HINTERLAND: ED TALFAN, ED THOMAS & RICHARD HARRINGTON | INTERVIEW

In Depot, Cardiff’s foodie haven, Luke Owain Boult caught up with Richard Harrington, Ed Thomas and Ed Talfan from S4C’s and BBC’s superb crime drama Y Gwyll/Hinterland.

RICHARD HARRINGTON – PLAYS DCI TOM MATHIAS

How do you get into character?

“How do I get into character? Well, I’m not one of these method actors, or methodone actors as they like to be called. I think, particularly for this job, all I did was read as much as I could of the script initially, and then by reading the script enough times it throws up a lot of questions. Because if you feel there are too many gaps in the story, it’s not really important that we show it in the first episode but it’s vitally important that I know what it is. So that throws up many, many spanners in the works and meetings and then you get involved in changing his history and how he is, how he moves, how he walks, why he does the things he does, how he reacts. And I think once you get a blueprint of a character you have to stick to that blueprint then, irrespective of what’s going to happen in the story. Because you’re not making a soap where you can suddenly be Grant Mitchell at the bar – he’s a thug one day and the next minute he’s saving a cat’s life or working for the salvation army – the characters have to stay completely who they are, which is what I loved about Breaking Bad. You watch the first episode of that and then the last episode and even though that series goes to places you’re never expecting, not one of those characters does anything out of character. And that is due to the hard work that goes on before you’ve even shot a frame. So when I stepped on set for the very first time I pretty much knew enough to just be there and simply do nothing really, just react.”

How did you get into acting?

“My parents always said I was a bit of an actor anyway and coming from Merthyr Tydfil you have to be loud and you have to tell a better story than the next man, so that was always an opportunity for me to show off.

I did something when I was 12 years old from school, there was a series called District Nurse with Nerys Hughes and the BBC came to school looking for kids and I ended up getting one episode and spending time with actors like Freddie Jones who I had known from David Lynch movies that I had been watching on the sly anyway. And I knew he was a great Welsh actor and I met him and I could tell that he drinks a lot. I remember being at the end of the read through where the second assistant director turned to him and said ‘okay Freddie that’s the read through over if you would like to go retire to the bar for a drink’ and he grabbed his hand and said ‘my boy, do you write poetry?’ And I remember thinking ‘God, that’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard in my life’, so I kind of kept it up really as I went along in school and then got expelled when I was doing my A-Levels for reasons I can’t tell you about. A Campbell Carrot was part of it. I wasn’t really doing much work, my parents were going through quite an acrimonious divorce. So it was quite amazing really.

But anyway I ended up getting a job as an actor because I was just at the right place at the right time and somebody had remembered me as a kid and thought there was a job for a seventeen year old boy to go and work in Amsterdam for the BBC in a film about a gay rent boy, and they instantly thought of me, so that’s pretty much how I started.”

Do you feel more comfortable filming in English or in Welsh?

“I feel more comfortable filming it in English this particular series. Number one my Welsh is not my first language. I love the Welsh language but I think you have to be a kind of scholar in order to speak it properly. But the character of Mathias I made the decision in my head that he was an English speaker, that he wasn’t really affiliated with the Welsh speaking community and that is the only bug bearer I have doing it in Welsh and English.

I love the drama in Welsh; there are only certain characters you think why would anything other than Welsh come out of their mouths. I like that. And once I get into the flow of things I like playing Mathias in the Welsh language, but I think I’ve got much more of a grasp on him – personally, that’s what I think, it may appear different to everyone else – much more of a grasp on him as a character, as an English speaker, because you can’t suddenly make a decision to say he’s an English speaking man from Wales and then suddenly switch that to a Welsh speaking man from Wales, because you will naturally change the course of his history. It was important for me, to answer your question again about how do you get into character, it was important for me to stay with a blueprint. And it’s impossible then to change it. But it can be done, and we do it. It’s just a little bit of a departure for me when I play it in Welsh.”

Are there any other things that you’re working on at the moment, any plans for comedy?

“Well I just finished a series of Poldark and my performance was pretty comedic in that. Yeah I like comedy and nobody seems to offer me anything like that. I know why. I’d like to maybe even try a bit of stand up one day. Comedies, comedians and humour have always been a lifeline for my family anyway, particularly for people in South Wales, because if you don’t laugh you cry don’t you. Particularly with the austerity cuts that happened. So yeah I’d love to do a comedy, I’d love to create something that I’d like to do because I’m not sure I’d be very good at the sitcom stuff, but I’d like to do something truthful with humour. Maybe a touch of stand-up one day, but then that’s like the scariest thing in the world isn’t it.”

How much of you is there in Mathias?

“How much of me is in Mathias? Well I look like him, that’s a good start. There’s a lot of who you are in every character you play. When I’ve worked I’ve always had to love the character that I’m playing even if I’m playing a real menace. You have to find the heart of who they are and I’m a person anyway that’s not very secretive and I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. So if you see me being quite emotional in scenes it’s normally because me, as Richard Harrington, find the whole story moving so I’ll inject facets of that into it. But I don’t know what the magic formula is really, I mean you’re always you, you never lose sight of who you are otherwise you’d go bloody mad don’t you. So I think there are many elements of who I am in the character but I haven’t got his story, I don’t have his tragedies or his successes so my job as Richard Harrington is to tame the character as much as I can in order to play as much truth that I can.”

ED TALFAN – PRODUCER

First up, what can viewers expect from the new series?

“I think the second series builds on the success of the first. We go more deeply into the characters, the core team: Mathias, Mared, Lloyd and Sian. It’s still very much stories of the week. But the overreaching arc is stronger through series two and takes us in to series three which we actually start shooting in January.”

Were there any challenges you faced in filming in both English and Welsh? Is one more of an adaptation of the other?

