The black limousine that has pulled up outside my house to bring me to visit the set of the TV series Sherlock & Daughter is about four times the size of my own car. That’s not my first thought as I get in, however.
As the uniformed chauffeur offers me chilled water and asks if the temperature is to my liking – everything, including the pristine white-leather seats, is very much to my liking – my main thought is that this production must have an enormous budget if it’s collecting journalists in such style. Each of us gets our own car. What do the stars get, I wonder. A carriage pulled by a pair of pink unicorns?
It’s a May morning, long before the eight-episode series will air, and I’m being driven to Powerscourt House, in Co Wicklow, where the cast and crew are filming.
Sherlock Holmes, I deduce from the drama’s title, appears to have a child. The detective is being played by the English actor David Thewlis, his daughter, Amelia, by the American actor Blu Hunt; Holmes’ nemesis, Professor James Moriarty, is being played by Dougray Scott, who is indeed a Scot.
Today the full cast is present for the filming of a formal ball scene in which Holmes shoots a spy. Inside Powerscourt House it’s hard to tell where reality ends and fantasy begins, because this ball scene is being filmed in a real Georgian ballroom.
[ Angela Scanlon’s new BBC Radio 2 show to launch later this monthOpens in new window ]
In a large room leading off it, several crew members are watching the action on iPads. Not far away are tables holding props, some of them spares, some lined up to be used later. There are enough candelabras to light a palace.
Another table holds vintage walking canes, lanterns, silver tureens, trays and what I realise, when I look more closely, is a small stack of dance cards, little booklets that ladies fastened to their wrists and in which would-be dance partners filled in their names and desired dances.
The pages, which have pinked edges, are held together by a golden string. The card has a list of dances – polka, valse, galop, lancers – together with the music that will be played. It’s an astonishing level of detail.
Filming started two months ago, which is to say in March 2024 – that’s not a typo: TV series can take some time to make it to our screens – and they have three weeks to go. As visitors to the set, we are not told much about the story of the eight-part series other than that Amelia’s mother has been murdered in mysterious circumstances.
It’s only then Amelia discovers that her absent father may be Sherlock Holmes. They join up to try to solve both the murder mystery and the one of parenthood.
“Amelia is a really strong character, but she has a really complicated back story,” Blu Hunt, who has starred in several other TV series, as well as in one of the Marvel superhero movies, The New Mutants, says between scenes.
“She comes back home to the ranch in California and finds her mother murdered, with a note saying that Sherlock Holmes is her father. There is nowhere else for me to go except England.”
Hunt, whose grandmother and great-grandfather were First Nations people, is wearing long gloves that cover a 21st-century tattoo on her arm. She says she loved her stunt scenes, particularly an outdoor fight in mud – “it just happened to have been raining” – but found riding a horse a bit of a challenge.
“I had to do a lot of training,” she says. “My character rides the horse bareback, which I was able to do, but I told them I couldn’t gallop bareback.”
Filming is a slow process. The ballroom is the setting for all of today’s scenes. The exterior shots in which guests arrive have already been filmed elsewhere. (Other parts of the series have been shot in Dublin, on Great Denmark Street and North Great George’s Street, and at Dublin Castle.)
The sequence of shooting has been determined by each location’s availability. Shooting out of sequence seems like a challenge. How, I ask Scott, can you return to the emotional energy of a scene you might have started days or weeks beforehand?
“You have to always be aware of where you are in the script,” he says. “So I will always go back and read the parts before and after the scene to make sure I’m in the right place of the emotional journey from there, and that it makes sense.”
Scott’s other credits include Mission: Impossible 2, Ripley’s Game and Desperate Housewives. He won an International Emmy Award and a Bafta for his role in the television series Crime. Where does he keep his Emmy?
“It’s next to my Bafta. I’ve got it tucked away in a quiet corner of my office,” Scott says. “It’s not out on display.”
The set is closed while filming is going on in the ballroom, so I watch the action over the shoulder of one of the many crew with an iPad.
It’s a complicated scene, because so many people are involved. Some are dancing; others are gathered around tables or playing instruments. There are also entrances and exits to get right. Every 30 seconds or so the director calls “cut”, and everyone freezes, as if playing statues.
Between scenes we’re invited to go upstairs and look down from balconies to watch the filming first-hand. From up here it’s clear that a marvel of choreography is going on. Every time a scene ends, people who have been dancing, or walking in pairs, stay still in their places.
A small army of make-up and costume people rush in, to touch up faces and run lint rollers over their clothes. Things you’d never think of, such as whether the candles are burning at the right height for the next shot, have to be taken into consideration.
The band are given instructions to play more loudly from now on. Something, somewhere is creaking, apparently; the louder music is to drown it out.
It’s hot down in the ballroom under all the lights on a summer’s day. It’s also foggy, puzzlingly, which gives the impression that the scenes are being played outside, in a kind of Dickensian London. But this is an interior shot. Why the fog?
“It’s sepia-coloured stuff to soften the light,” I’m told. This fog will be invisible to viewers, even though it looks properly thick to me. Another trick of the trade.
Before the cast break for lunch, they line up to have their photographs taken. Then they put plastic ponchos on, to protect their costumes from rain and any spills that lunch might bring. It’s for continuity reasons. Who knows how hair can get disarrayed, or a gown creased, during the time it takes to walk to the food trucks and back?
Before shooting restarts, each actor will be compared with their pre-lunch photograph and have any discrepancy fixed.
Period drama continues to be enormously popular. Downton Abbey. Poldark. Bridgerton. Screen remakes of Jane Austen’s novels are so frequent they seem to be on a loop. What does Scott think is its enduring appeal?
“Part of it for audiences is the attraction of a different time,” he says. “But you have to remember that when you are acting in a period drama, everything is modern to the characters. You can’t feel as an actor like you’re in a period drama. You have to feel like you’re in a modern drama, because from the character’s perspectives it’s modern.”
From a writing perspective as well, he says, the best period scripts are the ones that feel fresh, with a connection to contemporary subject matters.
Scott, who is in his late 50s when we meet, was mentioned as a possible James Bond before the role went to Daniel Craig. What has he learned during his long career?
“The more experience you get as an actor, the more you are able to not make decisions about how you are going to do a scene until you are on the set.
“You’ve got to have the ingredients to get a really good performance, but not necessarily have made all the choices before you get on the set, because that’s to do with the other actor.
“Also, you want to work in the moment and be instinctive – fresh and spontaneous. You need to be able to come up with ideas on the spot.”
These days Scott prefers not to watch his scenes back after filming them. He did when he was younger, “because I wanted to see what my perceived interpretation of the character was: was there a disconnect? That quickly became instinctive, so today I don’t watch them any more. I trust the director.”
Sherlock & Daughter is on HBO Max from Thursday, November 5th
Source: The Irish Times · Rosita Boland
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