Maxance Vincent
Young Sherlock director Guy Ritchie is known for a spontaneous directorial style, where he prefers improvisation over memorization and has frequently thrown a written script out right before shooting to keep the actors on their toes.
As he is currently filming the second season of Young Sherlock in Palermo, Italy, actor Dónal Finn, who portrays Moriarty in the series, tells Awards Radar during a Zoom press day about the first season that he is still “in the process of learning not to be afraid of it, because we look for safety. I think that’s what a script can give you sometimes, even if the scenes feel bold, unpredictable, and dangerous.
You still have the safety of going, “I will work on my corner of this thing, I’ll bring it to work, and I will protect the ideas that I have with the lines that I know.” There is something that feels a little bit initially kind of unsafe about this way of meeting new ideas, new lines, new motivations, maybe 20 or 30 minutes before you filmed them, probably even less sometimes. However, [Guy] is incredibly instinctual.
What I’m learning through the work right now is that he has a great vision for what is real, and when we kind of move away from something that feels real and move towards something that feels possibly heightened or projected. It means that the lines are easy to learn because they feel true. We start from an incredible place where Matthew Parkhill and our team of writers have developed this incredible vision of a story across eight episodes, and then Guy is bringing his tone or his kind of imagination to it as a flourish on what’s already there, so it’s a pretty exciting partnership.”
Finn initially felt daunted by the idea of playing Moriarty but felt that “some of that stress or pressure was being relieved by the idea that we were meeting Moriarty at a time that we’ve never really known him, and that some characteristics that we see of him in the show mightsubvert the ideas that we have about him later in life, that he’s like this Napoleon of crime or a criminal mastermind. I think it would be strange if someone who’s in their early adulthood lived and thought like that. We want to see a change in him.
I didn’t feel the pressure of having to arrive at the place where Jared Harris or Andrew Scott starts, because they start at a point of pure nemesis, corruption, or antagonism. There’s so much room within what’s written and created by Matthew and Guy that we see the potential for danger in this person, the potential for cracks, and the potential for separation, but we also see why they’re drawn to each other, what they like about each other, and why they enjoy spending time together. It’s a mutual obsession that they have, and I think it’s because they recognize that they may have found someone who’s as brilliant as themselves between Moriarty and Sherlock, so they’re compelled to spend time with each other.”
Watch the full interview below:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
Comments
Loading…