Jared Harris on his twisty thriller and ever-increasing links with Cork
Jared Harris in Reawakening.
A TORMENTED couple have been lamenting the disappearance of their teenage daughter for a decade, when one day, out of the blue, she walks into their family home.
Mary (Juliet Stevenson) is overjoyed at the return of her daughter, now aged 24, and willing to write off the inconsistencies in her memories of her younger life. But John (Jared Harris) is not convinced that the young woman in their home is their daughter - and sets on a search for the truth.
That’s the intriguing premise at the heart of Reawakening, an intense and suspenseful thriller with the sort of human drama at its core that Harris has long sought out in his roles.
“Superficially, it's about: is this girl the daughter or not? But when you dig beneath the surface, it's really about these two approaches to the problem that they have and and about how this couple dealt with the grief of feeling that they'd lost their child,” says the actor of working on the movie.
“These are sort of conversations you'd have, because you'd be examining the relationship each morning as you attack whatever scene you're going to tackle.
“Quite often in these circumstances, you'd find that the couple divorces. These two haven’t and they somehow managed to stay together, and in some ways, that's because they've allowed each other to grieve in their own way.”
Virginia Gilbert’s feature film cleverly raises new questions about the dilemmas the couple face when the young woman (played by The Crown’s Erin Doherty) returns home. It’s the type of complex drama that Harris loves to work on - and would love to see more of on the big screen.
“Hollywood gave up on an audience that was outside of 14 to 22 years old and mostly boys. That's particularly evident in the decade of superhero films that we're in,” he says.
“But they were kind of divesting themselves of that audience a while back, and that's why into that vacuum stepped the HBOs with The Sopranos and The Wire and AMC with Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the so-called golden age of television.”
Over the course of his career, Harris has given us some of his most memorable work in that golden age, including his Emmy-nominated role as Lane Pryce in Mad Men, as King George VI in The Crown, and in the miniseries Chernobyl.
It’s little surprise that the young Jared Harris would pursue a screen career, given that he was the son of one of Ireland’s most-legendary stars. His father, Richard, is regarded as one of our greatest-ever talents, while his mother Elizabeth Rees Williams was also a trained actor.
Last year, Harris came to University College Cork to view his father’s archives, having brought them home to Ireland. The archives span over 50 years of the Limerick man’s life and include sentimental props, artefacts, letters and photos that capture his colourful personality and love of storytelling.
“It's a new relationship for me so but I'm incredibly grateful to Cork and to the university for responding in the way they responded,” he says of the move. “It makes a huge difference when you do get that kind of response. We've been there a couple of times because we went to the film festival. We took my father's documentary [The Ghost of Richard Harris] there, and we took a movie called Brave the Dark there last year that I made with my brother in Pennsylvania.
“I'm looking forward to developing it [the relationship] even further. My father had enough material for a second volume of poetry, so I know that one of the goals is to get that published. Right now they're still archiving everything. The first thing that's going to happen is that there's going to be an exhibit that's going to start at the Hunt Museum in Limerick. It was very important to myself, it was important to Cork University, that Limerick be the place where the archive would be unveiled for the first time.”
Harris has vivid memories of coming to Ireland with his parents as a young child, and he still has many relatives here. He remembers Kilkee in Co Clare, in particular, very clearly. When his parents were together they went back and forth to Ireland but when they split up, that stopped.
“It was probably as much my mother who wanted us to have a relationship with the Irish side of the family. And my cousins absolutely knew my mother well - they adored my mother. They stayed in touch with her.
“Dad, I think there's a certain point where he kind of... he stopped. I think that it just took such a lot for him emotionally, spiritually, psychically, for him to forge the path that he forged. He did it really through willpower, sheer willpower, to get from Limerick to London to Hollywood. It sort of defies belief in a way, but he made it happen just by sheer force of will. And then, of course the world was open to him. It was a pretty tempting place.
“The biggest difference that happened to his career, and the reason why he could have the career of a leading man, rather than supporting actor, which was what was always open at that point to men, was largely down to the play Look Back in Anger. You didn't have to be from the upper middle class or the aristocracy to have your stories be about you. That opened up a whole new world of storytelling that allowed himself, O'Toole and Finney and Burton, they could have careers suddenly.”
Harris is currently in the US, filming the latest project from top director Kathryn Bigelow, whose films include The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. “I can’t tell you anything about it though!” he smiles.
It’s the latest in a career spanning over three decades, and he says as well as a great screenplay, there are other factors he looks for when it comes to picking his roles.
“Ideally it would be a great script with a great director, a fantastic cast, a great part obviously - that's why it's a great script. So, great script, great part, great director, great cast and be well paid. It never comes as a package!
“I would say it's always about the material. If you're having to force yourself to finish the script, then that's not a good idea. You shouldn't be saying yes to something like that. You should say no, and somebody else will actually respond to that material - and they deserve to have somebody working on it who feels that way about it.”
- Reawakening is now in cinemas
