In Nicholas Briggs’ Big Finish Original, The Human Frontier, the AI has a key part in the drama. Lucy Briggs-Owen – perhaps best known to Big Finish fans as Carol Wilson in The Avengers – plays Nilly, and to mark the series’ release, chatted about her various Big Finish roles with Paul Simpson…

NB There are spoilers in here for The Human Frontier

 

How did you get into audio acting?

My introduction to Big Finish, which was my first piece of audio recording, was The Avengers, which is probably ten years ago now.

It was something that I’d always wanted to do. I expressed it to my acting agent and the acting agency also had a voice department so that’s how it happened.

Big Finish has just been very very good to me. I seem to have gotten most of my experience through them for sure.

If you remember, what surprised you about what you needed to do for audio that you weren’t expecting? Or what aspects of acting challenged you because you were doing it in that format?

Sometimes, it was what I didn’t need to do because of the amount they do unbelievably successfully in post. I had assumed we’d run up and down on the spot and but the skill is actually staying still so you don’t cause the mic to pop with interference but moving around so your breath sounds as if you are physically doing whatever activity that is.

I had assumed that that would be a lot more real, that you really would be doing those things, but no.

The other thing is obviously one doesn’t need to learn the lines because you have the script in front of you, but I think it does take as much prep as a theatre job or a screen job, because you’re thinking about the same thing. You’re thinking about the relationships between characters and what you want, your super-objective, all those things.

There were loads of similarities, and then it was the technical things that now feel familiar, but thinking about it, I was a bit daunted by how intimate you can be and nice and quiet. I was used to projecting things quite far and also you’ve got to be careful of little things like certain consonants really pop on the microphone.

They now seem kind of feel like second nature. Nick might disagree, he might say, ‘I’m telling her forever to stop doing those things’! I don’t know (laughs).

I suppose I did learn quite a bit. I remember being very nervous on my first day.

For The Avengers, did you go back on that and look at the episodes that survived and see how Carol was played originally? She’s in one of the existing ones. isn’t she?

Yes she is. I watched the boys [Steed and Keel] a lot more because I wanted to know what the tone was, but I didn’t want to feel like I was copying anything. And the scripts were so good and [director] Ken Bentley was lovely to work with. I knew the face and I very much got a sense of the period but I didn’t ever want to copy anything

Everything is very much in RP [received pronunciation – ‘BBC English’]. Did it feel like using a different language with the RP? Because it’s so similar and yet it’s so different.

Yes, it’s just a little bit more formal. I speak with RP but with that time period it was particularly precise. And the precision was useful actually because they’re quite boundaried people and lots of the drama comes from when they do have to get up close to each other. The fact that it’s not quite as casual as we are today was where lots of the drama and the humour came from at times. So the RP was really useful.

Yes, in a funny way they were sort of mentally socially distancing!

Exactly. It’s so true that the voice totally betrays the psychology so often. That’s absolutely true of The Avengers and that time period I think.

Moving forward, you’ve done various different things: The Prisoner with Nick, you’ve done some Doctor Whos. Is this genre something you enjoy anyway? Is it something you’d watch?

Yes and it’s particularly something I would read. I love reading epic dramas. I missed Doctor Who [on television] but my siblings who are younger than me, when it came back around, they were glued. I got to know it a bit through them.

You’re from the generation without a Doctor.

Yes, but I was very grateful for having younger siblings because they just adored it.

On The Prisoner, were you in the same episode as Genevieve?

Yes, I was. That’s where we first met actually. I was thrilled that we worked together again [on The Human Frontier]. I found The Prisoner really upsetting. Not because it was a negative experience at all – it was, as ever, a positive Big Finish experience – but it was really disturbing.

Mark [Elstob as Number 6] is so good and I was playing someone who was so creepy (laughs). I found it really got under my skin actually. But yes that was with Genevieve.

In his version of The Prisoner Nick very much tapped into that psychological side of it.

It’s like that feeling of not being able to wake up from a bad dream – it’s terrifying. And it’s so well produced and the scripts were so good… it really got to me.

