“IT’S LIKE A WILD EMOTIONAL CHESS GAME”

What can you tell us about your character?

That he’s bad. He’s as dark a character as I’ve played. It was something that Christopher was very keen for me to embrace fully. He sometimes thinks of me as quite a nice and rather British fellow, and so he wanted to make sure that all Britishness was squeezed out of my personality, and was replaced by the villainous characteristics that he required here.

What were your first impressions of the script?

That it was immense, that it was hugely ambitious, that it was bold. In the trailer you hear someone say, “What are the stakes, are you trying to avoid another nuclear holocaust?” [And someone] replies, “No, it’s much bigger than that.” And that sense of scale, the boldness of the execution of the vision, was really what struck me, the numbers of interwoven themes and characters and this kind of kinetic driving energy through it. It was like a wild emotional chess game.

What can be worse than a nuclear holocaust, though?

If a nuclear holocaust essentially destroys the planet then what kind of vision of hell that would be, the planet destroyed but somehow humanity also trapped, so they don’t get removed, their existence is not extinguished, but there is what you might describe as a potentially more hellish eternal damnation, something that has to be endured forever. So maybe this film offers up a permanent living possibility of a grim future for the world – that can be avoided, I hasten to add, particularly if you get John David Washington on the case!