Safe’s Michael C. Hall & Harlan Coben

Michael C. Hall

From his portrayal of a conflicted mortician in HBO’s Six Feet Under to his role as a blood-spatter analyst who kills murderers at night in Showtime’s Dexter, American actor Michael C. Hall has mastered the art of playing dark, complicated characters. His most recent brooding small-screen presence is in Safe, a new eight-part drama created by best-selling author Harlan Coben. Hall also serves as an executive producer on the show, which was made by RED Production Company in the U.K. and is being distributed by STUDIOCANAL. Co-commissioned by Netflix and Canal+ Group, Safe was recently released on the streaming service and is also set for a linear premiere on C8 in France. Hall talks to World Screen about his portrayal of a recent widower whose teen daughter goes missing under mysterious circumstances.

WS: Tell us about your character in Safe and what appealed to you about the role.
HALL: Tom Delaney is a pediatric surgeon. He’s the newly single father of two girls. His wife, before the show’s story begins, has died. He is someone who is very capable in his professional life but as a newly single father, he’s kind of at his wits’ end, out of his depth, and has actually recently installed this software in his daughter’s phone to track her whereabouts and read her texts because otherwise, he has no sense of what’s going on with her. Shortly after we are introduced to Tom, his oldest daughter goes missing. The story of the show—there’s very much a thriller element—is he’s trying to take things into his own hands because he doesn’t feel like he’s getting straight answers or is being adequately helped by anyone else to figure out what happened to her. But in doing so, he discovers things about his past and his family that recontextualize his whole life.

Tom and his family live in a gated community, and the show touches on the current obsession with safety. We live in a world where our fears are exploited and preyed upon. A lot of the media, they’re sort of fearmongers; people are encouraged to be fearful and therefore make decisions that give them at least the illusion that they’re safe. The irony, in this case, is that the gated community these people have lived in to keep themselves safe is the place from which the danger originates.

The character appealed to me because he was a normal guy who was struggling for some sense of control in a world that was spiraling out of control. He wasn’t crazy; he wasn’t uniquely capable or afflicted; he was a regular guy. But in his exterior world, crazy things were happening. That was a bit of a change of pace.

WS: Do you have a process for preparing for a role? Was this character easier or more challenging because Tom was “normal” compared to, for example, Dexter, who was very out there?
HALL: With each role and each job, you certainly have your experience to lean on, but ideally, you’re reinventing the wheel every time; you fashion new tools as the job demands them. In the case of Tom, I was playing an Englishman, so there was a consideration on that front, and familiarizing myself to some degree about what the life of a pediatric surgeon or a veteran of the British Army might be like. But for the most part, it’s just emptying yourself out so that inspiration might flow through you when you get [on set].

WS: Given that Safe is an international series, was there a sense that this was different from what you’ve done in the past?
HALL: The days were definitely going to be either 10 or 11 hours, whereas in America, you shoot until you’re done and sometimes you’re fighting to finish before the sun comes up the next day. So that was a nice and civilized change. [Laughs] Ultimately, things are more the same than they are different. When you sign on to be a part of this little family that’s making something, it’s like joining a carnival and it’s its own organism. I certainly felt supported by the producing powers that be, but supported in the sense that I felt we were entrusted to do our job and weren’t micromanaged. So, the support I felt was maybe by a lack of overlord presence, which I think [most actors] appreciate.

WS: How involved was Harlan Coben in the production of Safe?
HALL: Harlan wasn’t on set, but he was very much a presence at read-throughs, and he was sort of the captain of the ship—the person who put us all on the same page in terms of what we were aspiring to create. He gave us a sense of his enthusiasm and energy. He was continually a presence on the post-production side or the writers’ room side and was able to give me feedback on what he was seeing in light of what I was hoping to convey. Harlan was sitting at the head of the table in terms of managing the machinery of the story. It’s [like a] detailed clock—any tweak one place is going to affect things elsewhere, so he was the one who was minding that.

