hit your 50s and I can’t drink like I used to. It’s a four-day recovery. I go through periods of not drinking any alcohol at all, but I still want to go out with my friends and I can tell you, drinking six non-alcoholic beers gives you a hangover.’ Otherwise, he realises that – perhaps for the first time – he’s truly content. ‘I came back from the National Television Awards last year where we were nominated for Returning Drama but didn’t win and I was pissed off,’ he explains. ‘I had to get up at 5:30am to film at sea off the coast of Devon. As we finished, a pod of dolphins followed us into shore. I got in my car, my surfboard was on the roof, the most perfect wave was coming, so I grabbed my board and surfed until it got dark,’ he says staring off into the distance. ‘And I thought, this is what the job is. It’s making people happy, and it’s also making me happy. Who gets to be that lucky in life?’ Beyond Paradise is on BBC One on Fridays at 8pm and is also available on iPlayer Picture director: Ester Malloy. Stylist: Sarah-Rose Harrison. Grooming: Charlotte Yeomans