Just a few questions, Mr. Selfridge!
JEREMY PIVEN: Harry Selfridge was, you know,
was a true maverick.
Harry's story is extraordinary.
The storylines are interesting, there's so many characters
and so many different stories that you can dip in and out of.
It reflects the society which was happening at the time.
DOMINIC BARLOW: It isn't about a shop; it's about a man.
It's about Harry Selfridge,
the man who built this iconic shop on Oxford Street.
We are telling the story of Harry Selfridge
and the people that interact with him.
AMY BETH HAYES: Obviously, the show's such a success
because we just have a fabulous team of writers.
I spend a lot of time,
particularly in the writers' room,
so I'm very involved in the beginning of the show,
very involved in the storyline and working with the writers,
and I was a script editor myself,
so I feel that script is really important
because without a good script, you have no good show, really.
So the writers' room, I mean,
it's not quite what the Americans have.
We all get together under the guidance of our lead writer.
This year, it's been Kate Brooke.
Beginning of Series 3, we sat down
and she talked about the big themes that she wanted to cover.
Very soon, on, say, the second or third meeting,
we get other writers in,
and then when it gets to the individual episodes,
we will talk a little bit about those in a group,
and then we will break off into smaller groups
with the writers who are writing that episode,
and then we begin to break that down in more detail.
I think I love the characters more than anything.
I think that Series 3, we really know our characters really well.
There is such a delicious mix of characters now,
from the kind of very warm, comic characters like Mr. Crabb
to our baddie, Lord Loxley,
and of course Mr. Selfridge, Harry,
who is just such an amazing character, really,
a sort of tragic character in many ways.
PIVEN: When you look at what he accomplished today,
when there was nothing going on,
anything even remotely like that,
and he just kind of jumped in
and knew exactly what he was doing,
and everyone kind of fell into place.
He lived in a lot of dualities
because he led the charge and was very confident,
but at the same time, very deep-feeling.
And so he has a lot of layers and demons,
and we explore all of that.
It's an extraordinary story, and it's a true story.
I mean, Selfridge's is still there on Oxford Street.
We were very much inspired by Lindy Woodhead's book
Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge.
I think, like any hopefully successful dramas
that are based in non-fiction,
we take the truth and then we work with it
and we try and stick to the bare bones of the Selfridges' lives,
what happened in the store, but then we have the opportunity
to create lots of other characters around that.
Princess Marie is directly related
to a founding father of Russia.
MARIE: I was hunted down by the Bolsheviks.
You should write a book about me.
Now that is a splendid idea.
A very big book.
(laughing)
I play a new character
who's been brought in because my son marries Rosalie Selfridge.
Princess Marie is based on a real character,
has escaped from Russia, running from the Bolsheviks.
So my character is a pioneering Russian aviator
who's determined to kind of get his aircraft
and fleet of aircraft off the ground.
He's a little bit of a playboy,
and he marries Harry Selfridge's eldest daughter, Rosalie,
and if this is a...
I think we're gonna learn if this is a marriage of true love,
or does he have other motives?
He's a good-time boy.
He likes champagne, he likes beautiful women,
he likes the new machinery and stuff.
He's in love with the kind of... the technology of the day.
I think he's a little bit of a Peter Pan boy
because he's very indulged by his mother,
so I don't think he's ever properly grown up
and learned how to be a man.
We open on Harry in his roughest time
because the love of his life is gone.
So we open on a funeral.
Good-bye, my darling.
(thunder rumbling)
How am I going to live without her?
You'll find a way.
And then go from that, from death,
to the celebration of life with the wedding.
We're hitting the ground running in Season 3,
and it's pretty action-packed,
and yet we're true to the show itself.
But it definitely has a different pace to it.
I think it's unfair to call Roger Grove a villain.
It's really, really unfair.
He's a very good man who's made some...
I think it's fair to say, in modern terms,
some fairly shocking decisions.
What I love about the show,
what I've always loved about the scripts,
is that they are a mixture of a true historical story
and a set of fictional characters
based on positions within the store
and within Harry's social circle and life,
that are, while it's based in truth,
they are of course fictional, which allows you a lot of scope
in the way you approach gender, politics, fashion, and retail.
But it also means it's grounded in a story that has to be told.
You can't mess with the truth too much.
This season has a lot in store for everyone.
Rosalie has this virtuous, irreproachable humility,
and I guess actually, a lot of her characteristics
follow through from her mother, Rose, so she's great to play.
But at certain points,
she is capable of stepping up to the mark,
and we kind of see that throughout the series,
that there's moments where the backbone has to come in
and she has to sort things out.
It's really interesting because obviously,
getting a part where you're playing a character
whose life was real,
I think from getting to speak to the writers deeply,
we can see that they kind of entwine a little bit of fiction,
but it is primarily the true story that runs through.
