Exploring a whole new branch of period TV drama.
WHY 17TH CENTURY DRAMA BARKSKINS FITS TODAY’S LANDSCAPE.
IT’S A FRESH FRONTIER TALE
Adapted by Elwood Reid (writer of the US version of The Bridge) from E. Annie Proulx’s (Brokeback Mountain) epic novel of the same name, Barkskins infuses a relatively untold story – centred on 17th Century French settlers in northern Canada – with classic frontier tropes viewed through a contemporary filter. So expect the New France settlement of Wobik to feature alliance and betrayal, faith and commerce, hostile environments and indigenous Iroquois, the latter drawn with more complexity than your average Hollywood western.
THERE’S A HINT OF HERZOG
Characters include pragmatic innkeeper Mathilde (Marcia Gay Harden), English trader Hamish (Aneurin Barnard), who’s searching for a missing colleague, and two ‘Filles du Roi’ (Tallulah Haddon and Lily Sullivan) sent over to start families to establish the French colony. And then there’s Rene Sel. “He’s the moral centre of the show,” explains Christian Cooke, who plays him. “Rene is a woodsman who’s crossed the ocean to carve out a better life for himself, but not at the expense of anyone else.” Rene expects to be gifted a plot of land after three years of indentured servitude to David Thewlis’ eccentric landowner Claude Trepagny. “Fitzcarraldo was a key reference,” says Thewlis of Trepagny. “The idea of a man building his dream in the wilderness was an exciting one. The appeal was that he was delusional – although not perhaps as delusional as he at first appears.”
EVERYTHING YOU SEE IS REAL
No green screen or soundstages here. “The landscape would have been the same 400 years ago,” marvels Cooke. “You could see why the settlers thought the forests were endless, because they feel like that when you arrive – literally awe-inspiring. But equally, it was also clearly a tough life. Even for us, some days after filming up in the mountains, they’d take a register to make sure no one had been left behind...”
THEWLIS MADE A ‘PEW’ START
While Cooke spent four days with a woodcutter to learn practical axe techniques – “He let me cut a few widowmakers down” – Thewlis wrestled with Trepagny’s accent. “Someone compared it to Pepé Le Pew and I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” laughs
Thewlis, who based Trepagny in part (“and with great affection”) on his French mother-in-law. He also spent time exploring the local woods near his Berkshire home, brandishing a cane and a French accent. “Trepagny’s first line is, ‘I am arrived at last in glory.’ There’s no way of saying that without going for it, so I had to warn everyone around here that I was learning lines. Fortunately they’re used to me…”
From the oppression and intolerance of humans to cavalier treatment of natural resources, Barkskins is steeped in contemporary resonance. “Very rarely do you get work that serves some sort of purpose,” says Cooke. “There’s an undercurrent of how the planet’s been decimated by deforestation over 400 years. The French arrive in this new land and decide how they’ll interact with the land and the people who have lived there for centuries, making the mistake of attempting to ‘tame’ them both. We’re at a tipping point where we have to decide how we’ll live our lives – in harmony with the planet or living against it?” Gabriel Tate
BARKSKINS STARTS 4 AUGUST ON NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC.