In anticipation of the home entertainment release of The Tunnel, HeyUGuys had the privilege to speak with one of the show’s more shadowy characters, Stephen Beaumont, played by Joseph Mawle.
With an open and honest reflection on his career to date, Mawle looked back to how dressing up in his youth set him on a collision course with the big and small screen, and the unenviable task of playing a Stark under George R.R. Martin’s ruthless pen. During our conversation he offered an in-depth commentary on the show in which he spoke enthusiastically about the dark undertones of The Tunnel and its exploration of moral ambiguity, before looking ahead to two of his upcoming film projects.
Why a career in acting? Was there that one inspirational moment?
[Laughs] Probably watching too many movies as a youngster, and wanting to be a bit like Mr Benn; to be able to put on any kind of costume and experience different things and ways of looking at life. I don’t think it was as deep back then as I am making out; it was much more superficial. To be fair, it was probably just dressing up, but from there it kind of grew, and I became more and more educated – just about. Its childhood tribulations, and how difficult it is, what one needs to do to achieve some kind of reality on screen or on stage that gives people the opportunity to come on a visceral journey with a character.
There are not many professions which afford you an opportunity to explore identity the way the acting profession does. Each role or part is likened to that of a mask.
I think that it’s like building an album in a funny kind of way. You find out what you are good at and what you are not so good at. You quite often work on those things that you are not so good at because rather than the things you do easily they are what interest you. Of course it is nice to complete a job and then say goodbye to it and start a new one afresh. But ultimately all of the characters in one way or another are a part of us. Part of the verse is saying it, turning up different volumes or turning down other volumes if you know what I mean?
Everything creative is channelled through the individual person, and is therefore shaped and influenced by the individual’s life experiences. It’s an inescapable fact.
Exactly, and whatever has inspired you, whatever turns your head or makes you think about a subject or an issue in a different way, and especially something like The Tunnel which is so focused on social welfare, the social political world that we live in, and how we navigate our way through that, how we see it and how other people see it. I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s an interesting drama in a sense. How many people were with the Truth Terrorist? How many people were on the other side thinking well he has a point there or has he got a point? It’s great to do things that throw up questions and challenges people to a point, but not to where they are left utterly confused.
One of the points of interest is the blurring of the line between good and evil in The Tunnel, which sees you explore the moral ambiguity, which is particularly pertinent to your character Stephen Beaumont.
Definitely, and it’s important that we continue to explore that ambiguity. Essentially most people believe they are doing the right thing, but the consequences of those actions might be perceived as deplorable or despicable from an outsider’s point of view. There are very few people who actively go out to do something they don’t believe in or for no purpose at all; no matter how misconstrued or confused those aspirations or purposes were in the first place. That’s particularly true of the character I portray in The Tunnel. He’s someone who has tried to do good, but it’s such a complicated place that he’s come from that it’s very easily misinterpreted, and even misinterpreted by himself. This is to the point that he can delude himself into thinking he’s doing something good when in fact, and I think anybody watching knows he’s as bad as anybody else in the show.
The Tunnel is not necessarily filled with hateful characters, but is it fair to say it has its share of flawed as well as darker characters?
Yeah, and there are multi-flaws in most of the characters. A lot of what those flaws are is not revealed in the drama, and that keeps a little secret in our pockets. But there are hopefully enough nuggets in there for someone to grab onto and piece together their own story. It’s great to have brave television where we are not being expositional about it by feeding the audience every little piece of information, but presenting a person and leaving them to discover as much as they are willing to. It really is just a question of how far you are willing to go, and whether you want to dig. Obviously we did our digging as actors playing these characters, and we discovered a lot of unpleasant and ungainly thoughts that were rather uncomfortable to think about. I don’t think many of the subjects are nice ones to contemplate, particularly for Stephen who is almost bordering autistic. Whilst I didn’t play that, there is certainly an element of him finding it difficult to relate to the world in the way that he understands it. There is a lot of catholic guilt thrown in, and probably a very unpleasant past with his father, which is what characterises himself and his need for his sister. Whilst he’s fascinating, it is not always nice.
One of the approaches to the detective stories is the mystery of its characters mirroring the central narrative mystery, therein creating a supplementary, but nonetheless important mystery or series of character based mysteries.
I think so yeah. These are people who seem to be on the edge of society, and on the edge of the world with it being set in a none land in a way; this place, this first bit of land between France and England, which they don’t go beyond. So they are people who are on the borders of society, and that was highlighted in the script and was something I liked in particular about Ben Richards’ writing.
Like the original Scandinavian crime drama The Bridge, The Tunnel and its characters are placed on the line which ties back to the subjectivity of good versus evil. It is a central theme of the show.
I think you’re absolutely right. It is a shadowy piece, and it is very noir in that way. In fact every single one of the characters has good elements and bad elements. No matter that there is clearly one Truth Terrorist, or perhaps not one Truth Terrorist depending on how you watch it, but everybody is trying to do something that they believe is the right thing to do. It is similar to stories like Se7en which have a very clever way of talking about issues in our society, and certainly within the church and in faith, no matter how misconstrued or out of context those issues may be.
Working within both film and television, how would you compare and contrast the two?
There are different elements. Basically film on the whole will take a lot longer to shoot because there’s a lot more detail going into it. But I would say time is the main one, and how one prepares or approaches it doesn’t change an awful lot, at least certainly not from my perspective. I have just finished doing a film, and whereas on The Tunnel you often have two cameras, I have been working on a set where there has been up to seven cameras shooting at the same time. So those things can change, and how you interact, but that can be a choice of the director rather than necessarily it being a rule of film. A film can be shot on one camera and be just as filmic. So there is not a huge amount of difference, but time is one of them, and allows you longer to compose and look at every element. So it comes back to time every time [laughs].
You’ve a couple of films in production: the action sci-fi film The Prototype with Neal McDonough, and Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea with Cillian Murphy. They are both distinctly interesting projects.
One of them is concerned with the real story behind Melville’s writing of Moby Dick, and the other one is about the future and is from the imagination of Andrew Will. So one of them is set in the past and the other is set in the future. Both have epic qualities about them, and both have a real say on our world and what we are doing here; what we’ve done and how we perceive ourselves. If anybody reads the book by Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea, it’s the true account of the Nantucket whalers who went out in 1819 and were attacked by a sperm whale. The rest of the story is about man and nature, how they interact with one another, and how nature is always going to win over.
The Tunnel is available to own on Blu-Ray and DVD now.
