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Jason Isaacs interview - Radio Times, October 2006 |
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The British actor talks to E Jane Dickson about swapping film for TV to play sensitive, sophisticated diplomat hero Sir Mark Brydon in conspiracy thriller The State Within.
On his character
"There's a lot to Brydon that doesn't meet the
eye when you first see him. He's
the British ambassador in Washington - he's not
Bruce Willis taking off his vest in a lift shaft. As
Brydon, I'm solving things with my knowledge
of what people might do."
On the show
"It's a thriller that engages
the brain as much as it engages the spine."
"The craft of the piece is very modern, and yet
it's a very old-fashioned notion - a highbrow
conspiracy drama that requires close attention
from the viewers. The film
makers are determined to keep you on edge
and guessing. The atmosphere we're trying to
capture on film - the prevailing atmosphere
in Washington post-9/11 - is a kind of jumpy
paranoia, and that's the feeling you get
watching it, too."
"What I love about this series is that it takes the things in the news headlines,
heightens the stakes and compresses the drama so
that you're constantly trying to guess whom to
trust. If it does anything beyond that, it will make
the audience wonder, 'When I watch the news and
read those headlines, who's telling the truth? How
do I filter it through the prism of what must be
true, rather than what the politicians are telling me,
and who stands to gain from what happens next?'"
On the creative opportunities TV offers
"I've been doing films for years,
but I had a part in The West Wing in 2004 and
it alerted me to the fact that the most speakable
dialogue and the most complex issues were being
dealt with on the small screen."
"I think it says something really good about the
current climate in television that the BBC is
prepared to commission six hours of big, edgy
thriller that isn't about bags of Mafia money."
On a possible second series
"The other grown-up thing about this series is that
people die in it. That's why making a mini-series
is so exciting - you know in a long-running drama
that there's no way the hero is going to be bumped
off before the end of the run. With The State
Within, all bets are off."
**
Now take a look at our full guide to The State Within.
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