“Shooting in both languages is terrific because we have the support of S4C and the BBC Wales and it means it’s not a case of ‘are you making Welsh language drama or an English language drama?’ We feel like we’re making a show from Wales for Wales. For some of the actors whose first language is Welsh I think they probably feel comfortable in the Welsh, but then they’re also terrific in the English and then vice versa. It does take longer because we obviously have to take two takes of everything.”

Do you find that at times there is one take you actually prefer in one language to another?

“I think the Welsh version and the English version are very similar in terms of the edits. But you do see different nuances, different emphases. But sometimes, inevitably, you think that person absolutely nailed it in one version and perhaps in another version you think it didn’t sing quite as much. But by-and-large they are the same thing.”

Hinterland is available on Netflix but Y Gwyll isn’t. Are there any plans to introduce it?

“I’m not sure what the deal is in terms of Netflix and the Welsh language version. I know that it’s distributed worldwide in a number of territories on Netflix. I think at this stage it’s the English language version that Netflix has taken.”

Why in particular was Aberystwyth chosen?

“Aber, in lots of ways, lent itself to the show. It’s a very isolated town, it’s a long way from another town and there’s a natural crucible there, you have the town itself, you have the mountains beyond, you have the ocean on the other side and also, I think, it helps in some ways that it’s not a South Wales show or a North Wales show. Everybody feels that they own a little slice of Aber; it’s kind of there in the middle.

What’s the creation process from paper to screen?

“With the series really it starts with a lot of talking, and a lot of driving around Ceredigion finding locations, places that we fall in love with. We have a brilliant location manager who takes us to sites. The best episodes, I think, have grown out of the actual place itself. It’s one thing to sit in an office in Cardiff and think about it, but it’s another thing to go to a location in Ceredigion and fall in love with it and think ‘I really want to do a story which brings me here’ and stories start to suggest themselves that way.”

A lot of people have said it’s the Welsh Killing or The Bridge, basically drawing comparisons with these Scandinavian crime dramas. To what extent was Hinterland actually inspired by these?

“It’s always very flattering if somebody compares your show to another show you hugely admire, so any comparisons to The Killing or to Wallander are terrific, but really we’re trying to make a show that has something to say about Wales, stories that interest us and it’s for other people to say if it reminds them of those other great shows.”

What do you think it is about Hinterland that appeals to people outside of Wales and around the world?

“When travelling, we were over in America recently talking to a number of people who had seen the show. I think the landscape makes a real impression, there’s a sense of otherness about it. It seems to be unlike perhaps a lot other UK shows. A lot of drama is set in the big cities in the UK, whether it’s London, Manchester, Glasgow. It’s kind of nice to look more at the fringes, the periphery and, in this case, to go to a county that doesn’t often get filmed, particularly in drama.”

ED THOMAS – EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

What can viewers expect from the new series?

“Well, it’s like the difficult second album. We were really pleased with the response to the first series and what you’ve got to make sure is that you keep evolving, so you keep the same shape, the stories of the week but you get to know a bit more about Mathias and Prosser and a few more characters, delve deeper into what makes them tick and hopefully draw a new audience and satisfy the people who really enjoyed and tuned into series one.”

Where did the inspiration come from?

“We just wanted to make sure that instead of trying to please everyone, we would just keep it simple, keep it lo-fi, local stories, find a part of Wales which has got a great landscape, a great big little country. So making stories that felt as if it came from that place, which meant that you can’t have certain type of stories which would fit in an urban environment, they’re very much kind of blood, soil, belonging, families, feuds, that kind of thing. I’m thrilled that it’s been picked up in lots of different countries and what we’re getting back is that people are watching it and that it’s got a really great sense of place, so that’s a massive compliment to us and everybody involved.”

How important do you think the setting is to the story?

“It’s the making of it, the fact we had to do it back to back in both languages; you’ve got to make the Welsh language sing. We’ve grown up watching cop shows in English and in America, so instead of trying to invent a new language with police procedure we decided to keep the police procedure as low as possible and get out into the Hinterland. They look more like Canadian vets than they do cops. Richard, who play Mathias was thrown, he said “where’s my suit? Where’s my tie?” Well you can have a tie but the rest of it is kind of boots and get out there in all weathers. So making sure that where we set it makes it believable in the Welsh language as well as making it sing in English.”

In terms of actually creating it and the writing process in particular, would you write for example the Welsh language version first, and then translate or adapt it? Or do you write them at the same time?

“It’s the same time. Personally, I write in English and then it’s adapted in that context. But everybody is different. You write the story, find out the story, build the story, get the bullets, make the story work over ninety minutes. If your first language is Welsh some people will choose to write it all out but in a way when you got three or four films and you’re part of a series and it’s got some character arcs as well stories a week a lot of it is in the planning and that’s a lot of bulleting as much as inspiration.

You don’t have to go big and wide in terms of expansive story but you can go deep into the characters and talk about characters you really like. To me they were like Westerns, I’m a big fan of Sam Shepherd’s stuff. Years ago when I was young I wrote a play called House of America which is all about Jack Kerouac and a bloke who thinks he’s Jack Kerouac, and in a way I’ve never grown out of that sense. I come from a place with lots of space Cwmtawe, you know you go that way for Brecon, this way to the Neath Valley, and bits of it always reminded me of my own little mid-west, so Hinterland is maybe just the same obsession told in a different way. But it has to be timeless or mythic.

There are no contemporary references in Hinterland. There is no recession, there are no references of any politicians, we never see any shopping malls. It’s just the landscape, and then the sea and a bit of the town and in that town you never see any branding anywhere. It kind of exists in its own world, it tells stories you want to tell.”

interviewer LUKE OWAIN BOULT

transcribed by CONOR KNIGHT

fim JAYDON MARTIN