It’s natural for Liev Schreiber to harbour a soft spot for India. His Showtime crime drama Ray Donovan has been adapted in Hindi as Rana Naidu on Netflix India. He played a key role in Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair’s 2013 political thriller The Reluctant Fundamentalist, before working with Ishaan Khatter in Jenna Lamia’s 2024 Netflix thriller show The Perfect Couple. Speaking exclusively to SCREEN about his new Apple TV crime thriller series Nocturne, Schreiber reveals his love for the country runs even deeper than his myriad professional adventures.“I’ve spent a lot of time studying music in India. I’ve lived in Gwalior and Delhi, and spent a lot of time in Rishikesh. I’m a huge fan of the country and the culture. There’s really only one film culture in the world that rivals Hollywood, if not outscales it every once in a while, and that’s Bollywood. So yeah, it’s a great tradition,” says Liev Schreiber.“And to see people like Mira making films that go off the beaten path, it’s generally a great time for film culture in India,” he adds.Even in Nocturne, Schreiber, who plays a former detective, shared screen space with Poorna Jagannathan, an American actor of Indian origin, who plays a no-nonsense FBI officer. “Poorna excels at comedy. That’s one of her really strong suits. One of the things she gave that character that I love is this no-bullsh*t character. She had this very kind of straightforward, cutting kind of approach. In a job where she’s working with tons of men, where she’s a woman of colour, to dominate the room and hold this very powerful position, it was great to see her just dominate the room. And she often did that with humour. I think that’s one of her best traits as an actor.”Another co-star, Zazie Beetz, is a person of colour, and plays his surrogate daughter and an undercover FBI agent in Nocturne. She agrees that there are more opportunities for people of colour in Hollywood now, but there’s still a long way to go. “I do think there’s more inclusivity in Hollywood than there used to be. A lot of it is a reflection of the current political times. There’ve been certain shifts backwards as well. I do think though the career I have now would’ve been possible 20 years ago. But it’s interesting that there’s inclusivity, and also an element of feeling it’s forced. I do feel we’re still trying to find a way to make it authentically inclusive. I don’t know, it’s complicated,” the actor tells SCREEN.Forging character dynamics on the showThe relationship between Zazie Beetz and Liev Schreiber’s characters is a complicated one — with a fine mix of protectiveness and recklessness involved. She reveals how they decided to work it out even before they got to the Nocturne set. “We did meet up for dinner and chatted a few times before we went to shoot this show. I think that was an attempt to build chemistry, but also to discuss our backstories, how we both felt our characters related to each other, and our characters’ relationship through the show. But we naturally got along and were able to create that energy on set. But we definitely tried to figure out the balance of love and tension between them,” recalls Zazie.It was no different for Stephen Graham, who plays an imprisoned serial killer, and Rory Culkin, the nurse of that volatile inmate. The duo even went to a football game in order to get acquainted with each other. “It’s about getting to know each other, getting friendly, and exchanging ideas prior to shooting with each other. We just spent a lot of time together to discuss the project, which is important, but also to get to know each other at a personal level because that way, we can be more comfortable playing off each other. The better you know each other, the harder you can go on set and on camera. By the time we did that first scene, he knew he could just throw me up against the wall. We’re cool,” says Rory, referring to their first encounter in the Nocturne premiere episode.Story continues below this adFor Graham, who starred in and co-created Netflix’s Emmy Award-winning crime drama Adolescence last year, getting into the messy mind of his character was par for the course. “Early on in my career, I was fortunate I got to work with Shane Meadows on a film called This Is England (2006). That was like 10 years’ worth of experience at drama school and in the industry. Shane makes you really understand the character. I understood acting at a different level from then on.”“There are a lot of nuggets about my character’s backstory in this show. There’s so much complexity in the story that we even went back and changed some things because the dynamics of the story were changing. So, we made a lot of the backstory together. There’s a reason why I really need to understand what it was about for this particular character. It was really fun to go into it with that intensity,” he adds.Also Read: Juhi Chawla supports Lalit Modi’s plea to move IPL to January away from ‘the harshest heat’Given the insight Stephen Graham has into his character and his twisted psychology, it’s no wonder that sharing screen space with him can be nothing less than daunting. Especially if the guy who you go to watch a football match with just shoves you into the prison wall on the very first day of set. Rory Culkin admits that though he’s been acting since he was five years old, often as the younger versions of his brothers Macaulay and Kieran Culkin, he always takes good nerves along to every set even 32 years later. “I grew up on sets, so I’m pretty comfortable with the crew, the equipment, and the lingo. But I’m always nervous. There’s always an imposter syndrome going into every project. I kind of like having that because the day I don’t, it means I don’t really care. So, being on set still makes me nervous to a healthy degree,” he says.