Haunted by the Past: Exile

Fan Spotlight: Exile
TeeJay – Guest Contributor
29 Jul 2026

Imagine the last time you saw your father almost 20 years ago, he violently beat you for reasons he always refused to disclose, and now your sister calls you and says you need to come home to help take care of him—or rather the version of him that remains beyond his Alzheimer’s addled brain. That’s the situation that washed up journalist Tom Ronstadt finds himself in, and it’s a real predicament.

Tom is not in a very good place. His rather volatile nature has burned all the bridges at work, his life is an empty void he’s tried to fill with alcohol and drugs, and at a very low moment, he can’t quite rein in the frustration and slaps his girlfriend across the face. So could it really be that much worse to leave the Big L and return to his small hometown in Lancashire to confront the low points of his childhood?

The drive up there is gloomy and rain-pelted; the house he grew up in looks untouched as his sister invites him in. Rooms are crammed with all the knick-knacks from decades ago, the furnishings and decor are still the same, the kitchen is cluttered and a little dinky. It has all the earmarks of a life standing still for decades, and has now been uprooted by a debilitating disease that Tom’s sister Nancy has been trying to deal with on her own but that is taking a toll to the point that she needs Tom’s help.

Being back there is like the trip down memory lane from hell because there are reminders everywhere of those defining moments leading up to his father’s violent act, awash with the lingering mystery that still shrouds his father’s actions and motivations. Older but not necessarily wiser, now a journalist himself, Tom’s curiosity resurfaces and he starts to dig up the long-buried puzzle pieces to what might have happened all those years ago, some of which are trapped in his father’s fast-fading mind.

Over the course of three one-hour episodes, Exile tells a slowly unravelling tale of tragic events—past and present—while depicting the harsh realities of being a caretaker to a sometimes unpredictable and even violent person with diminishing brain function. We witness the sweet, rewarding moments as well as those governed by weariness and frustration that family members are often faced with. And most of all, we witness Tom’s struggle of trying to reconcile the person who once knowingly pummeled his son with his fists, with the mentally incapacitated person in front of him whose lucid moments are few and far between.

John Simm plays Tom Ronstadt, a deeply flawed individual who is still chasing the ghosts from his past, never quite able to shake them. With his life falling apart in front of his eyes, the return to his hometown may actually be a blessing in disguise as he reconnects with friends from his childhood and whose help he tries to elicit to aid him in his quest for the one huge question mark looming over his whole life.

There’s his old best friend Mike—somebody that Tom initially looks up to but quickly comes to understand that cosy, small town family life isn’t quite what it’s cut out to be either. There’s the school acquaintance Mandy who Tom takes a liking to, so that flirting soon develops into something more. There’s his outspoken sister Nancy who is exhausted from the demands of the taxing and often thankless 24/7 care that their father now needs. And most of all, there are a whole lot of unanswered questions about the case his father was working on at the time—a case that has to be tied to what drove Tom to flee his childhood home.

Torn between his egotistic streak, self-pity and familial responsibility, Tom starts to realise that perhaps solving the mystery from his childhood could bring him the closure he needs to get out of the aimless rut he’s been stuck in. But what he starts to discover along the way is that he found a Pandora’s box that perhaps never should have been opened…

What Exile does incredibly well is mixing the realities of familial caretaker life with a dramatic and engaging personal mystery through characters that are 3-dimensional and very, very human, while at the same time there is a good deal of humour sprinkled through it that alleviates some of the heaviness and adds another element of warmth and sincerity.

It is not just John’s fantastic portrayal of Tom as a deeply problematic yet relatable human being that elevates Exile as a TV production, it’s also Olivia Colman’s wonderful work as Tom’s feisty sister Nancy who brings a heartfelt humanity to the character. Just as striking a performance comes from the wonderful Jim Broadbent who plays Sam Ronstadt with a tangible vulnerability which sometimes teeters on the edges of light-hearted comic relief that segues into profound tragedy in the blink of an eye. I couldn’t think of anyone more perfect to play this role. (Although, if you watch the Making Of on the UK DVDs, you’ll learn that they originally wanted Pete Postlethwaite to play Sam Ronstadt, but his declining health unfortunately thwarted the opportunity.)

Interestingly, from the very beginning the script was written with John Simm as Tom in mind. Writer Danny Brocklehurst described Tom Ronstadt in early drafts of the script as “a very rough-looking John Simm”, and it was sent to John that way to read.

John himself has said this about Tom Ronstadt: “The characters [writers like Danny Brocklehurst] write are usually anti-heroes, which is my favourite kind of part. I mean, Danny in The Lakes and John Parlour in Never Never, Cal in State of Play… They’ve all got some dark element to them, and Tom in this especially. He has a very very dark secret he’s carrying around with him, and then you suddenly realise why he’s like he is. But they’re the best parts. And Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment that Tony Marchant adapted, he’s the ultimate one of those, isn’t he? He’s the ultimate anti-hero.”

The Making Of references John’s talent and skill quite a bit and we learn that the cast and crew have nothing but praise for him.

Scriptwriter Danny Brocklehurst: “I personally think he’s one of our finest actors, certainly of his generation, but I just believe him. Every single scene, I believe him, and he’s got a really incredible range, he’s truthful, and to be honest, he’s just been associated with some of the best dramas of the last ten or fifteen years. If you look at the list of really really really good dramas of the last ten or fifteen years, usually John’s somewhere around it.”