And the fact that she married this Russian prince
and the demise, and I guess it's all going
to come crashing around their feet pretty soon.
All right, sweaty chaps.
Anger, energy, rehearsal, and background action!
Action!
Once we have a script, probably first or second draft,
we bring the directors in,
and they then have an input often about the store event.
So one example of how a director might work in a writers' room,
there's an example in episode 9 where the writers had an idea
that they wanted Harry to really be quite taken aback
and quite shocked by the reaction of the crowd
to the business plan he has to hold a big sale
and to undercut his competitors.
And we were all struggling with this.
We were saying perhaps somebody's petitioning
or handing out leaflets.
Everything we came up with was a bit lame,
and our director of block four said,
"I know, what about people throwing eggs?"
And we were all a bit shocked
because we thought this would be quite, you know,
we thought this might be a bit much,
sort of having our hero sort of covered in eggs.
But in a way, directors have a really good sense
of how something will look, and actually,
it works brilliantly.
I'm Martin, on the standby props.
Basically, we've got some eggs, which we'll throw at Jeremy.
We have to blow the egg yolks out
by making a hole in the top of each egg.
They're just filling with water so when they hit him,
they don't cover his costume in egg yolk.
The biggest difficulty is having to recreate over several takes
and not, you know, destroy costumes and makeup
and all of that, but keep it convincing.
And protests on-screen are often very difficult to achieve,
so we're trying to find a way of making it feel exciting
and giving some jeopardy for Harry
that the store is in trouble.
(crowd shouting)
The truth is stranger than fiction.
His life played out like a Greek tragedy,
and that's what we're getting into.
And yet, the writers are incredible and innovative,
and we've taken dramatic license in certain parts
to create these fictional characters.
There are two characters, Agnes Towler and Henri Leclair,
that when you first meet them in Season 1,
there's such chemistry.
And it wasn't premeditated by the writers;
it just happened, and it's a tribute to them.
They saw dailies and went,
"Oh yeah, there's something going on here."
I mean, all the women were in love with Henri Leclair,
Gregory Fitoussi, because he's tall and very good-looking--
whatever, I think that's overrated--
and I think they immediately saw him and went, "Oh, my God."
But there was true chemistry between the two of them.
So it's that beautiful blend of reality
and whatever the imagination can think up.
AGNES: I can't believe you're here.
Well, I am.
I told you I'd come back.
And I told you that I'd wait for you.
Series 3 is about really how soldiers returned from the war
and how people in London welcomed them back
and how they began to settle down together,
and so that bit of history's very important,
that we keep that extremely accurate.
Well, the world is changing and continues to change.
We're just coming back from the war,
and the men are lost, and it's new territory for them
because they didn't know what they were gonna get into
until they came back home and there were no jobs for them.
And one of the things that Harry and Nancy Webb want to do
is build these homes for them, a place to go,
and that journey is going to be an intense one this season
because you're gonna get some old friends and foes
that'll be back.
Lord Loxley will be back with a vengeance
and will be standing in Harry's way
of achieving his dream
and an homage to his wife, really.
That's what the Homes for Heroes is.
My character, Nancy, is very much a new woman.
This series is set in 1918, so it's just coming
to the tail end of the First World War,
and she is educated, which a lot of women...
She has a degree.
Women from this era, that's a very new thing.
And she wants to build Homes for Heroes
for the guys coming back from the war,
and she wants Harry to help her fund it.
It was really interesting to do research for this part.
Well, I talked to the guys, the writers,
and they sent several books all written by the same woman,
and it's just fascinating.
I had no idea.
AMANDA ABBINGTON: It was a real time of change for women.
You couldn't be married if you worked in Selfridge's.
You had to be a single girl.
And as soon as you got engaged or married,
you had to leave and become the wife and the carer at home.
All the women in Mr. Selfridge are very strong.
They're written very strongly.
There's an element, you know...
Lady Mae, she's a suffragette,
and you have Kitty, who's this kind of firecracker,
and Aisling, who plays Agnes.
They're all very, very well-written,
very strong characters.
We sort of try and push the boat out
as much as possible,
and then we try and sort of creep back with fact,
and often if we get stuck in the writers' room
with a story or with a character,
we'll go back to the book or we'll go back
to some other kind of historical material
and we'll just sort of take from it and see what we can...
you know, see if something inspires us.
The sets are amazing.
It's just phenomenal.
The best sets I've ever been on.
Every time you go to the shop floor,
you always just take a step back because it's extraordinary.
It's a bit like Aladdin's cave when you go inside.
I mean, they are amazing, the sets, I think.
