RICHARD HARRINGTON | INTERVIEW
Heather Arnold talks to the actor behind Chief Inspector Tom Mathias, and the star of Wales’ biggest new show, Richard Harrington.
I hear you’ve been around the globe lately promoting Y Gwyll / Hinterland?
Yeah, you finish a job then you kind of forget about it, and then you move on, and that’s just the embryonic stages of any project really. We were at Cannes Monday to Wednesday just promoting Hinterland, and we were definitely up there with the best of them. It’s a good product, and we’re all very proud of it, so whatever it takes.
Do you feel that Y Gwyll / Hinterland is different to other projects that you’ve worked on?
It’s different in a sense that it adheres to a cop genre, which is a crime/drama formula, but it’s what we do with those things which make it different. It’s very much a compassionate piece of work, and it’s shot in an environment which is inhospitable in lots of ways. It’s on the west coast of Wales and it gets bombarded by a weather front from the Atlantic, which is almost biblical, and you have to adhere to those kinds of things. It’s a place that can look like hell but can look like heaven as well. You go there in the summer months and it was like the Serengeti, and you just think “I can’t believe six months ago we were here and it was impossible to speak because of the wind and now we’re all in t-shirts”.
The whole area of Aberystwyth is a mythical looking place anyway, so in that sense it will have much more of a European feel to it than a British thing. The character is shrouded in mystery, which almost sounds like a cliché but it’s not. His back story is watertight, it’s absolutely fascinating, and I think we get to hear snippets of that.
Did you prepare for the character of Tom Mathias in any specific way?
I guess he was so well written as character, that it was my job to tame him and to not play too much with him. The power of him is he walks amongst this world, and I had to trust the fact that the character existed so well on the page that I didn’t have to do that much on screen. Everything was played very low key. I did lots of reading, and I met up with lots of policemen, but I ultimately didn’t want to play any of those people. I wanted to play the character that was written. It was my job really just to realise what was on the page.
Was the process of filming one scene in English, then again in Welsh frustrating?
It was never frustrating. You’re only as good as your last scene in terms of acting. You really want to go in and take on every scene and conquer them. The great thing about doing it in two languages is that you explore it thoroughly. There were certain characters that you put in there, in the way that they look and the make-up that they had on, I’m not just talking about powder make-up but the way their faces were worn, you couldn’t imagine anything other than Welsh coming out of their mouths. English seemed to be the second language to them. The Welsh could be trying sometimes because you have to learn scramble and egg with your tongue in order to do it. But I have to say that my Welsh significantly improved between day one and day 130.
Did the altering language have any effect on you or on any of the other characters?
Invariably it does because you sound different. Welsh is a lot more poetic, it’s much more expressive, so you wouldn’t find yourself gesticulating in scenes with your hands. So it does evoke a certain kind of passion and slight melodrama, and I think the rule was to not fight that. You would just have to yield to whatever the language demanded. There were two essences of the character: the nature of the character never changed, but the way he sometimes moved and spoke sounded like he did, by the very nature in the fact that he was speaking a different language. It’s like going on holiday when you’re speaking pidgin French; your mannerisms change slightly. But that’s just a natural departure.
