INTERVIEW: Jared Harris talks “unique” new AMC series The Terror

In 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin led a voyage of exploration of the Northwest Passage of the Canadian Arctic. The two crews of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror never came back.

Based on Dan Simmons’ bestselling supernatural novel, The Terror is a new television series set to enthral and surprise audiences. What happened to Franklin’s lost expedition?

We sat down with series star Jared Harris, who plays the captain of HMS Terror Francis Crozier, for a chat about what to expect in the new series.

Did you know anything about Franklin’s lost expeditions before you started the show?

Nothing at all. That was the appeal of it – this was completely new material, a unique story. I loved the script, I loved the intelligence of the writing, the restraint of the story-telling, it was very confident.

For example in that first episode, Franklin pulls something solid out of his mouth and it’s a metal ball he puts down. That’s the beginning of the storyline about the lead poisoning that’s in the canned food. The more insecure writer would have been like ‘good lord, what is it? That it seems to be a bit of lead. I wonder how it got there?’. In this you put the camera on it and you know it’s something. I thought that was fantastic, that they didn’t think you have to tell the entire story right off the back.

Did you pick up the subtle elements of horror when you first read the script?

One of the things that they did in episode one that they had to cut out, is when Hickey’s gone down into the grave. There’s two things that happen there. One is that he steals the ring. The second thing is, once he’s down there, he looks up and there’s this huge polar bear. He gets terrified by the polar bear, but it’s a cub. When he gets out, he’s so angry he kills the cub. Later on you see this mature polar bear come across this carcass of the baby cub and eat it, which introduces the idea of cannibalism. So there’s this very subtle idea of how they’re going to introduce a story thread into the whole show without pointing giant fingers at it.

Could you tell us a bit about Crozier and where he’s come from to get where he is right now?

Crozier is based on a historical character. He was Northern Irish in a slightly different context to what we have of it. The island was a single entity, there wasn’t a border, and the concept of Republicanism was just beginning to take shape. He would have identified very firmly with being British. He joins the British Navy at the age of 13 and he sees himself as being an agent of the British Empire if you like. Later on in life he comes to a realisation that even though he’s British, he’s still Irish. There’s this glass ceiling about how fast he can advance.

By the time you find him in this story, he’s by rights the most experienced polar explorer of all the three captains on board of the ship. He should’ve been in charge of the expeditions but wasn’t. When he sees Fitzjames on board he knows that if they discover the passage, he’ll be written out of the history. It’ll be Franklin and Fitzjames’ achievement.

How do you start with portraying a guy who was a real person?

You read everything you can. You look at the photographs. They took the portraits of the senior members of the expedition, and you can see really clearly that Franklin and Fitzjames wear their status. They’ve got the gold braid on their shoulder, the gold hats, they wear their rank. Crozier doesn’t have any of that, he saw himself as a sailor first and foremost.

Would you say this is more of a historical drama with some supernatural elements as opposed to a supernatural drama?

It gets pretty weird. As we dig down into what happens, it gets pretty weird. It’s based on Dan Simmons’ book completely. All the themes that are there in the show are in Dan Simmons’ book. I would say it’s a kind of survival story. It’s an adventure story with supernatural elements, based on a real historical event. If it was just a historical event, it would be on the History Channel or National Geographic.

How would you cope in an expedition like this?

There are certain things I remember reading and going, ugh, that’s disgusting. One of the things in Dan Simmons’ book is that he’s always describing what they are eating. After a while one of the safest things to eat is this biscuit, but the biscuit would have been infested with weevils, so you were pulling these maggots and stuff out of it. I think the food would have been very difficult.

I think the paranoia as well. One of the aspects that they do write into the story, but it was completely imagined is the noise. When the ships get stuck in the ice, you just hear them really slowly being cracked by the ice, the timbers starting to shatter and break, and it’s a constant moving of the ice against the ship as the ships struggling to maintain its soundness against it. The noise was constantly hearing things pop and break. At some point, you’d imagine something significant is going to go and we’re done for.

INTERVIEW: Tobias Menzies on new “psychological thriller” TV drama The Terror

In 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin led a voyage of exploration of the Northwest Passage of the Canadian Arctic. The two crews of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror never came back.

Based on Dan Simmons’ bestselling supernatural novel, The Terror is a new television series set to enthral and surprise audiences. What happened to Franklin’s lost expedition?

We sat down with series star Tobias Menzies, who plays the expedition’s third in command – James Fitzjames, for a chat about what to expect in the new series.

Did you know anything about Franklin’s lost expeditions or the character before you started?

I didn’t, no. I hadn’t heard about this piece of history before. Strangely, I don’t think it is very well known in the UK given that it was a British Naval expedition. One of the really interesting things about this project has been digging into this whole story and that’s very exciting to bring this story to a wider audience.

Not a lot is known about what actually happened. There are a few points of historical reference so we know that Franklin died. We have some idea where they were at certain points. There were the three bodies that were found on the island. Those are all honoured in the work. But to a large extent, the conversations and what was going on in those ships over those years is an act of fiction.

To what extent would you say this was a historical period drama compared to a supernatural story?

What I like about this show is that they’ve really kept the creature back, it’s a psychological thriller rather than being straight-up horror with lots of gore. I think it’s unsettling and unnerving and builds up through pressure rather than shocks. It’s definitely not Walking Dead.

Did you research the character?

I dread about him. There’s a fair amount written about him – he was relatively well known. A bit of a star of the navy. One of the interesting things about working on a real person is that you have all of that wealth on information on one person. I guess then you’re having to knit together what you found out in that regard versus what the show is needing from that character.

It sounds like he had an interesting family life.

That is absolutely woven into the heart of who he is, that he was illegitimate. He isn’t everything that he appears to be at the beginning of the story. It’s the main arc of his character. I think more generally the show is a group of men from high Victorian society coming with arrogance and a sense of superiority and all that is gradually stripped away from them. Fitzjames is no different in that regard. At the heart of this, he is not all that he seems – he is partly a construct, he has this secret that he has carried with him. In that regard, he is closer to Crozier who is his main adversary towards the beginning of the story – they actually come to understand they are more similar than different.The proposition of the piece is who do these people become when you take away all those trappings of civilisation and class and that were very rife in Victorian society.

How would you have fared if you had been stuck in the Arctic as these men were?

Very poorly. I think the physical deprivation that they had to encounter would be very hard for a modern person to imagine, in an age of anaesthetic and paracetamol and air conditioning. There’s an amazing little scene when a doctor is cutting off some toes because frostbite was quite common, I mean… it makes you kind of go… ugh. That was standard.

Where do you think the conflict with Crozier comes from?

It’s a societal thing. In Victorian society at that time, it was very important where you were from and to be Irish held you back. It was without any guilt an Englishman believed him to be superior to an Irishman. That is also partly articulated in the show in that you see this group of Victorian men arrive in the Arctic and encounter this different culture when they arrive, this Inuit culture, and they believe themselves to be superior in every way. Ultimately, that contributes to their downfall. That blindness, that lack of open-mindedness.

I think it’s a fantastic meditation on colonialism at its worst. It also pushes into environmentalism. The place where the story takes place – those ice caps are now disappearing. You could argue that one of the reasons why they’re disappearing is because of men like that that went and started to conquer those places in the world. I think that’s all there.