\n<\/p>\n
You seem to have a predilection to play real<\/strong>-life <\/strong>characters <\/strong>who die prematurely. <\/strong>Who would you like to play <\/strong>who lives to old age? <\/strong>NeilHV When the civil war broke out he sold firewood by the side of the road to try to put food on the table for his family. Eight years later, he was president. It\u2019s the kind of quintessential American success story, but history doesn\u2019t regard him that way.<\/p>\n <\/span>On deck \u2026 as Claudius in the RSC\u2019s 2025 production of Hamlet.<\/span> Photograph: Marc Brenner<\/p>\n Which made you feel more seasick \u2013 the sinking-ship stage set from the <\/strong>2025<\/strong> RSC<\/strong> production of Hamlet, in which you played Claudius, or <\/strong>HMS Terror from The Terror? <\/strong>Dr_JA_Zoidberg<\/em> When you\u2019re drinking <\/strong>scotch in Mad Men, which <\/strong>scotch is it pretending to be? <\/strong>CoveRoad<\/em> <\/span>From left: Christina Hendricks, John Slattery, Jared Harris, Vincent Kartheiser, Jon Hamm, Robert Morse and Elisabeth Moss in Mad Men.<\/span> Photograph: AMC\/ Lionsgate<\/p>\n Did you inherit your father <\/strong>Richard Harris<\/strong>\u2019s singing voice? And do you share his taste for rugby shirts? <\/strong>MissusD and TaffRaffia<\/em> What was the process of learning <\/strong>Belter <\/strong>for <\/strong>The Expanse<\/strong>?<\/strong> Did you model your accent on anyone in particular for your role <\/strong>as Crozier in The Terror? <\/strong>Gironans and Team504<\/em> <\/span>\u2018An angry man\u2019 \u2026 Jared Harris as John Lennon and Aidan Quinn as Paul McCartney in Michael Lindsay-Hogg\u2019s Two of Us from 2000. <\/span> Photograph: Aaronson\/Falk\/Vh1\/Viacom\/Kobal\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n Did you become more of a John Lennon fan after playing him in <\/strong>Two of Us<\/strong>? <\/strong>Goobdroog<\/em> Favourite pub? <\/strong>Galdove19 <\/span>Richard Harris at home with his sons Damian and Jared, February 1966. <\/span> Photograph: Stephan C Archetti\/Keystone Features\/Hulton Archive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n He said: \u201cI can forgive many things. I can forgive ignorance, because that\u2019s not your fault. That\u2019s the fault of your education. I can forgive bad manners. Again, not your fault if your parents just didn\u2019t bring you up properly. But the one thing I cannot forgive is ugliness, and you\u2019re the ugliest woman I\u2019ve ever seen in my life. Now fuck off.\u201d<\/p>\n So she goes inside, gets her boyfriend, who comes out and says [does Irish accent]: \u201cYou called my girlfriend ugly. Stand up if you\u2019re a man.\u201d So dad sucker-punched him and knocked him out. He was on the floor, cracked his head, and the girl started jumping up and down, going [does Irish accent]: \u201cDickie Harris has killed me boyfriend! Dickie Harris has killed me boyfriend!\u201d Dad wasn\u2019t sure what had happened, so he grabbed his Guinness and chucked it in the guy\u2019s face, which brought him round immediately. But he was a big boy and Dad knew that he wasn\u2019t going to win round two, so he leapt into a taxi and took off.\u201d<\/p>\n If you hadn\u2019t done the acting, what would have been your ideal gig? <\/strong>CaptainLib <\/span>Watch a trailer for Brave the Dark, starring Jared Harris<\/span><\/p>\n He wouldn\u2019t come down to see me in anything until after I graduated and I stayed behind in the summer to do Entertaining Mr Sloane. I\u2019d made a movie as well while I was at Duke. He watched the film in the afternoon and saw the play in the evening. He was fully prepared to tell me: \u201cForget this acting lark. It\u2019s not for you.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ll never forget the look on his face when I met him afterwards: the joy that there was this thing that he loved that he had a whole new shared area of dialogue, interest and conversation. Those are some of my best memories: sitting around a table with him. He would act out Olivier\u2019s performance in Titus Andronicus, Scofield\u2019s interpretation of Hamlet, Peter O\u2019Toole\u2019s Macbeth, and I\u2019d soak it all up.