In a career spanning 50 years, Irish actor Ciaran Hinds has been a shapeshifter, appearing alongside every big-name actor and director you can think of, transforming into dashing heroes, scary-as-heck villains — even a little stone troll king in the Frozen films.
The 72-year-old has worked opposite Liam Neeson (a close friend since they were teens), Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett — and the list goes on.
But in his latest two TV projects — The Narrow Road To The Deep North, which premieres this week on Prime Video, and East Of Eden, an adaptation coming soon to Netflix — he’s passing the baton, appearing this time alongside two of the biggest up-and-coming stars in the world: Jacob Elordi and Florence Pugh.
It’s a changing of the guard, if you will.
“And that’s grand by me,” Hinds tells STM, over the phone from New Zealand, where he’s filming with Pugh. “They’re both terrific.
“Interestingly, with both projects, both this one in New Zealand and The Narrow Road (which I filmed) in Australia, they are from great works of literature. The difficulty with both was getting these books up, and working, and feeling real — but I think they have both done a great job.”
The Narrow Road To The Deep North is a hauntingly beautiful five-part adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel.
Hinds plays the older version of the central character, Dorrigo Evans, with Elordi inhabiting his younger incarnation.
Both are breathtakingly good.
Though they are acting at opposite ends of their character’s lives, both manage to imbue their performances with the same intense, quiet energy — remarkable really, given neither had met properly until filming was well under way.
“They talked about us maybe catching up at one stage, because they had shot with him a lot, with the early stuff,” Hinds says.
“I was finishing one day and Jacob came in, and we said hello to each other, and passed a couple of minutes, but that was it.
“But he is absolutely terrific in this — really, he is something special. He’s one of these actors who is very interesting to watch. It’s like he’s got a secret in there somewhere, and it’s great, because (my character) is a very complex man.”
Hinds is equally mesmeric to watch.
In fact, right from the word go, the series’ creators and producers — the well-respected creative duo of writer Justin Kurzel and director Shaun Grant, along with Curio Pictures’ Jo Porter and Rachel Gardner — knew they wanted him to play the older Dorrigo in their adaptation of the beloved novel.
Kurzel, especially, was one of Hinds’ biggest champions, listing the actor as one of his all-time favourites.
“Did he say that? I didn’t know that,” says Hinds when we tell him.
“How lovely. I knew Justin’s name because I chanced upon a wonderful film called Nitram (Kurzel’s visceral 2021 film about the Port Arthur massacre).
“I thought ‘wow, this is great filmmaking’. And then I saw Justin Kurzel’s name attached to this, and saw he’d directed True History Of The Kelly Gang as well, and he’d done Macbeth with Michael Fassbender, and then he said he was interested in me playing this older Dorrigo Evans.”
They sent Hinds the first two episodes to read, and he was instantly taken with the story.
“I immediately told them ‘yes’,” he says. “It was extraordinary. And then I went off and read the book, and I enjoyed the book, and I was devastated by the book.
“I thought it was an extraordinary piece of writing, to take us between time lines, through beauty and passion and desire and horror and savagery — it had everything.”
They had found their Dorrigo.
“The physical match (between Hinds and Elordi) makes sense, and that had to be a consideration,” executive producer Jo Porter says.
“But also, Ciaran brings such a thoughtfulness and a power, and there’s something energetically about them both on screen that they really do feel like the same man.
“When we had the idea of casting Ciaran it was another eureka moment and we just couldn’t look past him. We were so excited when he said ‘yes’.”
The story, told through three time periods, focuses on Dorrigo’s life, spanning his younger years in the 1940s, focusing on the intense love affair he has with his uncle’s wife, Amy, played by Odessa Young.
It splits off to look at Dorrigo’s experiences as a prisoner of war during the construction of the Thailand-Burma Railway in World War II, and it also examines Dorrigo later in life, with Hinds portraying him in his 70s in 1989. By this stage, the Dorrigo we meet is a well-regarded surgeon and something of a war hero, but he is battling with the ghosts of the lives he’s lived to get him to that point.
Heather Mitchell plays his long-suffering wife Ella during this period, with Essie Davis playing his lover. They’re both fantastic.
The stories blend in and out, knitted together to create an achingly beautiful series that’s dreamy in parts, and horrifically real in others. And the one through-line of it all is love.
“This story is about the beauty and the cruelty of love, and not just love between Dorrigo and Amy, but love between Dorrigo and Ella, and love between Dorrigo and those boys in that camp,” writer Shaun Grant says.
“There are many different forms of love that we experience in this series. It’s a war series and wars are fuelled by hate, but there’s a hell of a lot of love in it as well, of differing types, and I hope that resonates with audiences.”
It certainly struck a chord with critics — when the five-part series was shown in February at The Berlinale, it was met with widespread approval, scoring a five-star review from the BBC and four stars from The Guardian.
“But it is a difficult journey,” Hinds warns. “And it’s going to be a hard watch for people, that’s for sure”.
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know what he means.
Time and memories jumps around in this series, as they do in Dorrigo’s mind, and the five episodes manage to capture that interplay of memory and trauma, light and shade, that is such a part of the novel.
“There’s this jump (for audiences) of trying to make the link between the younger Dorrigo, who had such a vibrant life, a difficult and passionate and brutal life, to then who you see as this man who is a reluctant war hero, and a surgeon of high renown,” Hinds says.
“He doesn’t lack empathy, but he’s kind of a shell, and there’s an emptiness inside of him.
“When he seems to be his most alive is when (we see him) haunted by the memory of the young man he was friends with, that he tried to help survive (in the POW camp), and Amy, the love of his life. “
Meanwhile, he is living his real life, with his real wife, played by Mitchell, whom Hinds says he adored working alongside.
“She’s able to be light and funny but turn on a sixpence and then be deeply moving,” he says.
“The only other person I can think of who is that quick and mercurial and brilliant and committed is Judi Dench.”
Producer Rachel Gardner says Hinds, Mitchell and Davis are incredible, and the former’s performance, in particular, “brought so many layers to that character, who is a very complex person, deeply traumatised, with a deep sadness and a lot of unanswered ‘what-ifs’.”
It is the latest in a long line of powerhouse roles for Hinds, who has enjoyed a career that’s seen him land everywhere from Hogwarts to Westeros, Middle-earth, and the icy fjords of Arendelle.
It’s certainly an expansive world he’s created for himself.
“Well, I don’t think I have made it for myself, I think about the fact that it’s other people having made it for me,” he says.
“With work, I just follow my nose, in a way.
“I am a day-to-day person, and I’ve never had any particular direction in where I was going; you could call me directionless, and you wouldn’t be far wrong.
“Things happen, and one thing leads to something else and you find you rely on your instinct along the way.”
Long may he trust his gut.