Jared Harris: From Mad Men to Arctic terror
PASADENA, California — British actor Jared Harris wasn’t sure what he wanted to be when he hauled off for college in America. “I was very argumentative, so they thought I could be a lawyer or something like that,” he says.
“I didn’t really like the things. You know, families discuss the careers of their children, and I was never that excited about what they had in mind for me. So going to university was a chance to set the reset button and get away from everybody and figure out what I wanted to do.”
When most young men declare they want to be actors, their families panic. Not Harris’s. After all, his dad was actor Richard Harris and his mom, Welsh actress Elizabeth Rees-Williams. They encouraged him.
“My mother came to see me in plays at Duke University, and she was very encouraging. And my father, he wouldn’t come down because he thought he was going to be embarrassed. I did a play, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, had also made a movie as well, and he came down. He was going to see the film in the afternoon and the play in the evening. And he was set in his mind that he was going to say: ‘Be a director, go to film school and do that. You don’t have the personality, the temperament to be an actor.’
“And he saw me in the play. And I’ll never forget the look in his face when I came out of the theatre after the show. It was surprise and it was excitement and it was real joy because we had a whole new area of relationship that we could discover with each other because I was into what he’d spent his life doing.”
It’s something that Jared — the middle of three boys — has spent his life doing. But it wasn’t until he defiantly hanged himself on the door of the office of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce on the record-breaking Mad Men that his career really took off. (From there he played Queen Elizabeth’s father, Henry VI, in The Crown, co-starred in Lincoln, and on Monday, he stars in AMC’s thrilling series The Terror.)
Harris plays the second-incommand of an ill-fated Arctic exploration that becomes trapped in the ice. As the captain of one of the ships, he must deal with the deprivations his crew experiences as well as the foreboding presence of an unknown monster.
Harris, 56, thinks his decision to become an actor mostly involved his being the middle child. “You feel like you’re getting lost in the middle. The squeaky wheel,” says Harris, who admits he’s still argumentative.
When he was seven, he was sent away to boarding school and finished up at a similar school when he was 18. “When you’re a kid, you think everything is normal, the way it’s supposed to be, so you don’t question it,” he says.
“It wasn’t fun, but you just accept things like that, and you get a good education out of it. When you’re at school, there are 100 kids in the same boat — all trying to figure out how they’re going to survive and who their friends are. You’re concerned with things like scoring goals. And the subjects you’re not very good at, you try to do enough so you don’t get into trouble. Where you’re going to get your next chocolate from and things like that.”
Although his parents divorced when he was seven, he says his father made serious efforts to see his sons during holidays and summer vacations. “They were very, very deliberate with each other about how each of them would split the holiday time,” he recalls.
“We’d go somewhere magical with him. A few times, he was working — not very often, twice that I remember. He was making The Molly Maguires out here.”
After Duke, Harris studied at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, then to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London and finally, the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he stayed for almost two years.
“My first job in the States was at the Public Theater, and basically, it was 10 bucks a day, and with that I had to ride the subway and get lunch and dinner. A lot of Chinese food,” he chuckles, “Chinese take-away buckets that last for days. But it was an exciting time.”
Married for 41⁄2 years to his third wife, Allegra, a lighting designer, Harris says they try to not be apart for long periods of time. Making The Terror took six months and was filmed in Croatia and Hungary, but Allegra was able to visit the set for a month, he says.
They met at a comedy club through mutual friends. “We were both in tough spots at the time, and we turned each other’s life around,” he says. “You join your life with somebody else’s, and if it isn’t going to change your life, then why have you done it?
Hopefully, you’re helping one another become better versions of yourself.”