the novel of Ian McGuire, cold blood, published in 2016, narrated the odyssey of a whaler from Yorkshire, England, to the Arctic Circle to try to explore the cold waters and take advantage of the last throes of a declining industry. Aboard the ship, Henry Drax, a dark guy, very dark; and a seemingly more innocent young surgeon, Patrick Sumner.
Now made into a miniseries (by the BBC and available in Spain on Movistar+ from October 25), Colin Farrell plays the harpooner, and Jack O'Connell (Invincible), the surgeon, among a cast of tough men.
Colin Farrell, frozen villain.
When Farrell was sent the novel, it took him 50 pages to realize that he wanted to play the harpooner he is unable to defend. “I have never played someone with so few scruples or regrets for the despicable things he does,” he explained recently.
Drax is already on the list of the worst villains on television. to get under your skin happily gained kilos and without any medical control and decided to experience the icy filming almost as his character would have experienced it in reality.
The director of the series, AndrewHaigh, decided that an experience as raw and breathless as the one narrated in the book should be lived and filmed as real as possible. On sets of budapest they shot some of the interior scenes, but all the sequences that took place in the Arctic he wanted to shoot as far north as he was allowed: at 81º longitude. Only 800 km from the North Pole.
Rowing in arctic waters, in 'Ice Blood'.
they chose the norwegian archipelago Svalbard as a base on dry land, but the essential technical and artistic team he spent almost five weeks on a boat, tens of kilometers from land, without mobile coverage, without an internet signal. Just them, lots of warm layers, and a few polar bears.
“It was beautiful, beautiful, but also a very dangerous experience, we were scared” , Farrell has confessed during the promotion. "It was a relief that no one died." And he, the first. Because he decided to get so much into the role of the harpooner that he went from putting on gloves, for instance.
And he didn't hesitate jump into the frigid water of the Arctic Ocean, in the middle of autumn, "as a kind of baptism of filming". And a very virile feat, precisely in a story that delves into "the origin of masculinity, the good and the bad", according to its director.
"It's been one of those few times in my career where I couldn't take my costume off, I couldn't let go of the character when we finished shooting. He was always with me”, he says and compares the experience only with that of the filming of Alexander the Great (2004).
EXPLORERS
One of the actors in the series, Stephen Graham (Snatch, This is England), took one of the photographs that is already the most famous of the shoot. Part of the cast playing a football game on the ice. Using sweaters as poles and, in the background, reconstruction of the whaling ship that they took to that corner of the world.
He sent it to a friend and his friend sent him back a photo that was practically the same. the historical and mythical expedition of Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica. And since those men at the beginning of the 20th century felt a bit like explorers, creating icy, soaked bridges between fiction and reality.