Entertainment
Movies and TV
Interview: Showrunner Matthew Parkhill praises actor Hero Fiennes Tiffin as 'Young Sherlock'
Interview: Showrunner Matthew Parkhill praises actor Hero Fiennes Tiffin as 'Young Sherlock'
Writer, producer and showrunner Matthew Parkhill only has praises for English actor Hero Fiennes Tiffin who is playing the title role in the Prime Video series “Young Sherlock.”
“Young Sherlock” is directed by Guy Ritchie and stars Fiennes Tiffin and Dónal Finn as the young James Moriarty.
“Young Sherlock” is a reimagination of the origin story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s beloved character, shifting the spotlight from the cases that made him famous to the formative experiences that shaped him.
The cast also includes Zine Tseng as Princess Gulun Shou'a, Joseph Fiennes (Hero’s real-life uncle) as Silas Holmes, Natascha McElhone as Cordelia Holmes, Max Irons as Mycroft Holmes, and Colin Firth as Sir Bucephalus Hodge.
In an interview with Manila Bulletin, Parkhill talked about how they cast Fiennes Tiffin and Tseng, working with Ritchie and why viewers should watch the series, which is now available on Prime Video.
Parkhill commended Fiennes Tiffin for his acting as the young Sherlock.
“I think he has, the way he plays Sherlock has a sort of an innocence to it. He has a wonder to it. I mean, obviously, he's incredibly charming in the way that, you know, the way he plays Sherlock has this incredible charm,” he said.
He added, “But I think what I loved in particular about him, what he brought to it was this sort of, that there's an innocence, there's a naivety to it. There's a way he sort of looks at the world. He's obviously fiercely intelligent and he processes everything at incredible speed. He has incredible ability for recall, but there was a wonder for me with the way he looked at the world. And I just thought that was super interesting.”
Casting for 'Young Sherlock'
Fiennes Tiffin and Ritchie worked in the film “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.”
Parkhill said Ritchie “really, really loved him as an actor. And I think I'm right in saying Hero was the first person to read. And I remember it very, very clearly because he was on holiday in Thailand, I think.”
Fiennes Tiffin was in Thailand when he auditioned for the role of young Sherlock through Zoom.
“And I remember him doing a Zoom read. I was in the casting studio in London with our casting directors. And he came on this Zoom and he did this phenomenal read. And I knew him. I'd seen ‘Ungentlemanly Warfare.’ And he did this incredible read. And after that, it was every Sherlock I saw, just here I was in my head,” said Parkhill.
“You know, and I know Guy loved him and I loved him and Amazon very quickly loved him. They knew him. So it was just a sort of kind of beautiful synchronicity almost. But he did read and he, like I say, did a Zoom read from holiday. And he just in that one read, it was like, that was it. You know, he was that was it. That was the only Sherlock I could see in my head,” he added.
Creating “Young Sherlock”
Parkhill revealed how “Young Sherlock” was created.
“There was a producer, a friend of mine called Simon Maxwell, who asked me if I'd like to get involved. And I said yes. Guy was involved and I got very drawn to the idea of doing an origin story, like how Sherlock was formed, what happened to him before we meet him in the pages of Conan Doyle's first novel, ‘A Study in Scarlet.’ So it was the, for me it was the sort of intrigue and interest in getting to explore sort of the blank page of what happened before that first story began. But it was,it was a friend who said to me, ‘Are you interested in this?’ And that's how I first got involved in the project,” he said.
Focusing on Sherlock before he became a detective became interesting for Parkhill.
“One, I wanted it to be an original story. And also, I didn't want to touch the canon. I didn't want to touch the Conan Doyle stories. I wanted to... I felt like...Getting a chance to explore who this character was before we met him in the Conan Doyle stories was the most interesting to me,” he said.
He added, “Like, what made him... He's a very peculiar man, Sherlock Holmes. You know, the Conan Doyle... And what made him that person, I always found fascinating. What makes a person become, you know, so fixated on solving puzzles and riddles, and he's quite a sort of anti-social, isolated figure in many ways, right? And I was just fascinated by how he became that way. So that was where the interest for me lay, and that's why I wanted to do it that way.”
Parkhill said “Young Sherlock” is very different from other works.
“You know, if you look at the... Obviously, there have been a lot of adaptations of Sherlock. There was the... I think Chris Columbus directed a movie in the 80s. But he was a very fully formed Sherlock already when we met him. I think in the first or second scene, he's saying, well, I can tell by the mud on your shoes you've come from Kent or whatever,” said Parkhill.
