Silent Hill movie star Jeremy Irvine calls film “wild, chaotic” as he explains his character’s role

I’ve just moved into a quaint little cottage, so I’ve got lots of old beams, exposed brick and my big wood burner. It’s very cosy.

What have you been watching?

Usually, it’s a lot of 24 Hours in Police Custody. I’m calling it police bodycam porn. If I’m not watching some tacky reality show, then I want to get lost in a fantasy world – I thought Severance and The Rings of Power did that brilliantly. It’s escapism.

Who controls the remote in your household?

I do, because my wife [midwife Jodie Spencer] doesn’t know how to work the remote, although she’ll claim that’s wrong… I find horror movies stressful, but she loves them, so I’m forced to sit through a lot of them. Then we have to watch something like Below Deck as a detox.

In the Outlander prequel series Blood of My Blood, you play soldier Henry Beauchamp. Were you surprised at the scale of the production?

When you’re doing the first season, you don’t necessarily know if it’s going to work or not. I had been told how popular the original Outlander was, but I wasn’t that familiar with it. I didn’t really get it until I walked on to the set for the first time. We were doing a war sequence and it was massive – it wasn’t dissimilar to the scale of the First World War set for War Horse.

Steven Spielberg’s War Horse was your first acting role. How do you reflect on that time?

I was a lot more stressed back then, and rightly so. My main memory is being petrified and just desperate to do a good job, but I loved it. I hadn’t worked or been trained to work on film before then, so I had Steven Spielberg as my teacher and he really took me under his wing.

You contracted trench foot while filming. Did you suffer anything as extreme for Outlander?

No, no rotting feet for this one. The difference is we were probably in the trenches for War Horse for three months, but we shot this in three days. For both, I’m running around with a gun with explosions going off. It’s like paintball, but with blank ammunition – it’s brilliant.

Henry suffers with PTSD. How did you research that?

I’ve met people who have suffered with it in the past. When I did The Railway Man, Colin Firth and I stayed with the guy we were playing [Eric Lomax], who was on the death railway in the Second World War, and still very much struggling. You don’t want to do something that’s fake or ridiculous when there’s people who have really suffered.

You previously said you were writing a historical documentary. Is that still the case?

I wrote a couple. We had a few people interested, but they never quite got off the ground. One was based on a story around the First World War and there was another one based around the Gurkhas, which my grandfather was very heavily involved in.

Your next film is the psychological horror Return to Silent Hill, based on the video game Silent Hill 2. Was that a change of tone?

It’s a wild, chaotic movie. I was a fan of the game. When they offered it to me, I thought, “God, 14-year-old me would think this is so cool.” I basically took the job for that reason. It is fun, but playing scared is exhausting. My character is going through a seriously intense mental breakdown and has created this world of monsters around him in his head. It was the hardest work I’ve ever had to do on a job. When I finished, I checked myself into a spa in Switzerland.

What would you be doing if you weren’t acting?

I’ve got a ride-on lawnmower at home, and sometimes I think, “God, I’m so happy doing this.” So maybe I’d be mowing grass on road verges!

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Outlander: Blood of My Blood is available to stream on MGM+. You can buy Diana Gabaldon's Outlander books on Amazon.

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