Adam Hugill plays Constable Carrot in the Sir Terry Pratchett-inspired BBC America series The Watch. Partnered frequently with Marama Corlett’s Angua, Carrot seems like an innocent abroad, blithely expecting the Watch to be able to maintain the law. But he’s in for a shock… Paul Simpson chatted with Hugill about life in Ankh-Morpork.

 

How much did you know of Terry Pratchett and Discworld before you got involved with The Watch?

I knew very little actually. I was brought up on Tolkien fantasy and stuff like that by my dad, so I’d heard of Terry Pratchett but I’d never been introduced to his work. I’d heard he was a master but that was all I’d known.

So when I got the audition I had to do a lot of research into the world and the characters and how it all fit together.

What did you do for the audition?

I was given the first two episodes and maybe three or four scenes – my introduction with Angua and other scenes from the first episode. I had to prepare those and then rock up and do them for the producers.

What did you think of the character when you first read him?

I only got told his name by my agent on the phone. He said ‘Carrot’ and I was like, ‘What? Carrot?’ I’m not used to getting character names like Carrot so that was, first off, a surprise. Then I did a lot of research online about who this guy was and what he was as well because he’s meant to be massive in the books.

I just had to come at it from an angle of layering it with our story. What were our two episodes, how has Carrot been introduced? He’s this young guy coming into the Watch, expecting to find a city that he can fight crime in but it’s all legalised, to an extent – the Guilds and their quota and receipts. It was baffling, just as much as it would be for the audience member to watch it through Carrot’s eyes. They’d be as baffled as he was to come into this world, that he couldn’t control anymore.

What do you think he makes of the rest of the Watch when he first sees them? What did you make of them when you first saw the costumes and everything – obviously Detritus is one thing but even just seeing Richard as Sam…

(Laughs) As Vimes yes!

I think Carrot at first, he is like a bull in a china shop in a way. He rocks up and he thinks he knows what to do. He’s strong willed but he’s naïve at the same time so he starts butting heads with everyone. No one understands one another and he comes in with all these bright ideas that he thinks he can change and make a change in the city. It’s a tumultuous relationship with a lot of them at first, a bit of push and pull with Angua, a love/hate relationship that goes on throughout the series.

It’s about starting to understand each other, I think, and understanding each other’s ways of doing things [so they can] all come together to then fight the crime when they find the loopholes. There’s definitely a lot of tumultuous relationships in the first couple of episodes at least, before they start to go on the actual journey together.

Richard as Vimes – he got very dirty, very dirty. I saw him on the first day, being covered in a layer of dirt. I was the cleanest one there because we thought Carrot, he’s by the book, so maybe he should be clean fingernails, no dirt on him. He’s pristine, he’s a law man. He rocks up and everyone else is covered in dirt and he’s the only one that isn’t.

Did you do any rehearsals over here before you went out to South Africa or was everything down there?

We did a read through in the UK, a week or so before we flew out, and then there was maybe a week or two in South Africa where we had pre-production of stunt rehearsals, readthroughs of scenes and getting to grips with costume fittings and all that sort of stuff. The bulk of it was out in South Africa.

Had you been out there before?

I had, yes. I’d been out in 2014 I think it was, when I was seventeen. I did a rugby tour out there when I was at school. I’d been out for two weeks to Cape Town, so it was weird going from seeing it from a child’s eyes to [being] an adult working out there.

Pre Covid, when there was the capability to move around, did you get the chance to actually see some of Cape Town and the surrounding area or were you very much studio based?

Well, that’s the thing, luckily we were all over the shop. We did a lot at Cape Town Film Studios, we did loads on several locations about 20 minutes outside of central Cape Town. We were shooting out at the sand dunes over at Atlantis*, about an hour away on the side of Cape Town. You’d look back all the way on to Cape Town, you see this gorgeous view. We were shooting all over – into the forests over in one of the wineries.

In our spare time, me and Mar especially, we were friends with a makeup artist called Marie. She lives there so she took us out in her car at the weekends to go to the beaches or wherever. So, I did get to see a lot of Cape Town and beyond, when time permitted because we were quite busy.

*[Editor’s note – no, they weren’t travelling the multiverse. There is a town called Atlantis]

Were you basically working on one script at a time?

No, we worked in blocks so the first two episodes were block one [with Craig Viveiros directing], then we had Brian Kelly directing 3, 4, 5 and Emma Sullivan for 6, 7, 8.

We’d work in those blocks of episodes but sometimes you would be filming a scene in the Watch House which was a closed set location within a studio and then the next day we’d be in a forest in a winery about two hours away.

Did you get all eight scripts before you started?

No, we were on a journey really. There were a lot of chats with [writer] Simon [Allen]; he was very happy to sit down with us and talk about where our characters were going and what the potential trajectory of the series would be.

We were living it as we went really. We’d have a readthrough for each block – so we had two readthroughs while we were out there – and each time we’d suddenly get three scripts. We’d have to read through them and see what the hell was going to happen and then boom, you start filming them the next week.

Was there anything that you went ‘No, I didn’t expect that’?

Twilight Canyons was crazy, I never saw that coming. Just an old age people’s home for all kinds of creatures, never mind people…

‘Cohen the Barbarian please come to reception’…

(Laughs) Yes. If you look in the background, if you rewatch them, there are so many Easter eggs dotted around.

