How His Dark Materials got HBO-ED
After a disappointing movie, what is the BBC/HBO TV adaptation doing differently?
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Ruth Wilson is perfect casting as His Dark Materials’ Mrs Coulter. Empire tells her so. “I’m slightly offended by that,” she says. “Considering she’s described as the mother of all evils — ‘a cesspit of moral filth’.” That’s not what we took from it. “Well, that’s what I take from it!” she says, mock-horrified. “No, it’s great. She’s a brilliant character.”
She is — and now, thanks to a lavish BBC/ HBO series adapting Philip Pullman’s epic literary saga, she’ll get her due. Finally. 2007’s The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter, was the first and last in a planned cinematic trilogy taking on the books, a limp disappointment, but the new series aims to put things right. “Several key landmarks in television have enabled me to be able to position His Dark Materials in a way that allows it to be exactly the piece that it is,” says executive producer Jane Tranter, citing Game Of Thrones, among others. She’d wanted to televise Pullman’s books since their publication. “We’re not compromising. It’s an extremely faithful adaptation of the novels.”
With a series timescale that allows the story to breathe — rather than the film’s explosion of exposition — this take’s pacing is in no hurry. “Like any piece of mythology, part of the excitement is the unravelling of it,” says Tranter. “You have to have the courage to let an audience wonder.”
A more patient telling enables deeper character studies, and Wilson has gone very deep. “There’s a truth” to the show, she says, “and the truth lies in all the human relationships.” Yet that doesn’t mean it isn’t epic. “It is part fantastical. It is part Star Wars. It’s grounded in a reality that we can half recognise, but we have these animals around us all the time, we’re on airships, there are polar bears speaking. They’re cutting through worlds, blowing up God. It’s huge.” The age of the big-budget box set might just hit a new milestone.