‘I understood that idea of wanting to get away from a place where everyone knows everything about you’
Calm With Horses follows a young man who has become the feared enforcer for a drug-dealing family, while also trying to be a good father to his autistic son. Stars Cosmo Jarvis and Niamh Algar discuss their characters with
Cosmo Jarvis was dedicated to immersing himself into his character’s environment for Irish drama Calm With Horses. Set in the fictional town of Glanbeigh, the film was shot on location in the west of Ireland. The 30-year-old actor, who was born in the US but raised in Totnes, Devon, with an Armenian-american mother and English father, moved to the region five weeks before filming began.
From that point on, until the film had wrapped, he spoke only in an Irish accent.
“I used as much time as I could in Ireland to try and understand the essence of the people from the place,” says the star, best known for the 2016 film Lady Macbeth and his work as a singer-songwriter.
“Everybody is an individual, but your environment is a big factor, so it was good to familiarise myself with the intricacies of how Irish people talk. I hoped it would become second nature, so once we started shooting, those habits would be inside me.”
In Calm With Horses, a tense crime thriller about loyalty, family and fatherhood, Jarvis plays protagonist Arm, a former boxer who works with the Devers, who are drug dealers and a kind of surrogate family to him.
At the start of the story, Arm has been asked to kill for the first time.
Simultaneously, he learns that his ex-girlfriend Ursula wants to take their autistic son to a special school on the other side of Ireland.
She tells him she doesn’t want him to be a part of her life anymore because of his criminality, after which Arm finds himself at a crossroads where he has to decide what sort of man and father he wants to be.
“I liked how unadulterated he was,” explains Jarvis. “I saw a lot of everybody I’ve ever known in him.”
To inhabit the character fully, he wanted to transform his physique, so he put on around two stone before filming.
“I needed to eat a lot and lift a lot of weights and then find out about people who’ve boxed in the amateur leagues. I had to get bigger but also to keep some of the fatness because Arm’s out of shape.
“It was important that he wasn’t a ripped guy. He should be big and imposing. Bulky, but not in an elegant way.”
One thing Jarvis didn’t do while preparing for the role was read the book the film is based on. The script was adapted from a short story in Young Skins, an acclaimed collection by writer Colin Barrett.
“I figured whatever they chose to represent the book in the script would have already been in the script and that it might make things unnecessarily convoluted because I make things convoluted anyway,” he says.
Irish actress Niamh Algar, who recently starred in Shane Meadows’ series The Virtues, takes on the role of Ursula.
Coming from a rural town herself, she understood the isolation that her character felt, the “idea of wanting to get away from a place where, for example, everyone knows everything about you and judges you”.
Ursula’s son’s is non-verbal, so, as part of her preparation the actress consulted with Autism Ireland and the National Autism Society in the UK.
“I’m not a parent, but I’ve got nieces and nephews and I spend a lot of time with them,” says Algar, who has been cast by Ridley Scott in his new HBO sci-fi series Raised By Wolves.
“It’s the idea that there’s this instinctual thing that you have to look after a child, especially when they can’t communicate how they’re feeling.
“If she had a spirit animal, she would be a lioness. Anything that comes in between her and him (her son), she will go through them.
“She is fearless. She is fearless towards the Devers.”
There is no denying that there are violent scenes in the film, but “what I loved about it when I first went into auditions is the stillness that Cosmo brings to this role and the silence in the violence”, recalls Algar.
“The violence isn’t gratuitous,” she adds, looking to Jarvis. “There’s a stillness to the violence that you bring and it’s almost like your character becomes detached in those moments.”
Jarvis nods and suggests the violence is “practical”.
“There’s not much personal motivation or investment in any of the violence that goes on on Arm’s part,” he says.
“The violence, it’s just sort of happenstance — a crappy thing that happens in this world. That’s how I saw it anyway.”
While there’s a physical element to Arm as a character, Algar sees him as someone “trapped within his own body”.
“He’s almost seen as a large, physical threat, but there’s a vulnerable side to him that Cosmo balances beautifully,” she says.
The film is an emotional watch that explores how bad relationships dictate the life of the abused and sedate their self-awareness through fear and habit.
Director Nick Rowland liked the idea of looking at how “a community can misunderstand, or even take advantage of, vulnerable people and show how it’s also possible to turn your back on these abusers”.
Together with Joe Murtagh, who wrote the script, Rowland really made sure heart and soul were brought to the forefront of the drama.
“You need to have this soul, otherwise you’re not really fighting for these characters,” Algar explains.
“From start to finish with Cosmo’s character, you’re there in every scene with him, especially in that last scene.
“When we shot that on the day, you could hear pins drop because you were totally invested in him.”
Calm With Horses was recently released in cinemas and its on-demand release has been brought forward to April 27. It will be available on itunes, Amazon, Google Play, Sky Store, Virgin Movies, Talk Talk, BT TV, Curzon Home Cinema, BFI Player, Rakuten TV and Volta
❝ The violence isn’t gratuitous... there’s a stillness to it, like the character is detached