At a Q&A in Port Talbot’s Reel Cinema on Fri 2 Feb, first-time director Michael Sheen, writer James Graham, producer Bethan Jones and cast members Callum Scott-Howells and Mali Harries formed a panel discussion on the making of BBC drama The Way. Buzz was there to soak up the most interesting tidbits.
The last decade has been one characterised by unthinkables: the tipping point for climate change, an insurrection attempt on the US Capitol, a global pandemic… theoretical threats turned into sombre realities. It’s upon this foundation that new three-part BBC drama The Way is built.
Filmed in Port Talbot in the background of the steel industry’s real-world collapse, one family, the Driscolls, are forced to flee their home due to a civil uprising, becoming refugees in a place they once called home. Without his director’s hat on, Michael Sheen revealed that watching the first episode with an audience was an eye-opening experience.
“I found myself getting more engaged with the story because less was jumping out at you going, ‘Oh, that doesn’t work,’ and all that stuff. I was able to watch it and feel the impact. Tonight was incredibly emotional for me because everything has resonance and hits you afresh.”
When asked about how long the project had been in development, Sheen joked it felt like he began work on it in 1949. It was actually 2017 – an age in TV years, more so in a world that went through the time-warping effect COVID has had between then and now. “The idea I came to [producer] Bethan Jones with,” Sheen detailed, “was a British family being uprooted, having to flee their home, go on a journey through Britain and then eventually cross the Channel. You wouldn’t know why it was happening to them.”
Initially, he envisioned something “very close-up, subjective… guerrilla filmmaking”, but thinking about the social and political circumstances that might realistically make a British family go on the run became too interesting to ignore. That was when the project began to expand, leading Sheen to enlist the help of celebrated documentary maker Adam Curtis.
“I was a huge fan of his documentaries [which are about] the idea of where power really lies and what’s going on under the skin of society and culture. By the end of that conversation that we had with Adam, I knew two things. One, opening [The Way] up was definitely the way to go. And the second one was that it would be amazing to have Adam be part of it. Then we talked about a writer. At that point, I didn’t know [playwright] James [Graham], but I knew his work.”
As Graham recalled it, meeting Sheen was “surreal” – at the time, he was filming the Chris Tarrant role in ITV’s adaptation of Quiz, Graham’s 2017 play about the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? coughing scandal, and sat down dressed in full Tarrant get-up. Once free from his quiz-hosting persona, Sheen described bringing Graham and Curtis on board as an “Avengers, assemble!” moment. “I knew that as a writer James would bring in big issues – state-of-the-nation stuff – but all through the prism of real people, with warmth and humanity. We knew that bringing the everyday and extraordinary together was what we wanted to do in this piece.”
At this point, the series wasn’t set in Port Talbot – Sheen’s birthplace and current home – but upon visiting the town to develop the story, Curtis and Graham found it a rich source of inspiration for its industrial legacy. Graham said he found it “exciting” to “war game” plausible Orwellian scenarios. “I connected with the ambition that Michael, Adam and Bethan had, which was to just ask that very simple question: could it happen here? We always think of these social and political problems – uprisings, the collapse of a state – as being impossible in Britain, because we’re so boring and stable and we’re one of the oldest surviving democracies.”
The main problem, unfortunately, was that reality kept trumping their ideas – including Trump himself, one of the heralds of a “chaotic world emerging” in the project’s infancy. “I kept writing drafts,” said Graham, “and then the world kept overtaking us. We had to keep upscaling the chaos. But I think at the heart of it, we always knew that the emotional core of the drama would be a family. A normal family that is a bit like a metaphor for the country being broken but trying to stay together.”
Sheen agreed the series lives or dies on the believability of its central crisis, even with the unbelievable becoming part of our daily rolling news. That was how Port Talbot, with its collapsing steelworks, became the logical catalyst to shape everything around – including the Driscoll family, who anchor the audience within this unravelling maelstrom.
“There’s a definite fire in her belly,” actress Mali Harries said of playing Dee Driscoll. “It made me realise how powerful people can be, especially in governments and local councils, but if we stand together, we can make a noise and we can make a difference.”
On whether or not to make any reference to COVID, Sheen explained that like many contemporary productions, it’s an unavoidable decision. In the end, they ran with it full pelt. For Graham, COVID was too instrumental in upturning normalcy not to resonate with The Way’s core theme. “Fundamentally the pandemic reminded us that history isn’t over and it keeps repeating it. We used to talk about the idea of the end of history at the turn of the millennium, that everything that could happen has happened; this is it, we’re set. But you never really are.
“It reminded me of the possibility of a tipping point where you wake up one day and reimagine the entire world as we all did at that time. It was like turning us off and turning us on again. That made me believe more in the possibility of imagining that something can shift unpredictably without any warning.”
A nicer ‘unthinkable’ for Harries and Callum Scott-Howells, who plays her son Owen Driscoll, was getting to work with the local hero and international icon that is Michael Sheen. Though Harries credits the kinship she felt with her character – “a strong Welsh woman who has faced trauma and just cracks on” – and the strength of the script with wanting the role, the chance to work with Sheen in his directorial debut was also irresistible: “He’s my kind of Welshman!”
Scott-Howells revealed that watching Sheen in The Damned United made him fall in love with acting, so looking down the lens and seeing him while filming was terrifying. He adds, however, that as a director, Sheen is amazing at making actors feel comfortable enough to express themselves freely. “He really aids performances, he doesn’t want to hinder them.”
Despite its dystopian setting, Sheen and company hope that Port Talbot’s tourism profile is raised by the series. “I feel privileged to have been able to spend time here with all the supporting actors, getting to know people and how important Port Talbot is for them,” Harries said. “I’m thrilled that it’s now not somewhere that I just drive by; I’ll bring my kids here, go to the beach, use it as part of my personal life.”
“I’m hoping that people will now come to Aberavon Beach [in Port Talbot] and have photographs taken next to that [stone] penguin [at Aberavon Aquadome],” Sheen added. “If there’s one thing I could do over in this drama, it’s to make that penguin a real icon. I’ve got one in my garden. I love it so much. I got the company to send me one.”
The Way launches on BBC One on Mon 19 Feb and will be available on BBC iPlayer.
Info: here
words HANNAH COLLINS
