“The thing with Cutter is that he always wants to do the right thing, regardless of what’s happening…so he has to put personal issues like altered realities and his best mate sleeping with his wife on the back burner for a few hours while he saves the world. He’s a very selfless guy.”
As an actor who by his own admission is known for envelope pushing drama traditionally scheduled late night on C4, Henshall was more surprised than anyone when he was cast as Nick Cutter. Heading up an ensemble cast in ITV1’s first foray into genre busting action adventure complete with CGI monsters, Primeval was something of a departure. Scheduled smack bang in the middle of Saturday night prime time, the show was a highly visible, high risk gamble. But that was exactly the point. Something on the scale of Primeval had never been attempted before and as an actor who has taken risks, it is perhaps less of a surprise that he wanted to be a part of the series. When asked how it feels being back, Dougie smiles and says:
“It feels like a band making a second album after a really good first one and you have to kind of repeat the trip. And having set yourself up for something you have to able to fulfil that next time around. But I genuinely think it’s better than the first series and that’s all you can really ask.
It also feels an awful lot easier in some respects. In the first series none of us knew if it was going to work, whether it would be any good, whether the CGI was going to work. It was a huge step into the unknown. And while it’s a little bit like that in any job that you do it just seemed much more on this, as it was just so ambitious for television.
Coming back to the second series meant that we had got a seal of approval from people because they watched it and they liked it. There was a lot more confidence in everybody who was involved in it and that meant that things settled down a little bit. But that certainly doesn’t mean anyone has relaxed; quite the opposite is true. We have to prove that we weren’t a fluke; that we have more to give. Success brings with it a whole new set of paranoias and fears.
The scripts are more ambitious this time around. The scale of it is bigger and the whole thing has opened out more and it’s got a lot faster. The creatures aren’t just emerging in an underground tunnel, or into a secluded piece of forest out in the middle of nowhere. They are appearing right in the middle of the outside world, and in one particular case, in rush hour traffic on the M25; which of course makes it a lot more exciting!
That’s another thing that is such a big part of Primeval. Why walk when you can run? Why run when you can run fast? They like to keep it moving, which is good.”
Looking back at the success of the first series, what does Henshall feel were the reasons for its popularity?
“People in peril, and of course, the monsters. They are tied in with such an innocent pleasure because it’s escapist; it’s pure indulgence. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have an enduring love of monsters and Primeval has tapped into that in such a lovely way.
You take a bunch of people, you make an audience really like them and then you put them in jeopardy. The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, all the greatest films as far as I’m concerned at least, that’s what they do. It doesn’t matter if you do it with Nazis or bandits or monsters; it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you have a premise that engages people.
And people were most certainly engaged. As the series reached its nail biting finale the audience were left balancing on the edge of cliff hanger so steep one TV reviewer said they had “to rope themselves to the sofa”. So just where we did we leave Cutter at the end of the first series, and do how we meet him at the beginning of the second?
“We left him with his mouth open. He had just watched Ryan and his team butchered by the future predators. Then when he comes back through the anomaly, he finds out that his wife had an affair with Stephen. And then to cap off what has been a pretty bad day, he finds out that Claudia Brown has somehow disappeared in the mist and was never even born. He realises that something has changed in evolution; that nothing is the same anymore. That was were we ended and that’s were we come back in. And his mouth is still firmly open.”
For Cutter everything has changed and the world is a very different place from the one he left. Not only have the people changed a little, but so has Cutter’s work place. As office based watercooler moments go, the introduction of the team’s new headquarters is set to be a pretty big one as Henshall goes on to explain:
“The ARC is this extraordinary building that was built out at Qinetic Film Studios near Surrey. If I’m honest I think filming Cutter’s entry into the ARC was probably about my favourite day in the first couple of blocks. We had been shooting for about 6 weeks before we actually went to Qinetic and even when we were there it was another 6 weeks before we saw the ARC. By this point I had heard and read so much about this place that my imagination was beginning to run wild. There is always that degree of hope that it will look as good as it should do. But it is a hope tempered with the thought that it might not, because we might not have the money to do it.
When we walked into the place I had the same look on my face as Cutter does when he sees it for the first time. It looks like somewhere out of a 1970’s James Bond movie. Swedish 70’s retro is what it looks like, all wood and steel and wonderfully lit. It looks like it ought to have someone like Donald Pleasance sat in an office stroking a cat. Except we have Ben Miller, who is just as good to be honest.
It totally exceeded my expectations and I thought “wow they are really serious about this.” The five of us looked at each other and said ‘we’re doing alright’.”
So extraordinary Bond sets aside, it seems like there is an awful lot for Cutter to take in during the opening moments of the series. How does this affect him as a character?
