David Suchet had been playing the jealous Salieri in a theatre production of Amadeus when he was approached by producer Brian Eastman to make two more feature length Poirot stories.
Filming began on the first of these, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in the summer of 1999. Suchet comments on how it felt climbing back into the role after five years, and his concern to be consistent with the character.
He also describes how, around this time, his aspiration to film all of the Poirot stories began to grow. He also 'went public' on this, while being interviewed on a trip to Japan (where the programmes were very popular).
The second episode to be made that summer was Lord Edgware Dies. Suchet comments on how the scripwriters set up the notion of Poirot coming out of retirement (following the ending of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).
Suchet returned to Amadeus for a run in America, before Murder in Mesopotamia and Evil Under the Sun were filmed, in the summer of 2000. Interestingly, he writes, he felt that both stories had a sense of "marking time"; that Poirot's character was not being developed in any way, and that both stories lacked "a sense of excitement and imagination".
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