Cold Feet’s James Nesbitt: womanising Adam was becoming ‘unlikable’

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Cold Feet: SR8: Ep1 on ITV

Pictured: Adam [James Nesbitt].

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Is Adam losing his mojo? The first episode of Cold Feet series eight saw James Nesbitt’s roguish Northern Irishman facing some hard home truths.

He had spent much of the episode trying to woo Gemma Murphy (Tara Gouveia), an attractive young woman who regularly served him coffee with a smile.

She had rebuffed his direct offer of a dinner date, but later turned up at his house on the night in question. Not because she had fallen for Adam: she was going out with his teenage son Matt and had come to meet the younger man.

Things took an even more unfortunate turn when Gemma dumped Matt because Adam revealed that his son was only 17 – not the 22 he had led her to believe.

“You embarrassed me, “Matt shouted at him. “You are sad and totally pathetic.”

Just before the strains of Rae Morris’ “Someone out there loves you” piped up in the closing credits, Adam received a pep talk from Karen (Hermione Norris) who urged him to find someone more suitable, someone who would be keen to grow old with him.

Someone, essentially, his own age.

Nesbitt himself believes it was “about time” Adam faced these home truths, and added that his character, who opened the episode chasing young women at Ramona’s wedding, needed recalibrating.

“I think it’s about time for all of us and me in a sense,” he said. “I do think he had lost a bit of his likability. What has always been strong about that character and why it worked was his likability. However idiotic, selfish or embarrassing he is there has always been a likability in him. And if you lose that in him then it becomes a character who’s getting a bit bitter as he gets older.

“For Adam to get to a place where he can look forward and people can relate to him, he had to have that big eye opener. And when you have a son saying, ‘You’re pathetic’, I believe that. Now he doesn’t change overnight. But for the show, for him, for all of us, it’s important to get to the point where he looks in the mirror physically and metaphorically and thinks, ‘What now?'”