When you’ve got something like that in your head so much, what do you do to move away from it? Is it just you have to put a mental door down and move on?

I tend to watch comedy to just shake it off and feel light again, watch things that make me laugh. I put on an episode of Modern Family or Parks and Rec or I watch Saturday Night Live, all those guys doing their silly sketches.

The Human Frontier – how did that come about? Did that come direct from Big Finish?

Yes.

What did Nick tell you about the part or did he just send you the script?

He sent me the script and he said, ‘You are the A.I.’ I was thinking to myself, “Oh, that’s nice, he’d like to have me in the room again but I’m just basically being Alexa.” I figured I’d be saying ‘Yes’ whenever someone asks something because I had no idea how integrated and sophisticated the A.I. programme was going to be.

When I read it, I thought “oh, this is really interesting”. I did try it at home, practising sounding a bit like an Alexa, just quite neutral. And that’s absolutely not what he’d written. The point is, and the story is, that she’s our brains, she’s our thought process, we are the same thing.

It was a funny one to play or try to connect to because Nilly didn’t really have a conscience but she lies. She bends the truth and she can be manipulative for good or for ill – and that’s really human.

To me, Nilly is probably the most three dimensional of all the characters.

Yes, it’s funny isn’t it?

What’s even weirder is going back and listening to the beginning, knowing what happens in episode 4. What did you think when you discovered how manipulative she was?

I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was really interesting and obviously it helps the story be much more interesting – and it also then throws in the ethical question of whether or not this is appropriate and how much we can think for ourselves.

It was such a clever thing to do because obviously it’s ahead of our time but it’s also a massive comment on the way that we consume technology and arguably, have technology consumes us. So, to that end I found I was pleased that she did turn out to be manipulative because I think it was far more interesting.

I wondered just when she was actually telling the truth and how much she’s serving (Nick’s character) Dendrick’s agenda from the start. Particularly that coda at the very end with the two of them where it’s, “Hang on, has he been on the ship somewhere or has he been in contact all the way through?”

But I think those questions are also quite useful for a sequel aren’t they? Potentially.

There is a future to it.

It’s funny, I totally started to think of her as a person, as a character. There’s something about Nilly that you wonder about her evolution, and if tech can end up becoming its own living breathing thing with completely independent thought. She’s not really independent from [Dendrick], though, because he is God, for want of a better word. He’s the highest power, isn’t he?

Yes. She obviously has some sentience and a degree of control. As Nick has said, episode 4 is called Control for a very good reason. Everybody’s trying to get control.

Yes.

Were there any particular challenges with portraying her?

I think the main challenge was to embrace her humanity and not to sound like a computer. Unusually, I was in a booth all by myself because the others, being humans, were interacting with each other more. But that actually wasn’t a problem. It wasn’t a hindrance, it was a help because I don’t have a physical presence. That helped to understand the dynamic between all of us. But it was lonely.

You were at The Soundhouse – if you’d been at The Moat you’d have all been in booths anyway…

Yes, that’s true.

What intrigued you most about playing her?

Obviously getting her humanity, her sentience across.

Were there elements where you needed to check with Nick as to how he wanted her played? It often sounds like two people talking, two people trying to get something done, such as when she’s talking to Anna and she’s trying to get to Daisy…

Yes. I think Nick was really keen to have her sound as human as possible. There were takes when I was slightly colder or a bit more robotic and it didn’t feel right. He was quite encouraging of the warmth and the colour.

But what intrigued me I think was, how do you humanise an android? She is a really incredible piece of software, I suppose, but it’s exciting to imagine where we might go, and what the future might hold, for us and our relationship with computers.

That was intriguing and exciting, even though the audience always knows who I am, to try to get the audience to forget that this is a computer. The stakes are never that high for Nilly because she’s always going to be alright. But I think that she cares very much and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed finding that relationship.

 

Thanks to Nick Briggs for assistance in arranging this interview.

The Human Frontier is out now from Big Finish, with the first part currently free to download.

Read our review here.

Read our interview with Nicholas Briggs here and here

And our interview with Genevieve Gaunt (the Commander) here