He said, “But I hadn't seen an adaptation or a Sherlock that just started from the beginning, started very much from before he was a detective. And sort of my rule to myself for the show was you can't ever just take a case because he's not a detective. So the case, every season, the case has to be something that he gets pulled into or dragged into almost against his will. So that was sort of the idea.”
Casting Zine Tseng
Actress Zine Tseng starred in the 2024 series “3 Body Problem.”
Parkhill said he saw Zine Tseng’s self-tape, a video recording sent to audition for a role.
“I saw a self-tape of her when she was in Taiwan and she did the self-tape. And I've been doing this for almost 30 years now. And it was one of the best self-tapes I'd ever seen,” he said.
He added, “I just saw and I didn't know her. I hadn't seen ‘3 Body Problem’ but I hadn't seen her at that point. I just saw the self-tape and Rory, one of our casting directors. was like you've got to see this and I just watched this tape and she sort of came up to the camera like really close then moved away and moved around the room and it was a really bold thing to do like really bold but she was just so sort of mesmerizing.”
“And immediately afterwards, I was like, who is this person? And then I watched ‘3 Body Problem,’ and those first, I think, three episodes that she's in, there's that scene when she's sort of crying, watching her father being sort of beaten or whatever, and just the power she has. So for me, again, it was one of those, casting's a funny thing, because I think either it happens immediately, or you go through a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, and again, I think she was one of the first people we saw for the role,” said Parkhill.
“And she came over to read with Hero, actually, in London, all the way, she flew all the way over and she was tired. She came into the room and, you know, and the thing that was most incredible about them was just how they sort of messing around together. So we sort of rolled some, we rolled the camera of just them sort of messing, just to show their chemistry,” he said.
Challenges
For “Young Sherlock,” Parkhill said Ritchie wanted clothes for the series that young people can wear now.
“But we tried to root it in the history of the period, but we also took certain liberties like Jany [Temime], our costume designer. Guy wanted clothes that young people could wear today. You know what I mean? So when you approach, but it's sort of using period costumes, using the material, but using it in a way that felt very contemporary,” he said.
Parkhill added, “So that was one of the sort of more interesting things, but I mean, it's always more challenging. Like for example, if you write, a scene, you know, a taxi pulls up, they get out. Right, fine, you need a car. You write that in a period piece, you need horses, carriages, you know what I mean? Everything takes longer, especially outside, everything takes longer when you're doing, you know, horses, carriage, like we did street scenes in Oxford and stuff.”
“But it's a lot of fun. You know, you go down these streets. We had a lovely moment in, there's a scene in Oxford in the Porter's Lodge, I think in episode two. And the porters who'd been at this college for years and years and years and years turned the corner and this thing, we built it, it was new, we built it. And they felt it had been there for like 200 years. And they said to us afterwards, they said, can we keep this one and get rid of our modern one? You know, so, you know, that was a lot of fun to sort of recreate history in these beautiful buildings,” he said.
Richie’s direction of “Young Sherlock”
Parkhill praised Ritchie’s direction of “Young Sherlock.”
“Guy is a wonderful, well, he's an incredible talent, obviously, as you know, made some incredibly amazing films in his career. I loved working with him. He's very in the moment. He's very, he likes to be there. He likes to be in the moment on set and he likes to play with things. So he's always reworking things in the moment, in the moment, even as you're shooting, let's try this, let's try this. And it's sort of, it's quite nerve wracking in some ways, but it's incredibly liberating,” he said.
He said, “Because you're like, well, we can try things because we haven't shot it yet. It's not in the camera, so let's try this. So it was quite a liberating experience for me as a writer and as a director. So that I found, like I say, very freeing. But when you see him on fire in the moment, firing off ideas and playing with stuff, it's a hell of a thing to watch. It really is quite...it's very powerful. You know, he's a very instinctive director and he knows what he wants. And, you know, we had a happy experience making this.”
Parkhill said watching “Young Sherlock” is “like, this is Saturday night in the movies with your family.”
“You know what I mean? So I think it's, it's, it's fun. It's charming. It's a rollercoaster ride. It's not afraid to get emotional. It's not afraid to explore the shadows, you know? And I think, you know, hopefully it's smart. But I think that it's one of those things that you sit back and just enjoy being in the company of the show. That's what I feel when I watch it. So if you want something that's like Saturday night, the movies of the family, this is the show for you,” said Parkhill.
Related stories:
Interview: Hero Fiennes Tiffin on playing 'Young Sherlock' in new Prime Video series
Interview: Actor Dónal Finn says 'Young Sherlock' series funny, thrilling, witty