Harrow’s Ioan Gruffudd

Ioan Gruffudd, the star of Harrow, talks to World Screen about the abundant opportunities television is offering actors.

Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd starred in several TV movies in the U.K. before getting exposure to an international audience as fifth officer Harold Lowe in Titanic. He then starred in the Horatio Hornblower TV movies, several feature films, including Black Hawk Down and Fantastic Four, and numerous TV series, including Forever. Most recently, he’s been in the unnerving she said-he said thriller Liar and the procedural Harrow, about a forensic pathologist.

WS: What appealed to you about Harrow?
GRUFFUDD: I had finished shooting Liar. I’d come home to L.A., and I had a couple of scripts that people were interested in, and Harrow was one of them. I was reluctant to pick it up because it was about a forensic pathologist; I had played a forensic pathologist [in the series Forever], and one of the people involved in Harrow had been involved in Forever as well. So I thought, Oh my, I’m going to be typecast. But once I read the script, I just couldn’t put it down. It was such a wonderfully rounded three-dimensional character; every character was, even in the pilot. The story and the twist at the end of the pilot just grabbed me. Even though it shot in Brisbane, Australia, and it meant that I was going to be away from my family for five months, it was kind of a no-brainer, just based on the script and the character. I had a very lucky year last year going from a great script with Liar to another great script. I think the character and the humor in this show are what attracted me.

WS: Tell us about Dr. Daniel Harrow.
GRUFFUDD: Stephen M. Irwin, our scribe, wrote all ten episodes and co-wrote some of them with Leigh McGrath, one of the creators. We always use analogies because they help convey character; Dr. Harrow is a bit like [House’s] Dr. House, quite curmudgeonly. He’s also like [Quincy, M.E.’s Dr.] Quincy; there are very lighthearted moments in Harrow. The gallows humor among all the characters in the morgue is wonderful. Then there is the tough love he has to go through with his teenage daughter being estranged and with his ex-wife. Then you add into the mix all the interesting cases that are presented every week, plus the one over-arching case of the entire series, which is a bunch of bones that are presented to him at the end of the pilot. We discover he had something to do with these bones. The pilot script was so well-rounded and encompassed all those things with a beautiful twist.

WS: You’ve done television and feature films. Do you have a preference? What are the different challenges?
GRUFFUDD: It’s been such a long time since I’ve done a movie. It’s interesting, there was a time when I was playing leads in movies, and as you know, nowadays there are either tentpole movies [or independent movies]. But all those delicious independents have global movie stars in them, so it’s impossible to make a living as an actor in movies these days. But thank the Lord for television! There is a wealth of content out there, and a wealth of scripts. I can’t even keep up with the shows that I want to watch, let alone all the shows that are out there; we are spoiled for choice. We’ve been bombarded with great series after great series. That’s where the work is, that’s where the consistency is, if we’re going to talk about economics.

WS: Do you have to like a character to play him?
GRUFFUDD: Certainly when you are discovering the character, you have to love the character otherwise you can’t do him justice. That becomes hard when you are playing someone like Andrew Earlham, as I did in Liar, who was a rapist.

WS: He was creepy!
GRUFFUDD: It was a very creepy role. You know what’s interesting? People who responded well to the show and who responded well to what I did in the show [have said to me,] “How did you do that? That was incredible. We’ve never seen you do that.” Interestingly enough, I didn’t do anything. I was charming and myself the entire time. It’s because the audience knows what Andrew’s up to that made it creepier. I didn’t have to find a “dark evil” character. I was just charming, and you the viewer knew what I had just done.

WS: And that was so unsettling.
GRUFFUDD: Exactly, I was made to look a far better actor than I am! Joanne Froggatt [who plays Laura] and I gave [the subject matter] its reverence in every scene. And the scene I had with the cop, that was a tough one, especially since we are reading so much about all these guys [who have assaulted women]. Rape is not sexual; it’s about control and power.