Maigret: Wainwright & Okwok on Female Janvier, Simenon's Influence

Posted in: TV | Tagged: Maigret

Maigret: Wainwright & Okwok on Female Janvier, Simenon's Influence

Maigret stars Benjamin Wainwright and Shaniqua Okwok discuss Okwok's approach to Janvier and expanding beyond Georges Simenon's work.

Published Sat, 08 Nov 2025 08:37:02 -0600
by Tom Chang
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As Benjamin Wainwright is front and center as the latest actor to play the legendary Chief Inspector Jules Maigret in the PBS Masterpiece series Maigret, he obviously faces a tall task stepping into the shoes of some of the greats that are his predecessors, like Rupert Davies, Bruno Cremer, Richard Harris, Michael Gambon, and Rowan Atkinson, and trying to measure up. You can also make as strong a case for the pressure faced by Wainwright's co-star Shaniqua Okwok, who plays a female version of Janvier, which is a dramatic change from creator/showrunner Patrick Harbinson, who might get compared to her male predecessors Jean-Claude Frissung, Jack Galloway, and Shaun Dingwall. The two spoke to Bleeding Cool about how Harbinson wrote to Okwok's strengths, how changing Janvier's character benefits the series, and how deep the showrunner will delve into the Georges Simenon original stories and blend them with contemporary original storytelling. The new series finds Wainwright as a younger version of the chief inspector as he leans on his team, affectionately called La Crim or the "Maigrets," as they solve cases as he rises through the ranks of the Paris Police Judiciaire.

Maigret Stars Wainwright & Okwok on Showrunner Patrick Harbinson Changing Janvier to Play to Okwok's Identity/Strengths; Deviating from Simenon's Works

BC: Shaniqua, what was the most difficult aspect of capturing Janvier's essence, and was there anything Patrick added to your character aside from making the character a woman that we might not have seen in the novels or in previous iterations?

Okwok: Let's start with the first part. The most difficult aspect of capturing Janvier's essence is the character's bravery and fearlessness, which I thought I had as a person, but I realized that doing that job — and even wielding that gun—was beyond me. To not be afraid to be at the front, not afraid to get their hands stuck in, I wasn't prepared for how much further I would need to go as a person to meet Janvier in terms of where she is. Then the part of me, also whilst we were filming, felt like I was a bit invincible as well. She is brave and invincible, and we all want our own mini Janvier in us as we enter the world.

Adding to the character, and making it a woman, you might not have seen in novels of this range. The idea of making Janvier a woman, and being a black woman at that, is going to be different. It's going to be a different beast, and then putting her in modern society. There's a part in episode two ("The Lazy Burglar – Part II") where we must do a reenactment, and it's such a subtle thing, but Patrick wanted a moment between Janvier and Lapointe (Reda Elazouar) where you can see their emotions seeing someone else who was of color being her in this way.

It's a slight moment of vulnerability where she's having to do her job, which is to reenact it, but she knows what's happening is inhumane to this person, regardless of whether they're a criminal. There are these small subtleties like that that you wouldn't get if it were a white male or even a white woman, because they wouldn't relate to those characters in that way. It was a subtle moment, but it just goes to show that Patrick was already thinking in such a nuanced way when he wasn't just casting, creating characters, and making them diverse for the sake of it.

[Patrick] had thought about the details of what it means to have a North African, then also a Caribbean woman, and then a woman who leads this group. He was thinking about what it means by having these different people come from these different worlds, and how they then go out there, investigate, and process the people that they meet based on who they are. He makes all that work. There's something in there he strings it together, and I will co-sign it.

How much of the new Maigret is based on Simenon's novels? Would Patrick expand beyond them with more original stories in the series' future?

Wainwright: I realized I didn't really answer earlier, "the most difficult aspect" from the last question, but I must have covered it somewhere. Let's do this one. I think absolutely he would, but I don't think there's necessarily any need. There are so many stories in Maigret's world, short stories and novels. That said, he did in the first and second episode ("The Lazy Burglar"), he did borrow from real life with the prison break storyline. That's not from Maigret, so he has already done it, so he's got previous.

I think [Patrick] will do whatever he feels works by keeping the essential Maigret stories at the heart of it. It's still the Simenon Estate involved and is an active producer on this, so he won't be able to go too far away from what Simenon has written, and the stories are so good, rich, and they're so varied that there's no real need to go far apart, but he does like to combine them. If he finds a modern aspect or a story in the news that works or goes against the grain of one crime we're telling, I'm sure he will pull that in.

Okwok: I would only see if he was to stray, maybe in terms of like the different characters' backstories. He might seek some influence in some ways, but it might not translate in the same way as like say, the male version of Javier, who had a wife and kids. I don't know necessarily whether my Janvier would also have a wife/husband, or kids. I don't know whether he would directly translate it, so it will be interesting to see the changes, if he were to show the kind of backstories of each of the "Maigrets" (group), what that would then look like, what influence he would take, and what he would leave behind. That's the only version of it where I feel like he changed.

Maigret, which also stars Stefanie Martini, Natalie Armin, Blake Harrison, Kerrie Hayes, and Rob Kazinsky, airs Sundays through November 9th on MASTERPIECE Mystery! on PBS and is available to stream via PBS and PBS MASTERPIECE on Prime Video.

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