Star of popular TV series says he’s enjoying keeping Hitman movie cast in dark on show’s cliffhanger finale
Homeland star Rupert Friend has revealed he was constantly pestered for spoilers about the hit show while filming his latest movie. The British actor stars as CIA agent Quinn in the award-winning show and the final episode of the last season left audiences in suspense about whether he would survive an assassination mission in Iraq.
Friend, who stars in new film Hitman: Agent 47, said he refused to give anything away to his colleagues, despite incessant requests from costar Hannah Ware.
“It was all she did, it was very tiring. I’m not allowed to say anything, but because it was Hannah asking I wouldn’t have told her even if I had been allowed,” he said.
“She really wants to know and it’s a great joy to me to wind her up.”
Hitman: Agent 47 is based on a successful series of video games but around in this big place with heated marble floors. I lived there for six or seven weeks while I was writing the book; we’d go rollerblading down these empty corridors. She hadn’t yet hired a housekeeper and she couldn’t cook so I was feeding her, which was a challenge. Did you like her? Yeah, I did. I saw two sides of her. The first Geri I met was very insecure, very bruised. She’d lived in a bubble for so long — she was worth £14 million but didn’t know her pin number. By the time we finished the book Geri was launching a solo career and she sort of became a different person. I think I preferred the little girl lost to the hard-headed pop diva. Could you be a ghost writer if you had a big ego? No, you’ve almost got to make yourself into a blank canvas. There are times your subject will say things that you fundamentally disagree with, or you think of a joke that you’d love to put in there but you can’t because it wasn’t their line. But you’ve got an opportunity to look at the world through someone else’s eyes, to absolutely inhabit their skin and find out how they were formed, their deepest fears, their greatest highs; all that is a huge privilege. And it was a stunningly good grounding for a novelist because all of those skills of capturing someone’s voice, I could then turn to writing fiction. Is it necessary for you to relate to your criminal characters? Totally. As a journalist in the UK I was very fortunate to work closely with a man called Paul Britton, a pioneering forensic psychologist who was the inspiration for Fitz in that wonderful BBC series Cracker.
Paul spent over 20 years working with the criminally insane. He understood the way psychotic and sociopathic people think, and he’s got a brilliant, brilliant mind. He worked on a lot of the biggest crimes of the 80s and 90s including Fred and Rosemary West. And one of the things that Paul taught me is that these villains don’t spring from nowhere. Society gets the monsters it deserves. What did society do to deserve Fred West? There were three generations of incest in Fred West’s family so he was never going to be a normal individual. When the police first called Paul Britton in to the West case they only had the three bodies in the back garden and the Wests were denying all knowledge. Paul looked at all the interviews with them and told the police that they buried their bodies close because they liked to fantasise about what they’d done. The police said “so that’s why they used the garden”. And Paul said, “no, they’ve used the garden because the house is full”. And then they checked the basement and found seven more bodies. Where did you grow up? My father was a country high school teacher so he moved around a lot. I spent all of my high school years in Gundagai, a tiny country town halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. I decided I wanted to become a writer when I was really young so I applied for a journalism cadetship and moved to Sydney. I’d never been in a lift before, never been in a building with more than three storeys. Never knew there were so many rich people in the world. I was a complete hayseed, completely blown away by Sydney in every way. You then moved to London. How were your Fleet St years? Oh amazing, a revelation. I was there for the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the whole dismantling of the Soviet Republic, reporting on history being made. Actually I was a day late getting to Berlin. You quit journalism in your early 30s — why? It was a great profession but it owned me. I’d go to India and before I’d even got on the plane to come back they’d ask me to go somewhere else. I always said that I wanted to be out by the time I was 35 and I wanted to become a writer. When I was 33,
Friend, 33, admitted he took a while to get the hang of playing it. Speaking on the red carpet at a fan event for the movie in New York City, he said: “I played the hell out of it.
“In the beginning my character just stood in the corner and turned around aimlessly looking at the floor, and I couldn’t work out how to get the gun out or anything, which is a bit like what it was like for me at the beginning of this film, but by the end you get a bit more proficient.”
Friend, who is best known for his roles in British period films The Young Victoria and Pride And Prejudice, trained hard for the physical role.
“It was full on, I really wanted to do all-day, every-day immersive physical preparations so I studied Krav Maga here in New York and I studied with a boxing trainer and bits of Muay Thai,” he said. my wife was pregnant and I thought, now is the time. As a self-employed writer at home how do you stop yourself from procrastinating? Writing is what I do. It’s almost like I can’t stop myself. I write seven days a week. I write Christmas morning. Sometimes I’ll come out of a day with just a single line. I’ve thrown 40,000-word novels away and started again. Your latest book Close
opens with a murdered teenage girl. Was that hard to write as the father of three daughters? If you look back through my books they often involve a teenage girl in jeopardy. My nightmares all involve my children — that I can’t get to them or reach them in time and maybe I just put demons on the page in the hope that they’ll never appear in real life.
An evening with Michael Robotham is on tonight at 6pm at the Leys Institute Library, Ponsonby. Gold coin donation. RSVP on the Leys Institute Facebook page or phone (09) 890 8755.