'I had to be hauled out of cold water' - Yorkshire's Maimie McCoy on filming the latest series of Van der Valk during a Netherlands winter

The Amsterdam-based show stars Safe and Mad Dogs star Warren as lead detective Piet van der Valk, while North Yorkshire-born McCoy portrays inspector Lucienne Hassell.

As the show returns for a fourth series, the Dutch detective and his team solve three more homicides in the city.

From the death of a whistleblower under police protection before a court hearing and an environmental campaigner being murdered on the eve of a global conference to a scientist being found dead, the street-smart detective and his team must get to the bottom of these cases.

“This series just felt like a bigger production,” says Warren. “The scripts were great. We had a huge explosion in the first one. It just felt a lot more expensive, a bigger crew. It’s like everything we’d been learning over the three previous years culminated in this series, but also we’re much more like a family; there’s a much tighter bond within us.

“The series has got a lot of heart. It really touches me. There’s something about it. And as a group of actors, who are just lucky enough, we love doing it. We’ve always had incredible crews out in the Netherlands, and it’s a very tight-knit unit.”

McCoy agrees. “A lot of the crew we’ve worked with have been on it the whole time, and there’s a real ambition within the crew. I think because it’s an international co-production as well, there’s an energy and there’s a drive to make it cinematic and to elevate that procedural police drama, which we’re so used to, and I think that’s why it works brilliantly.

“So you’ve got that British element to it. But I think also in terms of like how they light it, the gaffers are amazing. So it does feel like a movie.”

Each episode of the show is 90 minutes long so it can feel to the cast like shooting mini movies. Filming takes about 20 days for every instalment in the series.

“It certainly feels like you’re making a feature film, which it is,” Warren muses. “It’s feature-film length, it’s two hours with adverts, and it’s a lot of names, a lot of plot, a lot of Dutch names. It’s a lot to remember.

“The actual job of it, for me, is just remembering. I have a process of learning the lines. The acting bit of it is the easiest bit. You certainly know at the end of those 20 days you’ve been fully immersed in that episode, and then we start again on a brand new case.

“And they’re quite intricate plots. If I sat and watched it, which I have done, I have no clue who’s done the crime. I’m in it, and I can’t remember.”

Warren works closely alongside Azan Ahmed, who returns to the role of Sergeant Eddie Suleman this season. “He’s exactly 30 years younger than me, to the minute,” Warren notes. “It’s extraordinary that we were born on the same date and time – 8:30 in the morning. And when I learned that, I was bonded to him at that point.

"He loves to learn. He’s interested and wants to learn about the whole process. And he’s doing some incredible stunts this season – fighting and jumping over things. Stuff that I can only dream of!”

Shedding light on the fight scenes in the show, he adds: “When you’re sitting on your sofa watching them, they’re great. But the reality of doing them is that you’re normally fighting a stuntman who’s incredibly fit.

"He could literally kill you with one punch, so he’s having to be completely restrained, and it takes a lot of choreography to learn it. And when you do it, you’re so adrenalised. Inevitably, you get hit, and it takes you about four days to get over it. That’s the reality of it.”

He doesn’t do many stunts this series, he admits. “If there’s a stunt to be done, we normally get Maimie to do it because she’s very good at that. She’s got a dancing background. She’s incredible, moving the way she moves. It’s good to know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, and that is not one of my strong points.”

Viewers see Lucienne taking a chilly dip in the Amstel this series, a scene, like the rest of the show, that was shot during the winter of 2023.

“There was a lot of panic about how cold it would be and I was like, ‘I’m good, I’m hardy’,” says McCoy. “And then I went in the day before we shot it and thought, ‘This is a bit colder than I was expecting.’ But we did a great scene.

"It’s at the beginning of episode two. Lucienne is totally away from everybody and just having a moment of reflection for herself. It’s almost a meditation to her and a real calm away from the job that they’re doing. I think it’ll be a lovely contrast. But they had to haul me out of the water, because I was fine swimming, and then I realised that I had no body strength left.”

"I love working with the stunt team,” she adds. “It’s been the same team since season one so there’s a lovely shorthand now. They know I’m game for stuff.”

Filming in winter was a challenge, McCoy says, quite different from the sunshine the cast and crew have experienced in the city before. “I went one night on my bike, feeling quite brave, and was absolutely battered and thrown about by the wind and rain.

"I’ve always thought this city was immensely beautiful, but there’s something quite special when the lights are twinkling, and it gets dark very early. It’s a whole different vibe. I think it will bring a whole new level to the show, which will be really exciting to see.”

Van der Valk returns to ITV1 and ITVX on Sunday, August 2.