Douglas Henshall admits that when he was first approached to play Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a feature-length BBC2 biopic he almost turned it down flat. For the actor –acclaimed for playing gritty and edgy contemporary roles-the ides of playing a dour Victorian with a walrus moustache didn’t really appeal- until he read the script.
‘I didn’t know anything about Conan Doyle, other than he’d written the Sherlock Holmes stories, says Douglas, ‘To be honest, I wasn’t interested. But when I got the script it was a revelation. It was dark and haunting and not what I expecting. It got me interested and I read a biography of his and realised Doyle was a fascinating man. He led a big, eventful life and Sherlock Holmes, in some ways was the least of it.
The Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle looks at the turbulent relationship between the sometimes troubled author and his character. Set between 1892 and the early 1900ss and based mainly on fact, it explores the dark family secrets that could have driven Doyle to kill off Holmes at the height of his popularity.
‘Our story is witness to the slow descent of a man having a form of a nervous breakdown,’ says Douglas whose aversion to glue meant he grew his own moustache for the role. ‘There are people in The Sherlock Holmes Society, or wherever, who’d say that Conan Doyle never suffered a nervous breakdown. But we aren’t saying this is why he killed off Sherlock Holmes. We just imply it.
‘Looking at the events happening to him at the time, a breakdown of sorts would make sense. You’ve just lost your alcoholic father in an asylum, your wife’s suffering from a terminal illness, you’re having an unconsummated affair with another woman and you’ve just killed off the greatest detective in the history of literature. So there are a lot of aspects going on in his head to suggest someone is going to have some problems.’
So how does an actor approach such a complex character? ‘The way I’ve played it is very subtle – I hope’ he laughs. ‘I wanted to show he was being haunted by his own stories as well as his private life. I wanted to do something underplayed, because people who are having a breakdown don’t walk around with a sign on their head.’
The drama also stars Tim McInnnerny (Blackadder) as Doyle’s biographer Selden, Brian Cox as his mentor Joseph Bell and Sinead Cusack as his mother, Mary. For Douglas, Arthur Conan Doyle is yet another hefty role to add to his impressive CV, which includes Psychos and Anna Karenina on TV and Brit flicks such as Orphans (1997) and This Year’s Love (1999).
However, one job the 39-year-old actor isn’t quite so proud of is the straight-to-video sci-fi adventure Kull the Conqueror (1997). He says ‘Oh, my God, that is the most awful piece of rubbish that anyone has ever done. I thought it was a comedy. When I got the script I laughed all the way through.
‘It was only when I got on set and saw everyone else was taking it seriously that I saw I had made a mistake. So if it’s on TV again, don’t laugh. Not that you’ll be able to stop yourself!
By Tim Randall