Jared Harris

Jared, it was such an honor to meet you as you truly are one of our favorite actors. How did the theater prepare you for your big screen roles and do you see yourself taking it on again anytime soon?

I’m sorry, I just saw the question. I’m many of their favorite actors, I love that. [chuckles] Well, that’s pretty interesting because the theater doesn’t really prepare you for camera acting at all and it’s probably the biggest, you know the biggest. I don’t want to say failure but the biggest thing missing from theater school, from acting training in the United Kingdom is preparing you to act in front of the camera because it’s all theater-based training. With that said, it’s very good because they throw lots of different styles at you. The modern approach is naturalism, but you can’t really apply naturalism to Shakespeare or to restoration comedy. You have to get a grip on what genre you’re in and of course, that becomes very important in cinema and camera acting because you need to jump between different genres. So in that sense, it’s useful. The problem is always the same, which are you have to appear recognizably human. whether it’s on stage or in front of the camera. So that is essentially what your job is whether it’s on stage or in front of the camera. Normally, you need to internalize everything when you’re acting on camera and obviously, you can’t do that on stage because only the first three rows understand what you’re doing. And you have to project when you’re on stage. Will I be going back to the theater anytime soon? I would like to. Yea definitely would like to in the autumn, in New York City.

Your newest series on AMC “The Terror” is part of history. Did you know about these true events? If so, how did it feel to be starring in such an eerie role?

I did not know anything about the Franklin expedition. That is one of the things that appealed to me was it was a completely fresh story and that’s quite a rare thing these days. So, there are lots of fresh stories out there but there’s not a huge appetite for risking the unfamiliar with audiences.

So I didn’t know anything about it. Captain Crozier is a fascinating character. He’s someone who’s been on the edge of command all his life and he’s got the experience to lead but he has never been given the opportunity. As a result, he’s developed quite a big chip on his shoulder about it but he’s a great character. A really fascinating character. He goes through an amazing transformation. So it was a thrill to play him.

A lot of your major roles do come from history, which is fascinating. Do you learn new things that you didn’t know?

Yea, I mean one of the exciting things about playing any kind of role is the research that you get to do and you dive into history and you discover things that you didn’t know before. It makes reading textbooks entertaining. You never know what little gem you’re going to find that is going to become useful. So yea, I’m a history buff, I enjoy history. I’ve heard great stories out there and it always amazes me that history doesn’t sort of, being ransacked more often for great material because there’s a lot of it out there.

TPM Magazine being a humanitarian magazine. What role do you see yourself playing in the need for more humanitarian awareness? Not just for humans, but for animals too.

Animals definitely have the short end of the stick on that one. I mean it’s a depressing answer to this subject but you know, the geological name for the era we’re in is the term for the great extinction. The threat that we’re posing to our environment to the planet and to our survival by causing the greatest mass extinction in history since that meteorite smacked into the earth 60 million million years ago. It’s just unthinkable, isn’t it? And it’s all our doing.

Any organizations or charities that you support that require more awareness?

Yea, we just did something for the rhino. Remember the rhino. I had been shooting in South Africa, my wife and I went to a reserve that was rehabilitation animals and one of the things that they had was a rhino breeding center. They had little baby rhinos that their parents had been shot for their horns and they were rearing them. They were absolutely gorgeous. What’s amazing is it’s still this real sort of primitive superstitious thinking that’s essentially driving most of this trade. That’s causing these animals to be slaughtered.

You’re a multifaceted actor. What roles would you jump to play? Is there a specific historical individual that you wouldn’t hesitate to play?

I became fascinated by Ulysses S. Grant when I was doing all the research for the Lincoln movies, Spielberg’s Lincoln film. I would absolutely love to do a movie about the final chapter of his life. I’m working on it at the moment.

In regards to The Terror, were you hesitant to play the role and were there any scenes that actually had you terror-stricken?

I wasn’t hesitant to play it at all. I was thrilled that they were interested in me to play it. The second I read that first script, it was brilliantly written and I knew that they must have sent it out to several people and I immediately called my agent and said, “Get me in a room with these people quickly before Daniel Day-Lewis reads it!” The Inuit scene. So, I had to learn Inuit [laughs] sometimes the night before..that was pretty terrifying! There was another scene in the later episodes where they basically wrote me a four-page monologue. A speech that I had to stand up in front of the whole company and give and they backseat again, handed it to me the night before. So John Lynch, very very sweetly, we did the old Marlon Brando trick and I had a receiver and John Lynch who is northern Irish fed me the lines. I mean otherwise, it wouldn’t have been possible.

