Daily Inspiration Quote by Robbie Coltraine

There is a sly brag hiding inside this deliberate undercutting. Coltrane spends most of the quote draining Hain of the usual TV-hero electricity - no genius, no swagger, no “great policeman” halo - then pivots to the real selling point: the character’s gravity comes from resisting the sale. In a medium trained to reward competence porn and quotable charisma, “not very interesting” becomes a provocation. It invites the audience to look for something harder to pin down: pressure, fatigue, moral luck.

Calling Hain “Chekhovian” is doing specific work. Chekhov’s people aren’t defined by plot triumphs; they’re defined by how life happens to them, how they absorb disappointment, how they keep going while feeling vaguely out of their depth. Coltrane positions Hain as a receptacle for “extraordinary things,” which reframes police drama away from mastery and toward exposure. The subtext: the world is bigger than any cop, and the job is less about brilliance than about endurance and damage control.

The most revealing line is the actor’s aside: “Which is quite hard to play.” That’s craft talk, but it’s also a quiet critique of audience expectation. Playing “ordinary” isn’t easy because it can’t lean on theatrics; it depends on micro-choices, withheld emotion, the sense that the character is processing events in real time. Coltrane is defending a kind of realism that feels almost radical: a protagonist whose hook is that he doesn’t have one, except being recognizably human when the plot turns monstrous.