Richard
Harrington
Heather Arnold talks to
the actor behind Chief
Inspector Tom Mathias,
and the star of Wales’
biggest new show,
Richard Harrington.
I hear you’ve been around the globe lately
promoting Y Gwyll / Hinterland?
Yeah, you finish a job then you kind of forget
about it, and then you move on, and that’s
just the embryonic stages of any project
really. We were at Cannes Monday to
Wednesday just promoting Hinterland, and
we were definitely up there with the best of
them. It’s a good product, and we’re all very
proud of it, so whatever it takes.
Do you feel that Y Gwyll / Hinterland
is different to other projects that you’ve
worked on?
It’s different in a sense that it adheres to a
cop genre, which is a crime/drama formula,
but it’s what we do with those things
which make it different. It’s very much a
compassionate piece of work, and it’s shot
in an environment which is inhospitable in
lots of ways. It’s on the west coast of Wales
and it gets bombarded by a weather front
from the Atlantic, which is almost biblical,
and you have to adhere to those kinds of
things. It’s a place that can look like hell but
can look like heaven as well. You go there
in the summer months and it was like the
Serengeti, and you just think “I can’t believe
six months ago we were here and it was
impossible to speak because of the wind
and now we’re all in t-shirts”.
The whole area of Aberystwyth is a mythical
looking place anyway, so in that sense it
will have much more of a European feel
to it than a British thing. The character is
shrouded in mystery, which almost sounds
like a cliché but it’s not. His back story is
watertight, it’s absolutely fascinating, and I
think we get to hear snippets of that.
Did you prepare for the character of
Tom Mathias in any specific way?
I guess he was so well written as character,
that it was my job to tame him and to not
play too much with him. The power of him
is he walks amongst this world, and I had to
trust the fact that the character existed so
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