roominthecastle:Did you [and Stellan] have a conversation about your approach to each other in those

roominthecastle:Did you [and Stellan] have a conversation about your approach to each other in those confrontational scenes? JH: We had a very simple conversation and that was that I told him that he was the alpha male. You play this game in drama school, in acting classes, where you take a deck of cards – you have an ace of spades and a 2 of clubs and a whole bunch of cards in between. You give them to the actors but they are not allowed to look at them and they put them on their forehead. Just from the way that people interact with you, you have to figure out what card you’ve got. Then you line up after about 20 minutes in a row from highest to lowest. Highest always gets it right. Lowest always gets it right. The court cards normally get it right. There’s sort of a mix-up somewhere between the 8’s and the jacks. One or two of them would be mixed up. Generally, they always get it right. Stellan was the ace of spades. I was the 2 of clubs. And it sort of worked because it fed into that story which was similar to Emily’s character, which is that they are the smartest people in the room but nobody pays attention to them. No one’s listening to them, nobody believes them. Even if they do, they don’t care. Like when [Ulana] says, “I’m a nuclear physicist. You used to run a shoe factory.” and [the deputy secretary] says, “Yeah, I prefer my opinion.” And that’s what they were confronting all the time. The real Legasov had that sort of Slavic swagger to him. He was apowerful man and had that alpha confidence but my character doesn’t. And thereason why he doesn’t is that he is in contrast to Stellan’s character. Theydidn’t want the two of them the same way, so my character became different. Atthat point, I just put all my own research aside and said, “I’m playingCraig’s character” because that’s the version which suits his story andhis narrative. And we discovered this idea that he was somebody who wasn’t sociallycomfortable, he wasn’t brilliant at interacting with people, so he has ajourney in that sense. He was pretty useless at playing the political game,which obviously gets him into trouble. So he became a completely fictionalizedcharacter in that sense. For him to get anything done, he had to go through Stellan. So he had no agency in that sense. He had no power. So [the alpha/omega dynamic] sort of seemed to make sense. And Stellan was happy with it. -- source link

More pics about