New drama The Reunion unearths some dark secrets

Whatever happened to Vinca Rockwell? Hopefully, by watching this six-part adaptation of Guillaume Musso’s bestselling novel, we’re going to find out.

An international cast – headed by Ioan Gruffudd, Ivanna Sakhno, Gregory Fitoussi, Dervla Kirwan, Rupert Graves and Salome Gunnarrsdottir – gathered in the south of France last year to make the series, which is set on the sun-kissed French Riviera.

The story begins as Thomas (Gruffudd) is invited to his school reunion, where he meets up with his old friends Max and Fanny. Talk inevitably turns to Vinca who, 25 years earlier, disappeared from their campus during a snowstorm. The trio are bound together by a dark secret that could be about to be revealed, while also trying to find out what happened to their friend.

“Thomas is a writer who moved away from the south of France, where he studied at the International School in the early 1990s,” explains Gruffudd. “He left to become a novelist and he is asked to come back to this high school reunion. As a consequence of him returning, the audience then gets to see why he shouldn’t have come back.

“It is revealed that there has been a murder in the past, which Thomas and his friends were directly involved in. When he returns to the south of France the whole mystery starts to unravel. The reason he did come back, against his better judgement, is because he’s obsessed with the girl he was in love with back then – namely Vinca. He’s back to try and piece together that mystery but his other past has caught up with him at the same time. You’ve got these two narratives colliding.”

He adds: “The book was very popular in France and it resonates internationally, especially for people of my age because it’s partly about being young in the early 1990s as well as being the age we are now. And the themes and the story work in any language. It’s deliberately set in an international school that we all can imagine attending. You can imagine as a young person how being thrust into that environment might influence you and how it would never really leave you.”

Working in the region was also an attraction for the Welsh actor, who claims it was “very civilised. There’s such a reverence towards the craft of making film and television, and it’s great to be a part of that.”

But it was the story itself that really attracted him to the project: “I loved the script. It always starts with the script as well as: ‘What’s the character? Can I play him? What’s hidden in there for me to get my teeth into?’”

Gruffudd concludes: “Filming in that part of the world had a profound effect on me for sure. I’d never worked there before, so to see it in all its majesty and its glory and to understand it for the first time really was magical. I was blown away by it.

“As regards the show’s appeal for the larger audience, I think the murder-mystery speaks for itself because who doesn’t love one of those?”