The actor, 60, leads a glittering cast including Lesley Manville, Helen Hunt and Blake Harrison in the BBC’s new Sunday night wartime epic, World On Fire. Sean plays Douglas Bennett whose beautiful factory worker and jazz singer daughter Lois (Julia Brown) joins the Entertainments National Service Association and finds herself embroiled in a messy love triangle with a translator-turned-spy. Douglas has survived the horror of the First World War, but carries the scars of a mustard gas attack and battles PTSD, known then as shell shock.
After so many roles as a swashbuckling hero, Sean enjoyed the change of pace.
But he had one major caveat before he would sign up to do the show – he wanted writer Peter Bowker to guarantee his character would not die in series one.
During his long career, Sean has filmed some fantastic death scenes.
In GoldenEye he was splattered on a satellite dish, he was shot through the neck with a grappling hook in The Island, peppered with arrows in The Lord Of The Rings, and decapitated by his own sword in Game Of Thrones. Even in The Field he was trampled off a cliff by a herd of rampaging cows.
Sean laughs: “I had to check. I just said, what’s his story? Is he still around at the end? It is a bit of a joke but all those deaths were not in vain! They all meant something!
“But I did fall into that a little bit because the parts were interesting… they were all meaty, juicy roles and everybody likes to play a baddie and a villain, but I realised I was dying in everything and I just wanted to break out and survive!”
He continues: “I quite like that. Douglas is a strong man and he came back from war in pieces.
“He’s fractured, disturbed, damaged and it was interesting to portray a man who suffered so much psychological damage and physically too.”
Playing such a disturbed character did not come easily and Sean had to dredge up his own devastating experiences for the saddest scenes.
He says: “I try to find things in my life that were traumatic experiences. Without doing that you can’t really imagine how it must feel. It’s a personal pride thing, you have to dredge that up and it’s not always a pleasant experience
but it’s necessary to portray someone like Douglas truthfully.”
Sean based Douglas on his grandfather Harold who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and came home a pacifist communist. Sean reveals: “My character is a conscientious objector and he doesn’t feel it’s a justifiable war in any sense. He thinks there should be diplomacy and dialogue, he doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight, he doesn’t know what is to come but he does know what happened to his life after the First World War. Why did they die in their hundreds and thousands? What were they fighting for? They were cannon fodder. Young men died or were killed and many came back broken and it was horrific and unnecessary. Douglas remembers men having their brains blown out and bloodshed. He’s suffering and he’s suffering greatly.”
Sean remembers his own grandfather Harold going through similar torment.
He continues: “My grandad was like that. He was a pacifist after his experiences in the war. My grandfather served in the Royal Navy and was sent up to Murmansk in north Russia near the Arctic for many years.
“I’ve got pictures of him and photographs and it affected him and he came back a shaken man. He got his mojo back in the years after but you could see it had an impact. It’s a long legacy.” The Second World War might have ended 15 years before Sean was born but it still loomed large in his childhood. He explained: “My mum and dad were kids up in Sheffield and they lived very close to the steel works. The steel industry was a target on occasions and they tell stories about gas masks and sirens and having to run and rationing.
“As kids we used to play in bomb craters, old buildings with walls missing. They’d be standing but one side would be missing and you could see all the different wallpapers in different houses in the rubble.”
Sean also drew on his experience of meeting real serving soldiers in the past during his time filming 19th century Peninsular War drama Sharpe in the Nineties.
He said: “When we did Sharpe there was a scene when there was an award for damaged soldiers in the Peninsular War. They had missing limbs and legs and they were men who had fought in the Falklands war and they were gracious enough to be involved in our series.
“Talking to them it wasn’t so much the physical side, as the mental side that affected them after the Falkland Islands. I think there have now been more who committed suicide than actually killed in battle themselves.”
World On Fire appealed to Sean partly because of its huge scale and great cast – but most importantly he was drawn by the quality of The A Word writer Peter Bowker’s storytelling.
Sean says: “It’s the Second World War which I think is always interesting and the fact that Peter is involved, and the BBC – but especially the writing. I spoke to Peter on a few occasions and he filled me in on how this wasn’t really a retelling of the war and the machines, the artillery, the infantry.
“It was a personal story of people coming together in the most extraordinary of circumstances, a very intimate portrayal of men and women whose lives changed dramatically – not just a few lives, everyone in the world. That is quite an extraordinary occurrence. This has left a big impression on me because I remember the characters and how difficult it was for people.”
One of the most compelling relationships in the show is between Sean’s character Douglas and Lesley’s character Robina Chase, whose son Harry is dating Douglas’s daughter. In fact, the pair have such chemistry that writer Peter penned extra scenes for them, realising they were stealing the show.
Sean smiles: “I hadn’t worked with Lesley before but I’d always been a big fan of hers. I watched her in Grown Ups with Mike Leigh many years ago which was fantastic and in every scene she always gives a good account of herself.
“She’s a brilliant actress and it’s been really very nice to work with Lesley. It’s an interesting throwing together of two characters who are basically very, very different.
“Douglas is a working-class, Left-wing pacifist, Robina is a gentrified lady of the manor who is very stuck in her ways and politics and has Right-wing views. But as the war unfolds, we soften our stances because we have to. At first we don’t get on, but my daughter is going out with her son and, in that funny way, they do have something in common because they’re so forthright in their beliefs. You don’t find many people like that. By the end they have quite a lot in common.”
As well as World On Fire, Sean has just wrapped several other projects. So what’s next? He groans: “I’m having a bit of time off! I’ve been working non-stop back to back for a few years so I’m enjoying my garden!”
●World On Fire starts on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday, September 29.
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