“The moments after his return through the anomaly are ones of total disorientation for Cutter. He is desperately trying to convince somebody, anybody, that he has not gone completely mental. And then he is brought to the Anomaly Research Centre. That’s when the sound of the alarm bells reaches deafening levels. This is a building which didn’t exist before; which essentially used to be the Home Office, but is a place in which everyone else is relaxed and comfortable.
The thing with Cutter is that he always wants to do the right thing, regardless of what’s happening. So while he’s crashing about the ARC, suddenly there’s a Velociraptor in a shopping centre in Kingston, so he has to put personal issues like altered realities and his best mate sleeping with his wife on the back burner for a few hours while he saves the world. He’s a very selfless guy.
There’s also the added stress of trying to find out where Claudia Brown might have gone and can we fix it? You can see all the way through the first episode he’s asking himself ‘do I want to hang around here or do I want to go back and try and make this right and fix it? I think he becomes a lot harder or a wee bit harder anyway.”
While many of the dynamics within the group have changed, there is one that Cutter can always rely on staying the same, and that is his relationship with Lester. While it seems all around him has gone completely insane, the fact that Lester and he still hold one another in utter contempt is the one constant.
“Yup, they still loathe one another. But like all the best relationships where you start out loathing somebody, towards the very end of the series I think there’s the tiniest bit of mutual respect starting to rear its head. It’s a blink and you’ll miss it moment, but its there.” Douglas laughs “I think that it’s really quite nice and I think that there are possibilities for that relationship to move in many more interesting directions. Ben is great fun to play with because he is so arch and he has such a light touch in all the things he does.”
With the disappearance of Claudia Brown, comes a new character in the form of Oliver Leek; Lester’s new right hand man. Played by Karl Theobold, the actor’s addition to the cast has got Dougie genuinely excited.
“I had to stop myself gushing when I first met him, but I don’t think that I managed actually. Green Wing has been one of my favourite programmes in recent years. I was kind of in love with all of them, so I was just so excited when I heard he was going to be in it.
It is such a great choice to bring him in as Karl is so against type. He brings with him that really quirky left field thing that he’s got. He’s not like a lot of people who are funny. He doesn’t mug you; I really love what he does. Once I had managed to get over the thing of telling him how great I thought he was, it was really great fun working with him, I really enjoyed it.”
For the sequences shot on the other side of the anomalies, as well as the main bulk of Episode 5 which centres around Cutter, Stephen and Taylor trapped in the past, the production took themselves out to Fuerteventura. It was an experience that Dougie clearly relished.
“It was great. Basically we needed a desert, and I think that the desert is such an amazing place anyway because sand is like the sea, it changes all the time. I have a whole romantic Peter O Toole as Lawrence of Arabia thing about the desert and there we were just on this shifting landscape for 12 days, with a great story and a fantastic young actress called Mabel Rogers. I loved it.”
He continues:
“We’ve never really had a child who is central to the story before so that was a really fun episode to do especially for me and Jim. To have this wee person in between the two of us for a couple of weeks was great because she made such a difference to how our characters related to one another. For whatever way Cutter and Stephen are at loggerheads they had to put all that aside for this one moment, because there was a wee girl that actually needed their attention more than anything else.”
Did you become a bit fatherly?
“Yeah, there was a little bit of that. I think it brought out a little bit of that out in both of us and actually Jim was fantastic, I mean he is very, very good with kids. He is so funny and was wonderful at entertaining Mabel; he was just good value and we had a real giggle because of that. Plus Mabel had so much energy and was so funny and so confident but not in a precocious way. Just in a natural kind of way. Her little sister was there as well as her mum, so there was a really lovely family feel on set with all three of them there.”
But as is the law of Primeval, it wasn’t all romantic desert settings and goofing around in sand dunes. With creature incursions taking place in increasingly suburban settings, the cast found themselves in some rather fetid locations.
“Hannah, Lucy and I went for a swim in the Thames….not the best place for a spot of front crawl admittedly! I stupidly wanted to do most of my own stunts and I would kind of insist on doing them without necessarily thinking things through properly. In one sequence, I had to dive off a boat into the Thames because Abby gets snatched by one of the mer-creatures in episode four and I had to dive in to try and find her.
I don’t know how to dive and I don’t swim very well, so it seemed a little foolhardy to be volunteering so vociferously on a dive and swim when I don’t really do either really. Plus having said that you’ll do it, it’s one of those things where it seems like someone else volunteered and then your rational head takes over. Once you’ve said it, it’s kind of out there and you can’t retreat from that position.
There was a bit of me that didn’t want to hide behind things. It’s easy to get other people to do the sh**ty things for you in this job but I quite like the idea of just kind of going “No, no, I’m up for this” and being all gung-ho and enthusiastic and all “don’t worry about me I’ll just try not to drown.”
I was wearing a wetsuit and my reasoning was it’s pretty difficult to drown yourself in a wetsuit, as they are pretty buoyant. My other concern was whether I would look crap diving. Wearing a wet suit and not being able to dive made that a little difficult to be honest.”
