Tyger Drew-Honey plays Dan, the narrator and central character of the second season of Lucy Catherine’s supernatural thriller Harland, currently running in the Limelight slot on BBC Radio 4, and available on BBC Sounds. He chatted with Paul Simpson….

 

How did you get involved with Harland?

The traditional route. I think I heard about it from my agent and it was just an offer in the first place because I worked with Lucy many years before [on a series called Halfway Here – right]. I had a look at the script: a nice project. I was pleased to get involved in the first place and then when it went again, it was good news all round. Let’s hope it does again.

Did you get any sort of guide from Lucy or from the director Toby Swift as to who Dan was when you started? Or have you picked up everything about him from the script?

No, I think the characterisation in that sense is always kind of a real mix of the writer, the director and the performer. You all have to come together. Toby was giving great direction and I was finding a lot of my own stuff in the reads and stuff and obviously, the whole shape of it’s there from the writing. It definitely comes through the directing and the actual doing of it, as well as just reading the script.

In series 1 what did you think of him as a character?

He’s obviously a great guy and whatnot but I think, especially in the first series, he’s kind of in a dead end job. I think he’s come out of his youth and realised this is now his life.

I don’t feel like he has a particular joie de vivre – he gets swept up in this adventure and forms these feelings. It’s almost a roller coaster, his lifetime, everything’s been leading to this. I think he’s got great intentions and he’s trying his best at life but I think he may be looking for a bit of excitement.

In series 2 Dan is the narrator and we’re inside his head for a large part of the time. Did that change how you saw him?

Well, first and foremost as an actor it was a really nice surprise to have the part made so much bigger. That was lovely. It was the first project I’ve ever been involved in where I’ve been in every single scene of a show, across a whole series, which is not easy to do in radio.

Obviously because it was so much of Dan and there’s so much narration from Dan this series, the writer gives a lot more of him. He’s a bit more vulnerable – the audience will get to know him better and as such, I got to know him better. You see the real Dan and I think it’s really nice.

Do you think he’s found a cause to fight for?

Yes. A couple of times in the script, Dan will refer to his own life as ‘a tiny empty shell of a life.’ And he’s kind of got some of the sentiments I explained before – he’s slightly disenfranchised by life but now also he’s traumatised by [events in] series 1 and he goes on this journey. I think you’re right, it is a cause that he’s got to fight for. Otherwise he’s just going to rot in his day job and feel sad about the past, or he can get involved and be proactive.

And, of course, he has to deal with the fact that the man in the hare mask is his double.

Yes, which is obviously very unsettling! That’s a theme that runs throughout – this constant looking over one’s shoulder. And also, in this series because there’s a video game integrated into a lot of the storytelling, I think at a certain point, it becomes hard for Dan to distinguish the truth from the false, so to speak, which is a really nice layer to the whole thing.

The scene between Dan and Linsday in episode 2 where you’re talking about what you viewed on the CCTV, of her on the altar with the man with the hare mask in the previous series, was beautifully played by the pair of you. The embarrassment on both sides is almost palpable.

And that’s great, as actors, when you have these scenes and you come back after a year. A year before we were thinking about what she was doing on the altar and now we’re reacting to it still. It’s just really nice as actors to get that sense of continuity. I haven’t seen Jasmine [Hyde, who plays Lindsay] in the interim, haven’t talked to her and now we’re back, reacting to her doing all this stuff on the altar.

One of the great things about the scripts is that you feel the characters have a life outside of the 25 minutes that we’re spending with them. You and the actor haven’t seen each other in that time, but equally the characters haven’t, so you’re building into that.

Yes, that’s it, yes.

Filming for television, you don’t shoot stuff in order; if you do you’re incredibly lucky. On radio, that can happen, so did you record these scripts in order or were you constrained by when actors were available, so you were doing bits and pieces of all five?

We were doing bits and pieces all over the shop, because we had a couple of actors doing theatre at the time who needed to [go to] rehearsals. I think we tried to get it in some kind of order, especially the narration. Effectively, we did the narration in one day from the start of episode 1 to the end of episode 5. It was really good to be able to do that in one go.

Yes, it’s normal to be just a bit out of sync which is a little bit more difficult to get your head round but that’s where a great director like Toby Swift comes in. At the start of the scene he’ll tell you exactly where you are, what’s just happened, what’s on your mind, all that kind of stuff. You just think ‘Right, that’s where I am in the story, get back into that.’

It’s helping you hit your mark in a different way, isn’t it?

Yes, totally and the director, for instance, he’s not only getting you to a certain destination but he’s making sure you start from the right point every time. With radio you’ve got to convey everything with the voice but then again, it doesn’t feel very different because if you’ve conveying it with your face, it comes out in your voice but yes.

You’ve played a lot of different roles from Outnumbered to plays on virtual theatre; what’s been the biggest challenge of this for you as an actor?

It was probably the mountain of narration, because, there’s so much – thousands of words worth. It’s great to be the one narrating the series and being the author voice of it, it’s fantastic, but when you’re actually sat down at the desk and you’ve been doing these lines for two hours straight and some of them are quite long sentences and there’s three commas in there and you’ve got to get the intonation right and there’s 42 lines on this page… After a while your brain goes into this kind of weird place where you struggle to read. So I’d have to shake my head and bump myself on the head a bit to try and remember to read because the words were turning into scribbles a bit.

That was just mentally exhausting – it probably only took maybe five or six hours but I felt more tired doing that, than being up and around on my feet all day doing various little bits and bobs. It can be mentally taxing, that’s for sure.

Between series 1 and series 2, did you have any sort of input into what happened with Dan? When you read the scripts were there moments where you went, ‘Are you sure he would do that?’ Or was it very much, you went with what was there?

No, I went with what was there. There was nothing like that that jumped out at me, it was just as it was. I obviously did my bit with the performance but there was no semantics or lines that I wanted changing or anything.

Without any spoilers for episode 5, would you like to come back and play him again?

Oh yes, for sure, 100%!

Harland continues in the Limelight slot on BBC Radio 4 on Fridays at 2.15 pm; the whole of series 1 and 2 are available on BBC Sounds.

Tyger photo by Stewart Bywater and used with permission; thanks to Emma Donnan for assistance in arranging this interview.