<\/p>\n Have you and Charlie Brooker ever been in the same room? <\/strong>ThatDamnCat<\/em> Brave the Dark is on digital platforms from 15 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You seem to have a predilection to play real-life characters who die prematurely. Who would you like to play who lives to old age? NeilHVWell, I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s true. Captain Crozier [from The Terror] didn\u2019t die, and Lane Pryce [from Mad Men] wasn\u2019t real. I would love to play [the 19th-century US president]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[6456,2450,584,7969,881,12664,5768,5605,1394,7776],"class_list":{"0":"post-20584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-brought","9":"tag-dad","10":"tag-face","11":"tag-guinness","12":"tag-harris","13":"tag-irishman","14":"tag-jared","15":"tag-knocked","16":"tag-movies","17":"tag-throwing"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/em>Well, I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s true. Captain Crozier [from The Terror] didn\u2019t die, and Lane Pryce [from Mad Men] wasn\u2019t real. I would love to play [the 19th-century US president] Ulysses S Grant. His history has largely been written by southern US historians and so his achievements have largely been denigrated. But his campaigns are taught in all the military academies around the world. Despite a pretty disastrous presidency, he still managed to [sign a] Civil Rights Act \u2013 and he destroyed the Ku Klux Klan.<\/p>\n
Definitely the RSC stage, because it moved throughout the production, so you\u2019d suddenly find yourself losing your footing and wobbling. The set for The Terror was locked off, particularly when it was at that weird angle when the whole thing was tipping to the side.<\/p>\n
Well, you drink sugar water, which is horrible. The cigarettes are herbal cigarettes, which are impossible to keep lit, which is why you see everyone puffing really hard. It makes everybody look like complete nicotine addicts.<\/p>\n
I did not<\/em> inherit his singing voice. I\u2019m passable at karaoke, but I would never charge anybody to hear me sing. I actually have a bunch of his rugby shirts that I kept to remind me of him.<\/p>\n
Belter was great fun, because that was an invented accent. When I met the coach, he said: \u201cWe\u2019ve got three levels. It\u2019s like a curry: mild, medium and spicy.\u201d I decided to go for the most extreme, spicy version, because my character was supposed to be the original Belter. Crozier was interesting because he was Anglo-Irish, and identified strongly with the crown. We don\u2019t know what that accent would\u2019ve sounded like, so we settled on something that sounded like someone who had an aspiration towards being accepted by English society, but was still Irish.<\/p>\n
I wouldn\u2019t say I became more of a fan, because I was born in 1961 just before the Beatles released their first album. People were upset by our version of John Lennon because, by this time, he\u2019d become the voice of the peace movement, but he was also an angry man who could be violent and had a massive chip on his shoulder. So I got a lot of flak from Beatles fans who didn\u2019t like the version we were presenting.<\/p>\n
<\/em>I used to go and have a drink with my dad at the the Coach and Horses at the back of Covent Garden. They have really good Guinness. It\u2019s also the place where my father had his last fight. It was summer. He was sitting outside having a pint. My father would have two sorts of interactions with Irish people. One would be very positive. The other, they\u2019d say: \u201cWhat the fuck have you ever done for Ireland?\u201d He was having the second interaction with this Irish woman and lost his patience.<\/p>\n
<\/em>I think about that all the time. It\u2019s a bit late now. I\u2019m the middle child, so I was always arguing with my brothers, so my parents thought I might make a good lawyer. I was very shy, and still am in some ways. When I went to Duke [University in North Carolina, to study drama] and started acting, my mother came down and saw me, and said to my dad: \u201cYou should go see him. He is very good.\u201d And he said: \u201cWell, you would <\/em>say that, you\u2019re his mother.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I have<\/em> met him, so the answer to that question is: yes, we\u2019ve been in the same room. We were both at the Bafta tea party ahead of the Emmys, when I was doing the rounds for Chernobyl. We are not the same person. I did tell Charlie Brooker that I wanted to be in Black Mirror and, so far, I have not received a phone call.<\/p>\n