WS: Six Feet Under helped usher in this new golden age of television. What is happening in TV today that maybe didn’t happen previously?
HALL: When I finished acting school, in ’96 I guess it was, I literally couldn’t have imagined the opportunities I’ve had because they didn’t really exist at that point. The idea of doing a long-running television show meant that you were basically just cycling through the same story over and over again, investigating the same case or giving the same closing argument or whatever it might be. With Six Feet Under, Dexter, some of the great shows that are out there, there is this long-form storytelling that can’t be matched anywhere else. The degree of detail and complexity that you can take on and explore, it’s like a living novel in a way. The production value rivals any film in terms of the talent of the people they hire to shoot these shows, the budget that might be provided, and the appetite for risk-taking and boundary-pushing that exists in TV. I would say maybe American film in the ’70s is the only place where you could find the kind of adventurousness that is now in television. The writers who aspire to do that kind of work are completely gravitating toward TV. It’s a good place to be.

WS: You’ve been in film, television and theater. Do you enjoy them all equally or do you have a preference?
HALL: I enjoy the luxury of being able to do everything. My appreciation of one is informed by my participation in the other. Doing a film is great, in part because I can appreciate that it’s unique from doing a television show or doing something on stage and vice versa. But I’m happy that I’m able to mix it up.

WS: Are you drawn to dark characters, or do they just come your way?
HALL: I suppose it’s a combination of being drawn to them and attracting them for having done it. I don’t know that I would say I’m drawn to darker material, but I’m definitely drawn to complexity and conflict; it’s inherently dramatic. Characters carrying some sort of secret or internalized conflict are certainly more interesting to me.

Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben has penned some 30 novels over his prolific career, with more than 70 million books in print worldwide. Over the last few years Coben has been making a name for himself in the television space as well, notably creating The Five for Sky and serving as showrunner and executive producer on two adaptations of his novels for TF1. His latest endeavor is Safe—for C8 in France and Netflix everywhere else—which saw Coben again teaming with Nicola Shindler from RED Production Company and screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst, with whom he collaborated on The Five. Coben tells World Screen about the psychological thriller.

WS: Tell us about Safe.
COBEN: Michael C. Hall stars as a widower who is trying to take care of two teenage kids in a gated community. One night after a party, two kids disappear and next thing you know there’s a murder, mayhem, buried secrets—everything about this small, tight community is about to explode. It’s called Safe because it’s a gated community. I was thinking about walls—we build these walls to keep the bad out, but maybe sometimes we build these walls to keep the bad in.

WS: C8 is the French broadcaster, Netflix has taken it worldwide, it was produced by RED in the U.K. and your home is in the U.S.—it’s a very international project!
COBEN: That’s part of the fun of it. Michael and I are American. The writing team and the production team are British. It was filmed in Manchester. [Co-stars] Amanda Abbington and Marc Warren are huge British stars. And then we have Audrey Fleurot, a wonderful, famous French actress. C8 is one of the [platforms] behind it. And our director for the first two episodes is Australian. So we are trying to represent the entire globe. It’s the time of international TV, why not put it all in one show?

WS: As you’re devising ideas, are you thinking about what the ideal home for a show will be?
COBEN: Not even a little. I do the idea, the story first, and then we worry about what network, what platform, is going to do it. I need to be binge-watched though. I want each episode to end, and then you want to go to the next one. Safe does that better than any other show I’ve done. And I always want that shocking ending. I know some of you think you’ve experienced that in trying to figure these things out, but you’re not going to guess the ending to Safe, I promise you!

WS: Why is making a show binge-worthy important to you?
COBEN: I’m a novelist, I write thrillers and suspense. If you take my book to bed at 10 o’clock at night and say, I’m just going to read for 15 minutes and the next thing you know it’s 4 o’clock in the morning and you’re cursing me out—I love that! I want you to not be able to put it down. I want to give you that same experience with a TV show. Safe is an eight-episode story, and so I want you to gulp it as much as you can, and savor it at the same time.

WS: What have been some of the biggest lessons learned for you as you’ve done more television work?
COBEN: As a novelist, you get a report card that says, “Does not play well with others.” And TV is all about playing with others. I love the collaboration aspect. I haven’t written any fewer novels. I’m able to still do the novels and I love that. I’m naturally an introvert—a socially adept introvert, but I am an introvert. I’m writing my 31st novel—that’s a lot of time alone in a room. So to get out and be able to collaborate with really talented people has been exciting.