Didn’t it concern him at all that they were swimming in waters which aren’t generally considered to be ideal for an early morning dip?
“We were filming at Canary Wharf, and there are a lot of water sports which happen around there; kids out in kayaks and so on. That means they have to keep it at a reasonable level of sanitation in order for people to use, so they clean and test it every two weeks. Most of the buildings that we worked in looked great but there always seemed to be warning signs up on the wall which read something like ‘Don’t touch anything’ or ‘don’t touch food’ and ‘make sure you clean your hands.’
To be honest the Thames wasn’t the worst, as we were filming in a couple of old Victorian sanitation places and an old disused pump house.
It seemed like we were in a lot of places that smelt vaguely of s**t. We were in locations that look extraordinary and are nice to a degree because they are in the countryside. But then if you turn into the wind a little bit you think well….this smells like s**t, and then you remember where you are.” With that, he laughs. “Good times.”
And it seems with each new episode, and each new creature, the Primeval writers are finding increasingly unpleasant situations to place the actors in. As well as Victorian sanitation houses, and late night dips in the Thames, Henshall and his team had to contend with almost toxic levels of smoke inhalation and an art department which seemed to take a perverse delight when creating some rather nasty exploding worms:
“Episode 2 has us battling giant worms whose eco-system is this foul smelling smoke. It was very tricky for everybody actually because it takes an incredible amount of time to get the smoke to a level where it’s lying at a certain height on the floor but not rising and obscuring everything else in the scene. There was a little counter that Steve Robinson, our First Assistant Director, had to assess the amount of risk that the smoke was causing us.
In the story, when these worms are suddenly out of their environment they start to dry out and to explode. We had a day when we had to shoot these things bursting, but of course inside the big worms are little worms which then go looking for a host. For the exploding worms they came up with this gunk in various colours which we get covered in. It was just like putting your head in the stocks to then have crap thrown at you. As you can imagine, the crew were lining up to throw this stuff at us.
I can’t be sure, but I think it was some of the stuff that they use in cakes, gelatine maybe but whatever it was, it was the kind of thing that doesn’t come off very easily. It had lumps in it and they were red and yellow so it looked like a seven year old had thrown up all over myself Lucy and Jim. Then they had to set off sprinklers as part of the story, so the three of us had to stand there and keep doing it again and again and again. That was probably the most disgusting day on set; standing wet and covered in s**t. But I think it was one of the most fun days for the crew because they got to chuck things at the actors. All in a day’s work and never a dull moment!
In order to avoid future discomforts, if Henshall could write anything into the scripts, what would he like to see happen?
“I would love there to be an episode in the National History Museum. Because for anyone who has ever been there, especially anyone who went when they were a kid, that’s where a love of dinosaurs and a love of that kind of history gets born. I have always wanted Cutter’s office to be there, for me that is where he would have been most at home; in some wee place, buried at the back.
We have to have a shot in that big main hall. It’s one of the most extraordinary places, not just in London but on the planet. There’s nothing that quite compares to the great hall there, architecturally or otherwise, and I would like to see it used in some way.
As far as creatures are concerned, I’m not really sure. I would like to see something in the jungle, in a kind of tropical climate because there is so much scope for the thriller element to come into play. It also means we could get Ben wearing a safari suit; something that Roger Moore would wear! I would love to see Ben Miller in one of those.”
And for every action hero, there has to, at some point, come an action figure doll. And perhaps one of the biggest coups for the cast of Primeval is that most of them are going to be immortalised in plastic. So how does it feel?
“It’s the highlight of my career so far. I suppose I should be so much cooler and much more blasé about it, but I’m actually really quite excited. I think that I will be tripping around Hamleys or wherever this Christmas looking at us all lined up in boxes. How great is that? Odd but great.”
If your character’s toy could say something, what do you think it will say?
“For the first series, it would definitely say ‘Heeeleeeen’ and as far as this one goes, ‘RUN!’ I say run so many times and me shouting ‘Stephen’ at the top of my voice this series replaces the ‘Helen’ catchphrase. I hope that it could speak as it would be really funny to pull a cord and get a computerised sound of your voice. It would be funny to make mine Scottish, if they don’t make mine Scottish it would be a little weird.”
It is abundantly clear throughout the interview, that whatever discomforts the demands of the scripts put him and the others through, Dougie feels a great affection towards the series and the character of Nick Cutter.
“It’s the kind of thing that everybody wants to do at some point; to play a character like him. It’s a complete fantasy job really and is a million miles away from most of the stuff that I have done previously. I have enjoyed it a great deal.
But I am hankering to get back and do something on stage. I haven’t done a play this year which is a shame as I like to try and do one a year. I will certainly try and do one next year either that or I will go through a run of not doing anything for a little while. It just depends on schedules, times and managing to fit everything in while at the same time trying not to jump off anything too high!”
Primeval Press Interview