Buzzymag.com spoke to David Tennant about his new wartime drama series Spies Of Warsaw when he visited the USA last year.
David Tennant: Spies
Of Warsaw
In Spies Of
Warsaw, Tennant is in fact a Scottish actor using an English accent to play
a Frenchman posing as a German. Given that much of Spies is set in Warsaw ,
does Mercier ever pretend to be Polish? “No,” Tennant says. “He pretends to be
German, and I had to learn some German, which was – wow. I hope it was all
right. He doesn’t pretend to be Polish, because he’s very much a Frenchman, a
Francophone. A lot of French was spoken, so Polish becomes our sort of base
language for the piece. So when our characters are speaking in English, they’re
speaking French, if you see what I mean. So there is some German, some Russian,
but basically everyone is speaking French, which is English.”
Which, Tennant acknowledges, sounds a little confusing. He
speaks German when Mercier is speaking German, though he allows he wasn’t
always sure what he was saying. “I learned it by rote, so whether I’m managing
to successfully convey the meaning in German, it will be for others to judge,
not me.”
Besides German, is there anything else Tennant had to learn
in order to play Mercier? “I learned how to fire the guns that we used – that’s
always tricky. It’s not that it’s exceptionally difficult, but quite rightly
and properly, a lot of health and safety surrounds those moments. So people
come and stand around you and there’s a lot of, ‘Do not touch the gun, until …’
‘Let me show you the edge of the barrel!’ In fact, it gets quite alarming, not
because it is alarming, but because people have to be very protective and very
clear, and that’s right and that’s proper, but it doesn’t feel like they’re
very calm about these things – they’re really very exercised about it. [There
was also] a bit of horse riding – I’m not a natural horseman, so there’s that.
They were beautiful horses, and they were so easy to control, but by the end,
you get a bit cocky – that’s the trouble,” he laughs. “By the end, I was
thinking, ‘I can do this, I can do this,’ and of course, I get experts around
to help.”
Tennant adds that he also researched the era of Spies. “I read a lot, I watched a lot
and it’s a fascinating time period, I think, the late Thirties, as Europe was literally sort of coming to the boil. I did a
movie a couple of years ago called Glorious
‘39 with Romola Garai, which is about that time and that moment in
time. I think it’s a fascinating moment, because the history of Europe and the world pivoted in that time. I’m
continually fascinated by that time, just because things could have been so
different and the world we live in now been so different had Hitler been
appeased, had France managed to form a sort of stable government. I’m
fascinated by those moments in history that sort of change things forever and I
find myself looking for the modern equivalents. Is Lehman Brothers [in the Wall
Street collapse] one of those moments that changed the future of everything? I
don’t know.”
On the award-winning screenwriters Dick
Clement and Ian La Frenais, who adapted Spies
Of Warsaw from the novels by Alan Furst he says: “They’re legends. I was weaned on
their stuff – Porridge and The Likely Lads and Auf Wiedersehen Pet. They’re legendary
figures. So when you get a script with their names on the front, it’s quite
humbling to think that you might be working with guys who you know their stuff
so well.
David also talks about fame in the USA and those infamous Doctor Who cast and crew farewell videos
Watch the concluding episode of Spies Of Warsaw on BBC America tonight at 9pm/8c.
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