Ciarán Hinds: Story rather than role choice matters most

Ciarán Hinds has just finished filming a TV adaptation of East of Eden which was shot at locations in Oamaru and Auckland.

And another project is about to hit screens here – the Australian drama series The Narrow Road to the Deep North which premieres on Prime Video this week.

It's based on the book of the same name by Richard Flanagan, in which Hinds plays the main character - Dorrigo Evans - in his later years as he charts his journey from prisoner of war to revered surgeon and reluctant war hero.

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Evans is a man haunted by his past, Hinds tells RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

“It's a big story of a singular man, Dorigo Evans, he was a young doctor in Australia in the 1940s and he was promised to a woman, but then he fell deeply, passionately in love with someone else who kind of haunted him all his life.

“And then he ends up in the prisoner of war camp, terrible, cruel, savage time with the Japanese.”

The story cuts from young Evans in the early 1940s in Melbourne, on the infamous Burma railway in the World War II, to the late 1980s, as an older man “trying to live with the hauntings of the life that he's been through".

“In preparation, I was reading [Richard Flanagan's book] and I was deeply, deeply moved by the experience, because of the horror and the savagery and the cruelty - man's inhumanity to man being kind of relentless, and then there's deep, profound passion for a woman so and they kept being juxtaposed against each other.

“It was a hugely, for me, deeply human emotional experience.”

Working with Branagh on Belfast was personal, Hinds says, both men grew up in the city.

“We grew up about a mile away from each other in Belfast, and I would be maybe about six years, seven years older than Ken. Ken was a Protestant. I was a Catholic. We would never have met, at that time, I went to a Catholic Primary School, which was almost opposite where Ken lived, as it happens, half a mile down the road from where I lived.

"And then he would have gone to a different school, a Protestant school. The only thing we would have shared when we reflected afterwards, was we both went to the same cinema, which is called the Capital on the Antrim Road, and that would have been both our first experiences of film, film life, when we were very young.”

The film portrayed a city that Hinds remembers well.

“Even though, Ken wrote that about his family and Protestant people, it was no different, really, to my family, my grandparents, people growing up, we were the same kind of people, just nominally different in the name of faith, but not that different, really, same people, same people.”

Hinds spent his formative 15 years as an actor in theatre learning skills which in hindsight has stood him in good stead, he says.

“I guess that idea of having to work fast and change regularly in three-weekly rep to another character or something else.

“I wasn't just ploughing a single furrow, there were many different furrows to create, and maybe that's held up as I've got older.”

Hinds has more than 120 acting credits to his name - from Jane Eyre's Mr Rochester, a Russian president in Sum of All Fears and Albus Dumbledore's brother in the Harry Potter series.

But the roles he is being offered matters less to him than the story, he says.

“Sometimes stories don't interest you, even though it might be a very showy role or a standout role, but sometimes it’s just my own personal choices.

“When I get a story that connects with me, then I like to be involved no matter what the role might entail. It's the story and how it's written, and the people involved, that’s the most appealing thing to me.”