Christopher Eccleston loved working on ’Fortitude’ in Iceland
Next Thursday, Sky Atlantic’s new drama, Fortitude, begins, but its star, Christopher Eccleston, is not excited about his first glimpse of it.
“I don’t like watching myself back,” the actor says. “What happens is, you’re watching something, and you think, ‘This is great, but who’s that idiot?’ And it’s you.”
Eccleston’s attitude should not be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm for the ‘Nordic noir’ series, which cost £28m, and which also stars Michael Gambon, Sofie Grabol, Stanley Tucci, and Co Armagh actor, Aaron McCusker.
Eccleston, who plays a British scientist running the Arctic biology department at the Fortitude Arctic Research Centre, loved filming the show, for which the 50-year-old returned to Iceland two years after shooting super-hero movie, Thor: The Dark World, there.
“I did Thor Two, whatever it was called... Dark Underpants or something... but I had a much better time on Fortitude,” he says.
“I much preferred the locations that we shot in, I had a much better script, and I wasn’t in prosthetic make-up for eight hours every day. And I wasn’t a naughty elf. I was a naughty elf in the bar on Fortitude, but I wasn’t a naughty elf on set.”
So often associated with intense, sombre roles (Eccleston played Jude in Jude the Obscure, in a 1996 adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel; a war hero in The Others; and an unusually serious Doctor in Doctor Who), the actor’s jokiness is a pleasant surprise.
As well as the “extraordinary quality of light and air” in Iceland, and the Northern Lights, which Eccleston saw nearly every night and which became rather mundane, he is mainly nostalgic for the bar the cast frequented.
“It had some great beers — Icelandic beers — and we all tried the local stuff. There are some serious drinkers in Iceland, and some serious drinkers in the cast of Fortitude, it has to be said.”
No wonder Eccleston is keen to do a second series of the drama, which is centred around a mysterious death (“I’d love to get back out to Iceland”).
After finishing up on Fortitude, he flew straight from Iceland to Manhattan to film The Leftovers (alongside Justin Theroux), in which he plays an evangelical struggling with his humanity.
“I remember bringing a lot of the spirit of Fortitude to The Leftovers. I was very enthusiastic and relaxed — full of the wonders of the world,” Eccleston says.
But even Iceland didn’t prepare him for a winter in New York: “It was a really tough one — New Yorkers said that. We filmed a lot of night-shoots and it got really bitter.”
He stayed in his American accent throughout filming, even when he went out in the evenings, he says, and was surprised by the “huge addiction, even among New York-hardened crew members, to Downton Abbey”.
Would Eccleston fancy a role in Julian Fellowes’ mega-popular period drama?
“If the script was good enough, yes,” he says. “I think you’ve got to leave yourself open to everything when you’ve got a mortgage.”
His children — two-year-old Albert and baby Esme — joined their father on the set in Manhattan.
“I don’t like being away from my family at all, especially when they’re this young. But it has to be done, because I have to feed them,” says the actor, whose next project is a second series of The Leftovers.
Eccleston will also appear in Legend, a violent movie thriller about the rise and fall of the Kray twins, and the psychological TV drama, Safe House, later this year.
He speaks fondly of his hometown, Salford, in Greater Manchester, where his mother and twin brothers still live, and he remains a staunch Manchester United fan. “I had a season ticket for 25 years... It’s genetically impossible for me not to support them,” he says.
In a 1996 TV film, Hillsborough, based on the 1989 football stadium tragedy that killed 93 people, he portrayed Trevor Hicks, the grieving father who campaigned for improved safety and helped form the Hillsborough Families’ Support Group. Hicks’s two daughters died in the disaster.
Hicks and Eccleston have remained great friends since meeting during the film’s production (Eccleston was even best man at Hicks’S wedding), and the role remains one of his proudest parts.
“When I decided to be an actor, I wanted to be of some use. Hillsborough, the film, was certainly a very small tool in pushing for the inquiry, and, hopefully, the families will get justice,” Eccleston says.
In the meantime, Eccleston’s immediate focus is on Fortitude, a show that could be one of the TV highlights of the year.
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