When your wife arrived at the shoot location, we could not help but notice how your eyes just lit up when you saw her. Your love for her clearly showed. How much of a role does she play in keeping you grounded?

Well, we keep each other honest, I would say that. She’s giving me the eye right now. She’s tremendously supportive and she’s very, very, like I said, honest. You know exactly where you are. Most importantly, we keep each other laughing a lot.

She’s tremendously important in keeping me grounded but if it’s not about about family, then what is it about? So I feel incredibly lucky that she said yes.

Traveling can sometimes take a hold on personal lives. How do you relax?

I suppose one of our favorite ways of blowing off steam is to go do karaoke. I enjoy going out and doing a movie night.We like eating in and having cozy nights.

Cooking and watching some guilty pleasure television.

We loved you in The Crown. Although your role-playing King George V was short, how do you prepare to play such key roles with such undoubted perfection?

You read everything you can, you look at everything you can. There’s a lot of stuff now available on the internet. The old days, you had to go to the library and you know, you had to pull out those (? 13:08) files, those (?). You had to go through sort of dusty stores and try and get your hand on old footage and stuff like that and recordings. Now it’s much easier, it’s all available on the internet so I looked at a lot of old (? 13:28) new reels and there were lots of documentaries about him. He’s actually been played many, many, many times. Not just by Colin Firth. There was lots of stuff to go back into. You know, you read it all and you try to find something that’s going to spark your imagination and also fit into your story and to what this story was about. This story was about a father, it was about a man who was going to have to hand over the family business to his children before he was ready, before he expected to. It was about someone who wanted to find a way to protect his children in the absence and that was what the whole idea behind that scene at the end of episode one was with Matt Smith’s character, Phillip. He was trying to tip his hat and tell him, “I’m not going to be around very long. Can you please tell me and convince me that you’ve got this covered? You’re going to look after her because I’m not going to be able to.” Of course, you can’t say all that. That’s the reason why it was well-written because he didn’t say any of that but that’s what it was about.

We would all love to see you on that podium You won a SAG Award and were recently nominated for (?) What role does awards consideration play when choosing roles?

None. You can’t think of that. You have no idea. You don’t know. The only thing that I could say about that is I have said many times to my representatives that it’s not the how big a role that matters, it’s how good a role it is. So sometimes they’ll receive an offer or receive a script for interest and it’s one or two scenes and they’ll go, “no we’re not looking for that” but my point to them is let me read it because of Ned Beatty. He won an academy award for playing basically one day’s role, two scenes in the network. So, it’s about is it a good role. That’s really what it’s about in terms of actual sort of thinking that you can find something that’s going to somehow go on an award run, you’ve got no idea. You don’t even know when it’s going to come out.if it’s supposed to come out last October. You have no idea when these things, what’s going to happen to them. You just find something that you’re going to be interested in doing and it’s going to take a long time. This took, off and on, the best part of seven months. You want to make sure that it’s going to be something that you are going to be interested in for that long. Similarly, if you’re doing a play, you could be doing that play for a really long time. It has to be something that you really feel you can dig into for that long.

What has been the most interesting place you’ve traveled for your role?

I got to spend four days in the Forbidden City in Beijing and it was completely empty. It was before all the tourists arrived so we go there at 4 AM and they kicked us out at 9:30 but we’d had the entire run of the place for those 5 hours. That was pretty amazing. On the same job, I got to go up to the sections of the Great Wall of China closed off to the tourists. That was amazing. I have to say when they recreated the old factory, Andy Warhol’s factory on Union Square that was all covered in silver foil. Again, that was an amazing location, amazing set. That was pretty fun. Some of the castles and country manors that we shot in for The Crown and for the Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows was absolutely spectacular. There was a castle called Berkeley Castle that we filmed in for The Other Boleyn Girl that was amazing. I had Sir Frances Drake’s booty chest when he was sailing the world’s oceans and ransacking Spanish galleons at the bottom of the bed. It had the jail that Edward II was murdered in. It had the coronation goblet of Harold, throats Anglo-Saxon king of England who was killed and deposed by William the Conqueror. You get to film in incredible places.

Anything specific or any tips for readers?

Tune in [laughs] and watch our show. Tell your friends The Terror on AMC starts on Monday. This will probably come out after that but you can catch up. Best life advice I received was from Peter Fonda and he said “do not back up, severe tire damage”