Will & Grace star’s new murder mystery series is no laughing matter

When Eric McCormack first appeared on international television screens, he was the not-too-nice Colonel Francis Clay Mosby in the western series Lonesome Dove. He followed that up with half of one of the funniest sitcom pairings in TV history: Will Truman in Will & Grace.

Since then, there has been a string of roles, including cable news reporter Jack Nash in The Andromeda Strain; Michael, the ex-husband of a woman who has lost her memory, in the musical Wild About You on London’s West End; and now Kevin Anderson, in the murder mystery Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue.

Eric McCormack as Kevin Anderson in Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue.Credit: MGM+

“It’s easy to look back and go, yes, I had a master plan to constantly surprise everyone, when really your master plan is always just to say, ‘Yes please, I accept,’” McCormack says. “Mosby was my first big role, a dangerous leading man. Will Truman couldn’t have been further from that.

“People who don’t know where I came from say is it weird playing dramatic roles now. And I say, no, actually, Will & Grace was the weird one. I mostly have played darker guys or more serious guys, and lately I have played some assholes.”

I ask him if each role is an antidote to the one before it? “Antidote is an interesting word, certainly I needed antidotes to Will. It is just natural that when something runs that long [11 seasons, from 1998-2006, and 2017-2020] and has that effect that you want to show people what else you can do.”

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue opens with a plane crash that strands a group of survivors in a remote part of Mexico’s wilderness. What looks like it might serve up a garden variety who’s-gonna-eat-who thriller swerves suddenly into a full-blown horror-adjacent whodunnit.

Survivors of the show’s plane crash.Credit: MGM+

Among the survivors: seemingly dependable Zack Ellis (David Ajala); cranky and unsociable Sonja Blair (Lydia Wilson); and McCormack’s Kevin Anderson, who doesn’t want to own up to being a doctor but inevitably becomes a de facto leader of the group.

The killer – in the early episodes, at least, is seen only in silhouette, and credited in the show’s closing credits as the Figure, a moniker which is uncomfortably reminiscent of the Shape, the name given to knife-wielding Michael Myers in the Halloween films. The Figure stalks his victims with the same sinister precision.

“To describe it as a whodunnit or sort of vaguely Agatha Christie is to do a disservice to the tone of the thing,” McCormack says. “When we’re talking, there is a kind of Knives Out [murder mystery] sort of feel to it, but everything that surrounds us is terrifying. We’re constantly reminded that we’re surrounded by snakes and mystery in the trees and the music is great and daunting.

Then, when that first murder happens, “it does feel like Michael Myers”, adds McCormack. “What I love about that is the audience is not just trying to figure out who done it, they’re absolutely trying to figure out what is going to happen next. That’s what makes it different to something like The White Lotus. You have no notion because of the genre bending how scary or gross this is going to get.”

Jack, Karen, Will and Grace from Will & Grace.Credit: NBC Universal

McCormack met the show’s creator, British mystery author Anthony Horowitz, after signing on to the series. The initial discussions were with producers Jill Green and Eve Gutierrez, who pitched the series to him while he was starring in a tonally very different project, the West End musical Wild About You.

When McCormack and Horowitz met, they immediately clicked, McCormack says. “I loved him, I loved his sense of humour, truly. He likes being Anthony Horowitz. He loves his job. I just got a very dashing, romantic kind of character, and very open. We corresponded quite a bit from the Canary Islands [where the series was filmed] and I loved that we were able to work together.”

McCormack says he tends to think directorially. Which means that from the moment he opened the first script he knew he would read the six episodes through to the end. “These characters, they have things that are happening to them, and they don’t know what’s going on, but they do know what’s going on in their heart, and they all have secrets,” he says.

“So for me, it’s not just about the ending; I want to know all the way through where the Easter eggs are, that Anthony drops, where we were supposed to give something to the audience that maybe they didn’t even know they’re getting, so they can look back and go, oh, it was her.”

Grim mystery: Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue.Credit: MGM+

The upshot? “I don’t ever like to be too in the dark,” McCormack adds, flagging he did know who did it but never told. “I’m not an actor that wants to think [only] about my own performance. I think when you’re building a puzzle like this it helps if everybody knows what’s going on and we can all contribute together.”

But, he adds, that choice was left to each member of the cast. Some chose to know the identity of the killer from the outset. Some did not.

“You’ll get a different answer from the other actors ... David Ajala, for instance, just didn’t want to know, and other actors wanted to know but weren’t shown the final couple of scripts until they were practically on the island,” McCormack says.

“For me, I like to understand and there’s no point in me going to Anthony and saying this line in the first episode makes no sense. His answer is going to be, it will; you haven’t even read the rest. So I like to think the more informed I can be, the better choices I can make.”

Being well informed also leaves open the critical ability to make misleading choices, McCormack adds, in a nod to red-herring mad Agatha Christie. “It may be someone out there in the jungle, but it may be one of us, and how do you make those choices, even if they might be just little things. How you phrase a question, how you look at someone else can either be an absolute clue or a total mislead,” he says. “Making those choices consciously is what I love doing.”

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue is now streaming on Stan, which is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.

Find the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.