Vicky McClure insists she'll gladly be part of Line Of Duty for as long as the fans want it - Tech

As Line Of Duty’s sixth series edges closer, star Vicky McClure has insisted she never wants the show to end.

‘We’ll keep going until the audience wants it to end,’ she told The Sunday Times this weekend. ‘I’ll be devastated the day it ends. To be involved in a job with this much love for it, well, you never expect that.’

Vicky, 37, also admitted: ‘How much longer can it keep going? Sometimes you think, has it run its course? Every time we go back, we go, “What’s [creator] Jed [Mercurio] going to come up with?” But he has always got something up his sleeve.’

Back soon: As Line Of Duty’s sixth series edges closer, star Vicky McClure has insisted she never wants the show to end

‘Jed’s storylines are just incredible, and the boys and I feel the same.’

‘The boys’ are co-stars Adrian Dunbar and Martin Compston, whom Vicky has starred alongside in the cop drama since it debuted in 2012.

She credits them for keeping her sane while filming season six, which took three months amid strict COVID-19 regulations which meant they had to be away from their loved ones the whole time.

‘I’ve never been away for that long before,’ she said, revealing she brought a plethora of items from home with her to Belfast, where filming took place, to comfort her. ‘Everything in Belfast was shut, we had nothing to do, but we had each other and it really did get us through.’

On and on: ‘We’ll keep going until the audience wants it to end,’ she told The Sunday Times this weekend. ‘I’ll be devastated the day it ends’

With the boys: She credits co-stars Adrian Dunbar and Martin Compston for keeping her sane while filming season six, which took three months amid strict COVID-19 regulations which meant they had to be away from their loved ones the whole time

She also revealed that ‘Me, Martin and Ady are very much on a level playing field, we get paid the same’, clearing up any speculation about unequal salaries for the trio of lead stars.

Adrian revealed this month that filming series six was ‘difficult’ because they had to shoot the scenes out of sequence.

The actor plays Superintendent Ted Hastings to Vicky’s DC Kate Fleming – both investigating officers at AC-12, an Anti-Corruption unit of the police.

Appearing on The One Show, Adrian, 62, said: ‘Like everybody else we went into lockdown in March when episode one and a bit of episode two had been filmed.

‘And then we came back and we shot it all out of sequence. It was difficult.

‘One of the extraordinary things is that they revealed we’re going to have another episode out of it. So we’re going to have seven episodes instead of six.

‘But it was hard to get our heads around, you know, the storylines are complicated and when you’re shooting a scene out of sequence.

Jargon: Adrian, who plays Superintendent Ted Hastings, the senior investigating officer of AC-12, said at times it was confusing to ‘keep all that complicated stuff in your head’ filming season six out of sync

New recruit: DC Chloe Bishop will be played by new cast member Shalon Brune

‘It’s easy shooting two blocks, so you can keep all that complicated stuff in your head.’

Adrian added: ‘I’m actually dying to see it with everybody else because you know sometimes it gets a bit confusing but it will all be fixed in the edit as they say.’

When pressed for a release date, the actor replied there isn’t an official date yet but thinks series six will be released in the next two to three months.

The sixth series sees the debut of Kelly MacDonald as Detective Chief Inspector Joanne Davidson, senior investigating officer of an unsolved murder.