Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
MISS THIS AT YOUR PERIL!
If you like Indiana Jones then you’ll love Hooten & The Lady, a riotous series about a pair of globe-trotting treasure hunters who can’t seem to stay out of trouble
Barely have the titles rolled on new drama Hooten & The Lady and we are deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, where our chalk and cheese lead characters are dangling upside down awaiting a gruesome fate after being captured by a group of irate tribesmen.
It sets the tone for an irresistible new eight-part series which sees Hooten, a maverick adventurer, team up with intrepid museum curator Lady Alexandra, travelling the globe in search of treasures from the past and getting into all kinds of scrapes as they roam through jungles, deserts and underground cities.
‘It’s a fun, escapist adventure with humour and drama and action,’ is how American actor Michael Landes, who plays Hooten, puts it. ‘You British guys have this expression I love, which is that it does what it says on the tin. In America I’d say this is the TV equivalent of a cheeseburger and fries – comfort fare.’
That earns him an eye-roll from co-star Ophelia Lovibond, who plays Lady Alex, in a scene which could have come straight from the series. ‘The central premise is that the two characters come from completely different social, economic and geographical backgrounds,’ says Ophelia, a star of the BBC comedy W1A. ‘They grate on each other, but they have a fondness for each other in the end.
‘I go into the Amazon to bring back artefacts for a prestigious exhibition and I kind of volunteer myself as a lamb to the slaughter to go and get it. So that’s how I end up in the middle of the jungle in the first episode,’ she explains.
There her path collides with Hooten. ‘He’s the sort of guy who’s very good at helping people find relics or things of value for collectors,’ explains Michael, who played Jimmy Olsen in Lois And Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. ‘It’s more of a black market trade.’
Created by Hustle writer Tony Jordan, the show – which also stars Jane Seymour as Lady Alex’s mother and Ophelia’s W1A co-star Jessica Hynes as Alex’s pal – has echoes of adventure movies Indiana Jones and Romancing The Stone. ‘It feels quite 1980s,’ says Ophe- lia. ‘But it’s contemporary in the sense that there’s none of that old sexism in it. Alex is bold, forthright and courageous and she and Hooten meet toe to toe.’
Filmed on four continents and in eight countries, the shoot took its actors on an amazing adventure, where they got to film airborne fight scenes in helicopters, get dropped from great heights on a wire and brave crocodile-infested waters. In Rome they filmed at the Vati-
can at 3am. In Moscow they took over Red Square, while in Cambodia the cameras were rolling at the ancient Angkor Wat temple at dawn.
But it wasn’t all fun. ‘It was incredibly physically demanding in these extraordinary temperatures. In Moscow it was freezing and I couldn’t feel my toes,’ says Ophelia. In South Africa they filmed in a jungle full of snakes. ‘We had a snake wrangler whose job it was to catch snakes that came on set,’ says Michael. ‘In two weeks he caught 42!’
Michael reckons the show deserves to be a big hit. ‘It’s got humour, it’s got action, it’s got fun, it’s got travel,’ he says. ‘It really has got something for everyone.’