Interview with Ian Hart on Noughts + CrossesNoughts + Crosses The much anticipated adaptation of book one of Malorie Blackman's award-winning young adult seriesNoughts + Crosses starts Thursday 5 March on BBC One
Ian Hart plays Ryan McGregor in Noughts + Crosses. What drew you to the role of Ryan McGregor? Noughts + Crosses is bringing these issues to the forefront and that is important. The whole nature of this story is a reversal, and reversing the stereotype is a very clever way to put a new lens on an issue. So there is an element of reverse racism within this drama, which makes you feel uncomfortable, but it has to be done. Tell us about your character’s radical past and the dangerous journeys his sons embark on. You also get the sense that as you get married and start a family those things become less important. So you begin to bite your tongue and disguise your feelings because your primary objective has become something else. That is Ryan’s journey to a degree when we meet him: he has grown up. A French philosopher put forward the notion that youth have an obligation to rebel. That is the window of opportunity you get given in life whereby being radical is possible because the many things that tie a person down don’t exist to you yet. Ryan’s eldest son, Jude (Josh Dylan), definitely represents this idea. Ryan understands the feelings that motivate his son, of wanting to affect some change and the feeling of being impotent. Ryan has been there himself; he knows that world and where that ends up. He already knows the natural progression of that story, so therefore it is good advice to say don’t do it - but it is difficult to tell someone not to do something that you have done yourself. On the other side of the fence, with his youngest son, Callum (Jack Rowan), there is an opportunity for him to join their armed forces -which is effectively what Mercy Point is, a de facto army. There is always a way for the working class to get out - you’re either going to work in a rundown factory or you get legitimised in the eyes of the authoritarian government, you get accepted, but by the same token the army are the oppressors so he is going over to the other side. This is the first time they have opened up this opportunity to the Noughts, so you can see why that might appeal as the only other way out. It is difficult for Ryan or people from their background to see their kids in uniform though, because that represents the opposition. How was working with your on-screen family? Until the events of the beginning of the drama one can imagine the McGregors lived a cosy life, there seems to be a lot of love there. It is not a dysfunctional family, they have not been bogged down and degraded by the environment, and they seem to be getting along with life. It is good to have a counterpoint because the physical events in the scripts are quite dark and you have a tragic loss of innocence, so you have to have somewhere to come from to make that journey believable or palpable to an audience. Can you describe the alternate England in the world of Noughts + Crosses? With the creation of Albion, this alternate England, you are looking at hundreds of years of occupation, so you retreat back to the past, you resist colonisation, you resist homogenisation and instead of holding on to 1980 you go backwards. So you would see certain aspects of old Albion, although it is an artificial construct, which would be dragged to the forefront. For example, you start to think about something like Morris dancing as suddenly being emblematic of a conceived notion of what your national identity is. If your oppressor is enforcing their culture then you seek anything that would allow you to identify as something other. It's not difficult to come up with a comparative narrative that would give you an insight into this alternate future. You’ve only got to look at Ireland or Wales - the British government destroyed the Welsh language, deciding theirs was better. So to a certain degree, you look to the past to inform your fictional future. One of the best elements about being an actor is you are offered the opportunity to discover things, to learn a condensed version of a specific subject matter. You get opportunities if you take them, to study. It is a gift. March 4, 2020 6:00am ET by BBC One |