In Howard Overman’s War of the Worlds, now airing on Star on Disney+, Natasha Little plays Sarah, separated from her husband and trying to look after her two children as the world goes to hell in the aftermath of the invasion. Shortly before season 2 arrived, Little chatted with Paul Simpson

 

Your character feels like very much the everywoman thrown in completely at the deep end at the start of all this and then everything just piles on top of her. Have you had a point where you wanted to go to Howard and say ’Oi, can she just catch a break for a minute?’

Yes, I have. Life for Sarah is tough and grim. She’s parenting these teenagers, and  that’s tough enough as it is, I think, and they’re not discussing A levels or gap year decisions. They’re in with the big stuff, the existential human crisis and communicating with aliens. So yes, I think she starts season 2 not in an easier place than season 1 and season 1 wasn’t easy for her.

No, my reviewer at the time basically said ‘She just never seems to catch a break’ and gets pushed into some bad decisions because there just aren’t alternatives to it. What did they tell you about the character when you came onboard originally?

I think when I read the first scripts, I read half of season one. The scripts came in and my agent said, ‘You’ve been offered this part’ and I said, ‘Oh OK let’s see what it’s like’ and then very quickly I was like ‘I love this character’. I couldn’t believe they wanted me to do it because I actually was like ‘Are you sure they haven’t got a different Natasha in mind?’ because I was so desperate to play her.

What was it about her?

I think Howard’s writing is quite economical but he does a clever thing. War of the Worlds is science fiction but what I think really attracted me to it was the human drama of it. So we have this epic landscape of alien invasion and all that’s happening there, the world as we know it collapsing… He can paint that very big picture but he’s also very talented at the microscopic stuff of human relationships. A woman whose marriage is crumbling and who’s trying to manage these teenagers.

I loved that the parenting of teenagers, whether you’re dealing with a post-apocalyptic world or not having clean underwear, there’s a similar tension and she’s doing it all on her own. So yes, I was immediately drawn to her as a character and the script for that reason. It’s the human drama that keeps you really invested in the characters alongside this epic story that’s going on as well.

That’s the thing with teens: end of the world drama is not having a clean pair of whatever. The teenage brain works completely differently and that’s something that people writing teenagers don’t always get. Ty and Daisy are obviously a little bit older than the characters they play but were there things that you altered between you in terms of body language?

Well, as you say Ty and Daisy are both older than the characters that they’re playing and I think they did capture that sort of self obsession, that lack of being able to see outside your own circumstances. With the scripts, there was very little that needed changing. I don’t recall much that needed changing at all – it was all pretty much there on the page.

Changing where just something falls under the tongue slightly better rather than altering how a scene worked.

Absolutely.

I think there’s a shift in the character from last season. The engine for her survival, for Sarah, I think is protecting her children. By the end of series 1, her daughter is not there and her teenage son is a gun wielding resistance fighter, so, I think in season 2, she seems even more alone because her children have had an acceleration into adulthood and a really bizarre, tough, grim, adulthood. They don’t need her in the way that they did, so I think she seems even more lonely in season 2.

So what was the greatest challenge in playing her either this season or last or both?

I think it was quite strange after being in lockdown. We filmed last year and War of the Worlds was the first, if not one of the first productions back after the pandemic and none of us really knew. I’m sure the producers had an idea but I was like ‘Wow, what is this going to look like?’

It was reassuring: we were all very safe, there were plenty of Covid protocols put in place and we were tested endlessly but none of us had worked under those circumstances before – because we hadn’t had a pandemic before.

I remember the first day we were filming, we were filming in quite a small room, there was myself, three other actors, the DOP and a director and a first AD and that felt very strange. Even though I knew that everyone had been tested and none of us had Covid. It was just strange to be in that proximity with people when I’d spent three months with my immediate family and two metres away from everyone else I know. But that actually became quite a bonus because realise how much you missed just being with other people.

War of the Worlds is streaming now on Star on Disney+