You’ve got Cheery, very much pushing Carrot into saying something to Angua. Can you drop some hints about what’s coming for those two?

Like I said, it’s a love/hate relationship that goes on a bit of a journey because they spend so much time together. I think they really are on the same level playing field in their way of thinking, it’s just they have different ways of going about it. Angua will straightaway shoot a Goblin and Carrot will interrogate the Goblin. They have very different ways but they get to the end in the same way. They have a lot of time for each other and understand that they’re both coming from the same emotional place, of a loss and a need for kinships really.

I think it’s really lovely to see them become closer and share more of themselves with each other because they’re both quite guarded. Especially Angua, for her to start to open up to someone is quite nice.

It’s been very nicely played, in the first four episodes. It doesn’t feel like they’re being pushed into something.

It’s very subtle. It’s quite natural really, when you don’t know where you stand with someone and you don’t know how you feel about them. You might just have a great respect or admiration for them but that means you might feel protective.

How much of the stunt work did you do yourself?

Any stunts I had, I got to do. There is a stunt in a later episode I got to do but then when they wanted a really fancy shot, they got someone else in – but they ended up not using the really fancy shot, they just used my shot. I’m just saying, I was very good obviously! But I’m really gutted I didn’t actually end up getting to do that many stunts. Lara [Rossi as Lady Sybil] got a lot of stunts, so did Mar, she got a lot of cool kick ass stunts, but I got a few less, which was a shame.

What did you find the biggest challenge of playing Carrot?

Probably having to keep a character journey going and balancing where he is emotionally and where he is as a person.

He has to grow throughout the series, to fit in with the Watch and work as a team. He’s also coming from a place of having no family and wanting a new family and needing love because of his past.

It was about balancing that along the journey of it being this crazy wild mystery of finding the treasure and trying to stop Carcer, to not make it one note throughout the series. Trying to balance the craziness of the world and trying to make it rooted in its human emotion, which is quite hard with this sort of high crazy fantasy.

What was it like when COVID hit?

It was like a whirlwind. It all suddenly happened. It was like everyone knew it was going on around the world but then it starts to get very close to home and we were thousands of miles away from our homes. One day it was suddenly like “Covid’s a real problem”, or could be a real problem. There were no cases in Cape Town yet but suddenly there was a lot of hand sanitiser on set and all this sort of stuff. Then one morning, we got told, ‘We’re going to have to fly everyone home tomorrow morning because it’s starting to become really bad and the UK’s probably going to be shut down’. We were six days away from finishing filming. We got flown home very quickly.

So then you had the pick ups over here.

(Laughs) Yes about seven months later.

Did you find that difficult, picking it up for the scenes from those last two episodes? Did you have to look at some footage to get yourself back into it?

There is a tonal change in the character, I can’t say why. So I really needed to rewatch some of that episode to understand what the hell I was doing in that episode, to understand and then carry on. So yes, I had to rewatch some stuff to make sure I knew where I was in the story, how I portrayed it in the episodes and not just reading it on a page.

For that, did you see footage with effects put in? What did you think when you saw it?

Yes, we’ve been quite lucky really. I’ve been sent, constantly, episodes in different stages of production. It’s been quite nice to see a stick being the dragon, then suddenly a smoke cloud being a dragon, then the fully formed dragon.

I’m fascinated by filmmaking so it’s amazing to see all the layers that go in – the colour gradings and all these things that change the world from what you saw on the day and what you’ve seen as it’s gone along to the finished product.

I was really impressed, I was stoked to see it all finished. It’s so cool because you don’t see that on the day normally; you get to see drawings.

So when Goodboy’s in his cage was it just a light effect to a large extent on set?

A lot of our show was practical effects, even Goodboy to an extent. There is a deleted scene where I actually handle Goodboy and it was what Goodboy looks like. It was a life size model so you could hand it in your hand but even that was so lifelike, it didn’t look like a little bit of green fluff.

I wasn’t in Game of Thrones sitting on a green ball looking at a circular green room. I didn’t really have to imagine [much], bar looking up at the sky and imagining a dragon. Everything was very practical and very there for us. The only real VFX was the extension of the world because that’s impossible to build. It was so easy to do because they had it all there for us.

Is there a particular moment that you’ll look back on in 40 years and go “That was what The Watch meant to me”?

There was so much – the joy of being in Cape Town with a friend. I guess the second episode especially really holds a special place in my heart.

I loved, and still do to this day, the scene with me, Richard and James Fleet as the Archchancellor where we interrogate him. He has this sound when he swears, a trombone noise. Me and Richard couldn’t stop laughing, it was so funny.

James is a consummate professional, he didn’t break once. It was amazing. but me and Richard couldn’t, we broke mid scene. There was a fog horn – one of those little airhorns? They are bloody loud. We were sitting on the sofa and the first AD was lying behind the sofa with the airhorn, ready to squeeze it. It was so loud in our ears and [what you see] was all real, that was just us absolutely cacking ourselves.

That will stay in my heart forever because that was the first couple of weeks of filming. The early days were some blissful days in my memories.

 

 

The Watch continues on Sundays on BBC America at 8 p.m. Click here to read our other coverage.