I chanced upon this interview with Johnny Flynn, who played the role of Ben Shotter in The Heretic - the global warming play I reported on a few months back. It's from the education pack prepared for the show. Other members of the show's team are interviewed as well, but I thought Flynn was very thoughtful.
What did you find most exciting when you read the play?
Initially it challenged my preconceptions about something I thought I knew. Because you go along with the orthodox perception of these issues and it basically made me really challenge what I was doing about these things, and in some ways compounded what I really felt about the issues of climate change. In my particular case it made me feel like making a more of a concerted effort to make sure my personal efforts were conscious and mindful. So it’s interesting as each different character has a different standing on the issues. My character is an eco warrior to start with and has quite a woolly approach to what he thinks he’s got to do, and then he’s challenged by this brilliant teacher who sits slightly on the other side of the fence. But instead of necessarily bringing him to her camp she just tries to sharpen up his foundations, and what it is he’s acting on. And that’s what it did for me. It makes you sift through whether bandwagons are easier to be attached to, and just know why you’re doing it; peer pressure or common consensus and political persuasions and things like that.
What did you do as an actor to figure out Ben’s vantage point on climate change?
I started reading a lot about the actual science, because I realised that I just basically accept a lot of what’s been told to me. So I did a bit of research. It’s very easy to see temperatures of the world throughout history, throughout the history of the world, so I did a bit of that. And then when we started rehearsing we went to the Science Museum and we had a talk with Sophie’s dad who is a geo-physicist and that was amazing - to highlight the amount of time that we have been on the planet and to show us what we’re dealing with, which is a very grey area. A lot of it is guess work. So I had to work out where I would pin Ben’s hopes into that, and how the accumulation of that science affects his understanding of it. By the end of the play what’s really nice about Ben is that there is something he’s holding on to: he still won’t go in a petrol driven car. He still thinks of global warming as a major threat, so that was really nice to have that still there. So that’s how I did it as an actor, by using the science. Also I didn’t go to University, that’s quite a big thing. Most people did go to University, most people over the age of 22 probably did, so I have to try and understand and portray why it is that somebody goes and does a three year, vocational degree.
What do you think is the biggest challenge in portraying Ben?
I think he’s really, really angry about a lot of things and I’m personally not so angry. If I do get angry then I try and address it. But I think he sees his rage as something he’s really happy with. He wants it to be attached to his pain, and he has this itch about that that I think is really key to his character. In this one particular scene, it’s like the pinnacle of his agitation - he starts to make motions to cut his wrists, in front of Diane, but it’s not like he’s going to do it, he’s just showing her that he could. I still have to really go into that. When we first did that scene I thought ‘oh, my, Lord, this is quite serious, I have to find this somewhere’. That was definitely the hardest thing. I feel like there is a lot in his life that I can pin my own experiences to, and find correlations, and that’s all good – like who he is, what he believes, what he does – I can pick bits of my life and put blinkers on and really recognise who he is and inhabit that. But those things that come from stuff in his childhood like his mother dying in childbirth – how does that make you feel? So I’ve been doing a bit of reading of psychological stuff, particularly about when you’ve killed your mother in childbirth what that does to your relationship with your father and so on.
How would you describe Ben’s relationship with Diane? How close do you think you get to her?
Really close. I think the thing about Diane is that she is the first person to allow Ben to be who he really is. She wants certain things which align with his own interests. She wants Phoebe to be happy, and she sees me (Ben) as an opportunity for that, if we get together and so on. And immediately before the play - we have made it that just before the play, Ben has been on his gap year, and he’s spent it in prison. It was originally a bit earlier but we’ve changed it so it is just before. Great way to spend a gap year! There is this great line where Phoebe says ‘how old are you?’ and I say ‘nineteen, I took a year off’. And Diane says ‘what did you do?’ (to kind of work me out), and I say ‘nothing, I took a year off.’ And she thinks he’s just a lay about, but the truth behind that for me is that it was a very hard year! I was in prison!
And did you find that for yourself or was that something Richard came in with?
We discussed it. It was when he was sixteen, but in terms of how his character journey goes it makes sense that he makes it on to this quite good science course, that he did his A levels and that was all cool, and then he had this fractious time with his dad, and he hit his dad, and his dad had had enough and he decided to press charges. Then in prison afterwards, mulling it over, he has the UCAS form, he has already met some people that had turned him onto militant eco-activism, so he decides that the way he was going to do it was he was going to be a scientist. And it makes it a bit more loaded that just before the play he has been in prison. It heightens the tension. It means that all the adults he has met with recently have been rehabilitation officers, and prison guards, who haven’t really seen him as a person. So the first adult he meets in this new situation is Diane, and she really unlocks him – you see that happen. And even though she is the complete ideological antithesis of him, that’s what’s really good about the play: it says that although you can have very different views to somebody, on a human level and on a caring level it doesn’t get in the way of really enjoying and seeing and recognising each other.
What do you hope that the audience may take away from the play?
For me – I probably should have said this when you asked me what the most exciting thing about the play is – in the last scene, everybody drops their agendas. And that is the most exciting thing to see for me, that resolution, that everybody starts to really be together, are able to be together and look past political views. On a wider scale in the world, that is what needs to happen and a demonstration of that in a really well written play is a really positive and ethical thing to put out. That, alongside the questions that are thrown up about climate science and so on which are really important questions.
Since we’ve been doing the play it’s been shown that there are these big carbon trading fraud scams going on. There are people doing the wrong thing in the name of a good thing, so it’s good that this stuff is being dredged up. It can make you feel very uncomfortable, but I think that is a really valid and important thing to do. There’s no propaganda because it’s a play and because each character speaks their mind – it’s like what Brecht did – you can see someone behaving in a certain way and you can personally judge them or not. How they are on a human level is also there as well as a political side, so you can judge those things against each other and see how one affects the other. And then you can look at yourself and work that out as well – and that has been part of our journeys as actors too, and it’s been great.