Director John Alexander: “Of course John was always attached to the piece from the first time I read it, and that was another thing that attracted me. I had worked with John a few years ago on the series Life on Mars, and I think he’s an amazing performer and I’d jump at working with him again. It’s amazing, the emotion or the thought that John is conveying [with] just those looks. Always fascinating what a good performer can do. He makes it look so easy, to his detriment at times. Often he’s working with other people and he’s so generous with his performance that you don’t necessarily notice his against someone else’s. Because he’s always there.”

Co-star Olivia Colman: “The first read-through, we were sitting next to each other, and John and I got the giggles about something, or one of the lines made us laugh. It was always very easy. […] I think John is naturally a bit of a giggler. For John, the job is huge. In every scene, every day, really carrying it. So it must have been quite nice to muck about a bit.”

Another striking thing about the three-part series is its choreography – from the cinematography to the soundtrack. It’s slightly jarring but not unintended that they often chose framing that seemed awkward, either through unusual picture composition or extreme close-ups. Director John Alexander explained that they did this very deliberately to make the character of Tom feel even more displaced and out of his element. The same goes for the soundtrack, which is very distinctive and has a haunting and discordant quality to it, but fits the piece very beautifully.

On a more personal note, this series definitely hit home for me because I’ve witnessed the Alzheimer’s journey first-hand with my own grandmother many years ago and know what it does to the people who love them and care for them. And that made the struggles we see the characters go through even more palpable. 

For those with an interest in scriptwriting, the shooting script for episode 1 is freely accessible in the BBC Script Library, and it’s an interesting read because it has a few scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut.

John himself says this about the script: “The reason I decided to do it was because it was so good. I didn’t really wanna do anything after Hamlet. I must admit I tried to bat everything away so to have the last few months of the year to sort of come to terms with it because it was such a big deal, I was thinking about it all year. And before that I did a job called Mad Dogs, then went straight on to Hamlet. So I wasn’t gonna do anything after that, but the reason I did this was because the script was so good. And I thought if I don’t do this, then some other actor is gonna do it, and I’ll sit there, biting my knuckles as I watch it. One of the best scripts I’ve read for a while.”

The UK DVD set has episode commentary by director John Alexander and writer Danny Brocklehurst on all three episodes. They shine a light on some of the aspects that are not immediately apparent when you watch a scripted programme like this, but which I always find fascinating. Here are some highlights:

• In its very initial stages, Exile was meant to be an indie film set in America, according to the concept that screenwriter Paul Abbott had written up. Danny Brocklehurst then took the idea and changed the setting and adapted the story to what it is today, which underwent quite a few changes in the process.
• Tom Ronstadt is the main character of this mini-series, and as a John Simm fan you do realise that he is featured quite prominently, but what perhaps you don’t quite think about is that John is in pretty much every scene. And that’s a huge amount of work for an actor – to learn the lines, to always be there and be present in the moment, to basically know you’re carrying the whole thing. That said, John Alexander had the impression that John Simm actually enjoys those kind of challenges, and he had experience with it since he did it for two whole series in Life on Mars.
• Many TV series and films are shot out of sequence – often because of logistics, scheduling or availability of shooting locations. All the scenes in Sam Ronstadt’s house were filmed at the beginning of the shoot and later edited to fit where they belonged. That also meant that scenes weren’t necessarily shot in chronological order. John Alexander gave us a glimpse of this when he shared, “You’re kinda leaping across the whole emotional journey and trying to imagine where you’re going to go, as well as where you’d been. There’s an amazing moment at the end of episode 3 where John shot a scene where he’s in the kitchen, and it happened after [the] big emotional [reveal] scene, and I think he shot it two weeks before the emotional scene, but perfectly pitched in terms of how he’d imagined he would play the scene he just shot. It’s like a three-dimensional puzzle.” 
• Speaking of the big reveal scene, I find that this is easily the most powerful scene in the whole series, and I think John Alexander and Danny Brocklehurst felt the same way. While they are very chatty throughout the whole three episodes in the episode commentaries, this is the scene where they don’t talk much, where they are just as spellbound by the emotional intensity of the shocking moment, which is testament to John’s strong performance here. Interestingly, this happens again during the scene at the end when Tom visits Sam in the care home.
• As I was watching the episodes again, I noticed a few nuances that I would like to think were done deliberately, such as juxtaposing shots of Tom sitting in a café at the very beginning with that of him sitting in a café at the very end, but him being in very different places emotionally. Or the callback of Tom’s line of, “Gone? Gone where?” when he asks Nancy where their father is after she got him into respite care, which is verbatim a repeat of Sam’s line in episode 1 when Sam asks Tom where his assistant Wendy is. 
• Watching the series again with the commentary on gave me a whole new appreciation of just how good it is. Both John Simm and director John Alexander received a BAFTA nomination for their work on Exile, and I can certainly see why because the combination of fantastic scripts by Danny Brocklehurst and strong performances from an excellent cast have made Exile reside in my top 3 of things John Simm has done to date.

Exile – John Simm Compliation

Next to John Simm, Olivia Colman and Jim Broadbent are starring Shaun Dooley, Claire Goose and Timothy West. Exile is available to stream on different platforms (incl. Tubi which is free with ads) and on DVD.

John Simm in the Exile Making Of