ITV1’s new adaptation of Blake Morrison’s best-selling suspense thriller The Last Weekend stars Rupert Penry-Jones (Whitechapel, Silk) as the sporty and privileged Ollie.
Written by Mick Ford (Ashes To Ashes) and directed by Jon East, the three-part mini-series unfolds over four days across one hot summer bank holiday weekend in the Suffolk countryside. The scene of what should be a relaxing break for two couples with a long shared history becomes the backdrop to a chilling nightmare that no one could forsee, except perhaps for one person.
Rupert Penry-Jones likes to complete as many of his own stunts as possible during filming and getting naked in a drama wouldn’t normally cost him a thought. However, getting naked and running into the North Sea in March took a little more encouragement.
“Quite often production would insist on using stunt men for scenes I wanted to do and not for the ones I didn’t,” he laughs. “Despite feeling exhilarated taking a swim in the North Sea I wouldn’t have said no to a stunt man taking that on. I cannot describe how cold it was! We had to strip off, completely naked, dive in, swim out, turn around, deliver a line, then turn around and swim on again… thank God they got it in one take.
“Having said that it was one of my highlights of filming and despite dreading the whole experience the feeling of it was fantastic, it was very cold but not as bad as I had expected! And the mountain biking was great because I love to do downhill mountain biking anyway but to do it when there is a van at the bottom of the hill to put your bike in and drive you back to the top so you can go all the way down again was a luxury and I loved it,’ he laughs.
Like his character, Rupert has a competitive streak both in and out of work.
“Actors have to be competitive to a degree,” explains Rupert. “It’s that competitiveness that drives you on. Sometimes if there is an audition that I’m supposed to be going for that I think I’ll probably never get it, I’ll imagine another actor that I don’t like so much telling me that he’s going for it and how annoyed I would be if he got it – then I get my head down and learn my lines!”
“Outside of work I’ve always been competitive in sport. I don’t believe in ‘playing to enjoy it’, the enjoyment is in winning and beating somebody. That’s why I don’t like poker – I play poker with my friends and I get no pleasure out of them taking my money and I get no pleasure out of taking their money.”
Rupert was keen to read Morrison’s book before delving into the scripts and in fact agreed to take on the role before reading all three scripts.
“I read the book first and read only the first episode of the script before agreeing to take on the project, hoping that the rest of the script would be like the book. The characters are slightly softer than they are in the book because they have to be accessible to a television audience but you still get a sense of their dark sides and for the first half of the story you don’t actually know who’s good and who’s not.”
“As with all television drama these days there is never enough time or money but I believe we’ve made the very best of it. It’s a great script and the dialogue is faultless and that is pretty rare. When scripts are turned around as quickly as they are in television you usually have to re-think things and the dialogue doesn’t quite fit the location but we haven’t had any of that on this project so its been really nice to just concentrate on the character and the performance.”
On the surface Ollie and his wife Daisy appear to have led a charmed life and this fuels Ian’s bitterness and envy.
“Ollie is born with a silver spoon in his mouth and has everything that Ian wants: the money, the successful career, he got a first from university – he’s done everything by the book. Ian was left in his wake but they stayed friends. Ollie is the golden boy – he’s got it all but now he’s just been diagnosed with a brain tumour so feels like he’s about to lose everything.”
Rupert feels the friendship between Ollie and Ian is quite unusual and although he feels they aren’t soul mates, the relationship is quite complex.
“They became friends at university by default only because Ollie had an injury and couldn’t walk around while his friends were off playing rugby,’ he explains. ‘So they bonded over the pool table at Uni. It was a mismatch from the start but they’ve stayed friends for the last twenty years despite not having much in common except they’re very competitive. I think Ollie likes to cling to the past and Ian is one of those people who helps him do that – he’s always harping on about it, especially over this weekend.”
There is a strong class difference between Ollie and Ian, which initially Rupert planned to explore and expand upon when building the character of Ollie.
“I thought of making him much more posh than I am but then he became a bit ridiculous when I was running through it in my head, so I reined him back in to be more of a public school boy like I am, but not ridiculously so.”
Rupert and Shaun Evans met on the set of the third series of Whitechapel, in 2011 making this the third time the two have worked together over the last year.
“In Whitechapel, Shaun came in as the killer so we didn’t have many scenes together but I was aware of him being a pretty special actor. Then he appeared in Silk; and there are some actors who seem to know instinctively how to react to each other’s performance and we seem to have that which is rare.”
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