AHEAD OF HER TIME
ELEANOR TOMLINSON SWAPS POLDARK FOR MARTIANS IN HER THRILLING NEW ROLE
BVIOUSLY I love a period drama,’ says Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson, ‘but an alien period drama… that’s quite a new genre!’
She’s sitting, in suitably ravaged costume and make-up, just to the side of a scorched earth set for the BBC’s new adaptation of The War Of The Worlds. In Sunday’s opening episode we saw snapshots of what is presumed to be her character in the future, wandering this barren landscape. ‘There’s quite a lot of trauma for me in there,’ she gesticulates. ‘But in a more
comfortable costume than Poldark, even if my character has scavenged it from odd people…’
Actually, she’s pointing to a massive warehouse in Birkenhead in which the entire Red World was built, rather than the wasted environs of Woking, where HG Wells’ original extraterrestrial invasion story was set. But the commitment to detail and ambition of this War Of The Worlds adaptation, which unusually is set in the period in which Wells wrote it, is impressive. Tomlinson, too, is fully committed – she rode plenty of horses in Poldark but in the first episode here we saw her rear up her steed as an explosion went off… and an alien stepped over a church.
‘That was great,’ she says with a glint in her eye. ‘I went on a big, old training programme to be sure I was ready for whatever was thrown at me and they pretty much threw everything at me! But it gave me a confidence. You’d expect male stars to take on the stunts so I felt it important that I could too.’
It’s a significant point given this is clearly a traditional War Of The Worlds with refreshingly modern politics and sensibilities. For all Tomlinson’s talk of this being a faithful adaptation of a classic, her character Amy is a strong, practical, three-dimensional female lead who is barely in the book.
‘I had seen the Tom Cruise film when I was a teen and I read the book,’ she says. ‘But in both there’s not much to go at with my character – she’s not really in it. That was good because it meant there was more for me to work with. She’s pretty groundbreaking for
her time, a modern woman who has grown up in India and is having a relationship with a married man [Rafe Spall, who plays the journalist, George]. She’s independent, passionate and has a keen interest in space and Mars. Her life force is captivating and to have her at the core of the drama is so refreshing.’ Elsewhere, the astronomer who first comes across the Martian capsule (Ogilvy, played by an enthusiastic Robert Carlyle) hints at his homosexuality and there are stern appraisals of colonialism and empire building. The relationships between Amy, George and Ogilvy stem from the fact they are all considered pariahs who don’t quite fit into society.
‘I really do think we break into a