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MAGICAL MATERIAL
With airships, talking monkeys and armoured polar bears, it’s no wonder the BBC’S new drama His Dark Materials is one of its most expensive shows ever. Here the cast reveal how they’ll bring you...
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Just a few minutes into her first day on the set of His Dark Materials, Ruth Wilson realised she’d taken on something extraordinary. Sashaying into the dining room on location at New College in Oxford, looking like a 1940s Hollywood siren, she was surrounded by 200 extras dressed up as students, throwing things at each other while a puppeteer jumped around her holding a fake monkey.
‘The whole thing was crazy,’ says Ruth, who plays evil Mrs Coulter in the BBC’S eight-part retelling of the first book in Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy. ‘I couldn’t take it in. I was wearing this amazing 40s-style outfit in this incredible setting, and there was the whole thing with the puppet and trying to sort out in my head how it was going to work.’
When the film rights to the trilogy – 1995’s Northern Lights, 1997’s The Subtle Knife and 2000’s The Amber Spyglass – were sold there was some surprise as the story had been deemed ‘unfilmable’. Set largely in an Arctic wasteland, with airships and strange creatures including talking armoured polar bears, it’s a complex story of faith, magic and authoritarianism. Most difficult of all, every human character has an animal ‘daemon’. More than just a pet, it’s an incarnation of its keeper’s soul that goes everywhere with its human, has human intelligence and is capable of human speech. Sadly, a 2007 movie starring Nicole Kidman proved the unfilmable theory correct – it was critically panned and bombed at the box office.
But former BBC executive Jane Tranter was convinced she could do a better job with it on TV. ‘In many ways, having to wait worked out to my benefit,’ says Jane. ‘If I’d made these books into a TV series a decade ago it would have been on at teatime with puppets, but since then TV has gone epic. Game Of Thrones and all that fantasy stuff has happened.’
Their new production is huge. With a rumoured £50 million budget, it’s said to be one of the most expensive shows the BBC’S ever made, and it’s been co-produced with US channel HBO, who were behind Game Of Thrones. As well as Ruth, best known for The Affair and Luther, it’s attracted a raft of stars including James
Mcavoy, as Lord Asriel, Peaky Blinders’ Helen Mccrory who voices Asriel’s daemon, Hamilton star Linmanuel Miranda as hot-air balloon pilot Lee Scoresby and Poirot’s David Suchet, who also voices a daemon. The lead role of Lyra Belacqua is taken by 14-year-old Dafne Keen, who played Laura in Hugh Jackman’s superhero film Logan.
The story is centred around Lyra, an orphan being brought up at the fictional Jordan College, Oxford, by scholars and her explorer uncle Lord Asriel, who she barely sees as he’s always off on projects around the world. Their world is an alternative universe to ours. It’s both ancient and futuristic, run by a church-like organisation called The Magisterium, which brooks no heretical thoughts.
As the series begins, Asriel has returned, revealing that he’s learned of a new world that can be seen through the Northern Lights. The idea of this is heresy for his fellow scholars, and they try to shut him down. As he leaves to find out more, Lyra is taken in by her glamorous guardian Mrs Coulter, whose outward appearance masks a dark truth. Meanwhile, children are going missing and no one seems interested in finding them. Her curiosity piqued, Lyra journeys to the North Pole to find her uncle.
‘It’s this captivating story of a little girl trying to find some parents, but at the same time it’s about the nullification of the human imagination,’ says James Mcavoy. ‘It’s about the struggle between the right to think and act and those that try to stop that. It’s bold – and eternally relevant.’
For all the actors, getting to grips with the idea of a daemon and how to act with them was one of the biggest challenges. To help the cast, foam puppets of the animals were operated by a puppeteer and two versions of these scenes were filmed: one with the puppet in, to record the response of the actor, and a second without it, to allow space for a CGI version of the animal. ‘The daemons bring this whole other dimension to the show,’ says Ruth. ‘The whole process was really quite special.’
The book series (as well as the trilogy there is a prequel, La Belle Sauvage, which came out in 2017, and a sequel, The Secret Commonwealth, released earlier this month) has sold more than 17 million copies – despite being attacked by the Cath
‘Ten years ago this couldn’t have been made’
‘It’s a bold story – and eternally relevant’
olic Church, which also demanded a boycott of the film.
‘It’s not an attack on a belief or church per se,’ says Jane Tranter. ‘Philip’s attacking a form of control where there’s a very deliberate attempt to withhold information and not allow thinking to be free. We plan to adapt the books as they were written. This is not going to be a vanilla adaptation.’
Young Dafne, whose parents are also actors (her father Will plays one of The Magisterium), is aware of the pressure she’s under in the lead role. ‘It’s terrifying because there are millions for whom Lyra is a heroine,’ she says. ‘I don’t look like the Lyra of the books, who has blonde curly hair, but we’re both very nosey and quite cheeky.’
Most of the series was filmed in a Welsh former factory adapted to house everything from Oxford colleges to a snow-covered mountain so realistic it gave Philip Pullman altitude sickness when he visited. A second series is being made and there are plans for a third. ‘It was only when I started filming I realised how much people love these books,’ says Ruth. ‘I hope fans feel we’ve done the story justice, because the amount of energy everyone has put in is extraordinary.’ n