| Bite Club
The set is a hive of activity. Visual effects guys from Primeval’s CG team are scouting the Festival Hall’s restaurant to make sure everything will fit in with the monster they’ll be adding later. While Henshall and a woman dressed as a cleaner are dangling from the side of the building on an emergency fire hose. Except that it’s not really Henshall – it’s a stuntman doing things that Henshall’s not allowed to do for himself. “They want to use a stunt guy because it means they can drop him further,” admits Henshall, who’ll be doing some dangling of his own later on. “They don’t worry about what they do to him so much, which is a shame because I wanted to do that. But I guess they have to think about safety. If they break me it’s too much money.” Hardly surprising considering this year’s Primeval is a bigger proposition than ever before, with all three series to date picked up by BBC America and last year’s seven-episode run bumped up to ten for 2009. And while that means lots more work for cast and crew – “Primeval’s a tiring shoot because we don’t walk very much!”, laughs Henshall. In Primeval 3 there will be new regular characters. Policeman Danny Quinn (Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrel’s Jason Flemyng) is looking for answers about his brother’s dino related death, while Captain Becker (newcomer Ben Mansfield) steps into army fatigues left vacant since Captain Ryan dies in the distant past of Series 1. “I think if there was ever a misstep with killing people in the show, it was a shame they got rid of Captain Ryan,” admits Henshall “He was a great character. Also Mark Wakeling was perfect for that kind of role. I think the idea of bringing in Ben Mansfield in as this guy Becker is an acknowledgement that we could do with somebody who links what we’re doing with Special Forces, to security, and government stuff like that.” The third of the newbie trio is Sarah Page (Footballer’s Wives’ Laila Rouass), an Egyptologist, who gets involved with the ARC gang when today’s pristichampus – the spitting image of the Egyptian God Ammut – appears out of an anomaly in an Egypt exhibition , and goes on a touristy rampage on the South Bank. “I think it’s a great idea to have an Egyptologist come in,” says Henshall. “Suddenly it rings in this whole idea of mythology, whether or not mythological creatures were linked to the anomalies and just something people didn’t have a name for back then. I think that’s a really clever way to come into it” Extracts from an article by Richard Edwards SFX magazine issue no. 181 April 2009. |
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