Jekyll and Hyde

The Beast in the Fog

I’ve always been drawn to stories about doubles—not the kind where a body is cloned or a soul is copied, but the kind where a single person splits down the middle, where the self becomes a battleground. Robert Louis Stevenson’s *Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.

Hyde is the ur-text of this obsession, a novella so embedded in the cultural imagination that its title has become shorthand for any kind of internal division. The 2015 series Jekyll and Hyde* doesn’t just adapt Stevenson’s story; it drags it into the fog-choked streets of 1930s London and asks what happens when the beast isn’t just inside one man, but inside an entire city.

That’s the first thing that strikes you about this series: it’s not content to be a simple character study. The camera lingers on the gas lamps, the cobblestones slick with rain, the Art Deco facades of buildings that look like they’re holding their breath. London here isn’t just a setting; it’s a living, breathing entity, as much a character as Robert Jekyll (Tom Bateman) or his alter ego, Hyde.

The city feels alive in a way that’s rare for television, where period pieces often get bogged down in the weight of their own production design. Here, the production design isn’t just a backdrop—it’s a mood, a warning. The fog isn’t just weather; it’s the smokescreen behind which monsters lurk.

The series opens with a prologue that feels like a silent film: a man in a top hat and tails stumbles through the streets, his face contorted in pain as he clutches his chest. He collapses, and when he rises, his posture has changed—shoulders hunched, fingers curled like claws. The transformation is wordless, and all the more unsettling for it.

This is the first time we meet Hyde, and the series doesn’t bother to explain him. He just is, a force of nature as much as the fog that swallows the streetlamps. It’s a bold choice, and one that pays off.

By the time we meet Robert Jekyll, a young man raised in India by his foster father, Dr. Vishal Najaran (Enzo Cilenti), we already know what’s coming. The question isn’t if Hyde will emerge, but when—and what he’ll do when he does.

Bateman’s performance is the anchor of the series, and it’s a tricky one. Robert Jekyll is a man trying to outrun his own nature, and Bateman sells the exhaustion of that struggle. There’s a moment in the first episode where Robert, fresh off the boat from India, stands in the middle of a London street, his eyes wide with wonder and fear.

He’s a man who doesn’t belong anywhere—too English for India, too foreign for London, and too afraid of what’s inside him to fully inhabit either identity. Bateman plays this dislocation with a quiet intensity, his body language shifting between stiff formality and something looser, more dangerous. When Hyde takes over, it’s not just a change in posture or expression; it’s as if Bateman’s entire physical presence has been rewired.