Hi I'm Jared Harris and I'm
In Studio with The Hollywood Reporter.
(upbeat music)
- So congratulations on your EMMY nomination.
- Thank you.
Lead actor in a limited series for Chernobyl.
So let's first talk about the role itself.
In the past, you've been blessed and cursed
with characters that are complex, depressed--
- Blessed, blessed--
- Defeated--
- Blessed.
- And even suicidal.
- I think that's blessed as well.
- Yeah.
- As an actor-- - You have a good
you have a good ending.
I mean a good death scene means
the audience will remember
your character's story.
Just means you're out of a job afterwards.
- Right.
- Sucks.
On that side.
- What is it like to play the role of a character who is
so connected to their own mortality?
- I mean I suppose,
I think all of the characters...
I mean it's just how you're dealing with it.
I mean, good comedy you can be asking yourself those
questions, it's just how you're dealing with it,
how you're responding to it.
I suppose...
I mean this question comes up because of the way
that this character's life ends and it's obviously
very similar to what happened with Lane Pryce.
They were different statements if you like.
Which of course then you have to understand that's
the point of it, that's what the writer's getting across
and it's a nuance of your character but...
So Lane, he was really trying to
make life as difficult as he could
for the people in that office
and it was a sort of, sticking a finger up.
It was cutting off your nose to spite your face in a way.
But in this one,
Valery's dying
and in fact, I saw something that his daughter wrote
that said he was actually much sicker
at the end of his life than we portrayed him to be.
And so he did not have much time left
and he used it as a way of an instigating event,
to make a statement and try and spur action.
So it was not,
it wasn't a futile gesture in that sense.
- What is your impression of Legasov?
You spent a lot of time in his shoes.
- Yeah it was interesting because there's,
I always do a lot of research,
even if the character's not a biographical character
and of course this one was but there actually wasn't
a lot of information on him because the Soviets
actually succeeded in scrubbing him from the narrative.
What I did see about him, I could see that,
as an archetype, he was quite similar to Stellan's character
and that was starting to bump against what Craig wanted
from that relationship which was a contrast between the two
and I needed to occupy a different space
to the space that Stellan was going to occupy.
So, my impression of the real Legasov was that
he was actually in that sort of, traditional,
Russian alpha personality.
You know, he came across as actually very confident
and he occupied his space but that didn't work
really for what Craig needed to happen in our story
and the journey that our two characters were gonna take.
- I mean you feel something for these two characters,
you feel
in the way that they came together,
it gives you a little bit of hope in humanity.
- Yeah I mean, again,
Craig is a very, very smart writer
and he has
a podcast about screenwriting where he talks
about and he's been going for a long time,
so one of the things that he was able to deploy was
certain structures from different types of movies so,
and use them to keep each episode fresh
and that particular thing he
employs is the bromance genre if you like.
And it's these two people who are completely opposed,
at odds, antagonistic to one another at the beginning
of the story and they start to realize,
if they're gonna succeed, they're
gonna need to rely on one another
and then they become bonded by the fact
that they are the only two people who have
consistently gone through this whole experience
and that they're sharing the same fate
which is that their lives are going to
be drastically cut short because of it.
And they can't leave.
So they know that that is the
shared fate that they're gonna have.
- Yeah.
I'd like to talk a little bit about
the theme of just kind of the,
the mettle of the Ukrainian people
because I didn't know before, that it took
600,000 people to clean up the Chernobyl site,
get it to the point where it is today.
Where is under control question mark.
- Yeah they've got a containment structure
that's gonna be good for a hundred years and
then they'll have to rebuild it, fix it
and that site itself is gonna be problematic for,
depending on who you talk to 25 to 40,000 years.
- What did you learn about Ukrainian culture?
It's such an interesting time because it's
right before the fall of the Soviet Union.
Some might say,
this was the cause of the fall of the Soviet--
- Gorbachev said that.
- Some like Gorbachev.
- Yeah.
That's one of the things that I
appreciated about Craig's intent was,
it was to shine a light on the self
sacrifice and heroism of these people.
Who did all this without any expectation of a reward
or of being lionized in any way.
And then of course, there's the expression that Boris'
character, Stellan's character, says which is that
this has been traditionally their fate you know.
This has happened constantly throughout their lives.
We were in the Ukraine for a week, we shot in Kiev.
And Kiev doubled for exterior
Moscow scenes, streets and stuff.
One of the things that I remember about shooting there
was that you would see apparently,
everyone between the ages of 16, men or women,
and 49 are all,
they rotate in and out of active service, active duty
because they are...
When we were there, Russia was
shelling the eastern part of the country.
So you know, it's sort of,
it's like that mindset of being under siege you know?
And they
I suppose they're expecting trouble
to start and not to get much help.
- What do you think about the tourism of the exclusion zone?
This is a new thing--
- No it's been going on for a while.
Sort of adrenaline tourism isn't it?
- Right.
- It's been going on for a while,
Anthony Bourdain goes in there,
one of his Anthony Bourdain parts unknown.
But I think this idea that, the new thing is
is that the Instagram people going in there
and taking these, practically naked shots
of them in front of, whatever, leaning on whatever
structures are still...
I would just say that,
there are parts of that whole place
that are still probably not safe.
- Would you go?
- No, we were asked if we wanted to go.
My wife said absolutely not.
I didn't want to go actually.
It feels slightly ghoulish to go there and do that, no.
- The Ukraine is saying they want to turn their brand around
and make it a positive tourist attraction for them.
- Chernobyl?
- That's gonna be an interesting meeting isn't it?
- They said it's going to be good for the brand.
- You sit down and spit ball how you can do that.
I don't know how you would do that.
- I don't know.
- But I do know that there's,
one of the things that positively that came out of this show
was that story of the
sacrifice and what they did to secure Europe's future
was not known and that there are,
flowers and stuff like that being left at commemoration
markers and they're being appreciated for that.
So that's a positive thing.
- Yeah that's beautiful and that
kind of brings in the humanity once again.
The humanity is there underneath all of the politics.
- Yeah and that was definitely part of the DNA of
the scripts that Craig was writing.
I mean the most
affecting human story in the whole series
is the relationship between Jessie's
character and Adam's character.
He's the fire fighter, the first responder
and the pregnant wife and you
follow their journey through the story.
I mean they're essentially, they represent
the innocent victims of this 'cos they had
absolutely nothing to do with it.
- And Americans can identify with the idea
that the first responders are usually the casualties.
- Yes and they don't get looked after.
- Yeah absolutely.
- What do you think,
you know the academy and the audiences
responded really well to Chernobyl.
They're usually,
more into dragons,
so what do you think about Chernobyl
is so popular among audiences?
- I don't know, it's a...
I think
everybody knew that the material was really good
and that it was a good show in that sense,
it was a powerful show but the way that it took off
I think took everyone by surprise.
You can never know what people are
gonna be thinking about 18 months from now
and the show came out at this point where
it touched a nerve in what people were thinking about
and so it had a parallel to a lot of the conversations
and things that are going on either politically
or environmentally that are on people's minds right now.
And it's that sort of magical thing
where you can't plan that.
And although a lot of those questions are again,
in the DNA of the show that Craig wrote,
you don't know if people are gonna take that up or not.
And it's a fucking good show.
- It is.
- It doesn't hurt.
(laughing)
- Jared Harris thank you so much for being here.
- Thank you.
- Limited series' Chernobyl on HBO.