| Hear no Evil
A deaf girl is caught up in a murder enquiry in an intriguing crime drama. The murder of a fellow officer is one of the toughest cases a policeman can be assigned. So when DCI Jim Edwards starts to investigate the terrible killing of a policewoman in the BBC1 crime drama The Silence, he knows he’s taking on an emotionally charged case. Things get complicated when Edwards played by Douglas Henshall, learns that the key witness is his deaf teenage niece, Amelia. When she identifies a police officer as the killer, Edwards is torn between doing the right thing by his late colleague, protecting his family and watching his own back. ‘His problem is trying to protect his niece while at the same time doing his job to the best of his ability,’ explains Henshall, who appears alongside Derval Kerwin as Edward’s wife and Hugh Bonneville and Gina McKee as Amelia’s over-protective parents. The drama, which is showing over four consecutive nights, features deaf actress Genevieve Barr in the role of Amelia in only her second TV appearance, following a small part in the Channel 4 Comedy Showcase pilot The Amazing Dermot last year. According to Henshall, she made the step up look remarkably easy. ‘Before we started filming, my only reservation about Genevieve was that she had not acted much before, and here she was playing the lead role in four hours of drama, which is tough enough for anyone,’ he says. ‘But any doubts I had were dispelled within a week of working with her. Her insight into the character and her situation she is in were so in the money, I realise I’d be better off concentrating on what I was doing.’ The experience of appearing opposite a severely deaf co-star turned out to be a learning curve for Henshall, too. ‘I had to remember that when my character was talking to Amelia I needed to be somewhere where Genevieve could read my lips,’ he explains. ‘But looking at someone when you’re talking to them is actually considered to be good manners where I come from anyway.’ The role of Edwards is 44 year old Henshall’s second successive outing as a policeman following his appearance in the TV drama Collision last autumn. ‘I seem to have reached the age where I’m being offered roles as policeman,’ he smiles. ‘Both those roles have me playing the father of teenagers. You go through stages where you’re considered too young or too old for certain roles, and it’s good that I’m now being offered the chance to play people who are my own age.’ Genevieve’s Role of a Lifetime Deaf newcomer Genevieve Barr had pretty much abandoned her childhood dream of becoming an actress before she landed the lead role in The Silence. ‘I studied drama at school and always pushed for lead roles in school plays, but I never got them’, says the 23-year - old. ‘I never knew whether they didn’t choose me because my speaking voice wasn’t clear enough or because I wasn’t a good enough actress.’ Instead of pursuing acting after university, she went into teaching. Then a friend at a television production company thought of her when channels 4 were looking for someone deaf to appear in Comedy Showcases’ The Amazing Dermot. The 2009 pilot didn’t get picked up. But news of Barr’s performance reached the casting director of The Silence. ‘Life’s been like a whirlwind ever since, ‘she says. ‘I don’t think the BBC wanted to cast a hearing actress in the role of Amelia, but I would resent it if I thought I got the part just because i was deaf rather than because I’m a good actress.’ ‘Now I’ve decided to stay with drama, I don’t know if it’s possible for a deaf person to have a full-time acting career, but I’m going to give it a go.’ Words: Fraser Massey , TV and Satellite Week July 10th – July 16th 2010 |