CANDIDA OTTON: We're responsible for everything
behind the actors' heads, really.
It's just a beautifully done show.
It was a ground-breaking store, and Harry Selfridge
was a ground-breaking man and had fantastic ideas,
so keeping it sophisticated and stylish,
just moving a bit away
from the heavier Victorians, really.
Starts with the designs, you get the scripts.
My job is to break down the scripts, see what we need,
and then go out and try and find them.
At the very beginning, when we first started
and we were in our prep, sort of six- to eight-week prep
before we started filming,
they wanted to introduce different areas to the store.
So male gentlemen grooming was one of them.
We got lots of beautiful stationery and pens
and a great gentlemen's grooming counter,
from shaving brushes and razors
and colognes and all that kind of thing.
We wanted to incorporate a few more items for sale, really.
We actually wanted to... it's just like a shop.
We actually wanted to enlarge our stock.
JOHN MALONE: This is the ground floor of Selfridge's, at the store.
They've just finished filming here
and moved on to another set.
But the cabinets, like the set,
were all made for the first year of the series.
What's quite unusual, they've probably invested
about five years into this
because the sets were made to a very high specification
and all the cabinets have been hand-made,
knowing there's going to be two or three or four series.
It's a good investment because you get very good props and sets
and you know you're going to use them again for a few years,
and it's worked very well.
These mannequins have all been sourced
because obviously they're period mannequins,
so there's very limited people who you can get them from.
These wooden arms and things,
you wouldn't have these things, I think, so...
This piece of hedge is from our Palm Court terrace actually,
and we moved it in here to make good use of it.
And we had the idea of hanging these tennis balls
just as a visual sort of display.
These cabinets take a lot of filling because they're glass,
and they're double-sided glass,
so you see everything on display.
Both Kate and myself and the whole art department,
when we first came down to that fantastic set,
because the set's stood for a couple years now,
we walked down there and it was empty and we thought, you know,
we could only last about 20 minutes down there
because we just had panic attacks,
had to run back upstairs,
because how are we going to fill this space?
In this job, it's a bit tricky
because finding props that are 100 years old
are quite hard to come by, so it's digging around,
ringing people, asking favors,
and a bit of a treasure hunt most of the time, yeah.
I think our set dec and our buyer
have done a lot of product placement, as much as they can,
because there's companies who have been around that long time,
they still have the same packaging and stuff,
so we've got a lot of product placement.
Everything else, we've bought, we've sourced bottles,
and we've made up the perfume by using food coloring,
and we normally use vodka as well
because it goes off after a while.
This has all got to be here for eight months.
Everything is very, very carefully thought out.
We built the main body of the sets,
the beginning of this process, on Series 1,
and they're constantly evolving.
It goes with the character of Selfridge's itself.
It has to keep moving with the times,
it has to keep developing.
I mean, one of the things that's quite amusing I always think
is to see how Kitty's empire grows hugely because every year,
somehow cosmetics becomes bigger and bigger.
HAYES: When Series 2 begins,
we see that Kitty has been promoted to beauty,
which is a new department which she now runs and is head of.
Beauty has become this huge industry,
and she's very much at the forefront of that.
It never fails to amaze me how much detail and attention
the art department put into those offices.
GOODMAN-HILL: My favorite set is the offices.
I love being in the offices.
I think it's because it's where Grove spends
an awful lot of his time.
I spend most of my time in the offices,
which are spectacular.
If I have something about a newspaper or a letter
or something like that, they've made this exquisite thing.
A lot of Selfridge's original paperwork
has been copied and put on them.
Whole wodges of paper,
every single bit would be an authentic print.
My character has a studio
where he does all of his plane designs and drawings
and, you know, the drawers are stuffed full of designs
of his actual plane, because Serge was a real person as well.
It just helps you so much to live in that world and be in it.
And I didn't spend as much time on the shop floor
as I would like to these days.
I think every time we walk onto the shop floor,
there's something new, there's something dazzling.
There's a set on there right now
of a box hedge with a lady in tennis clothes,
and hanging in front of it are all white tennis balls,
and you look at it and you go, "White tennis balls?
"You don't see white tennis balls anymore,
they're all yellow or green."
So it's kind of great
to see that sort of stuff come to life again.
And I think we're spoiled on the show
with how beautiful the sets are
and how expansive and big they are.
I love the house.
It's so beautifully done, the minor details.
Each series, they sort of update it with the fashion of the time.
I mean, I think they have
different wallpapers this series.
Yeah, the intricacies, like I think they're importing
a lot of goods that are going into the house
to make it look a bit more valuable, I think, really,
because they're just affluent people.
This is where we break the fourth wall, literally.
There's a loading bay just through there.
(laughs)
We don't often use this part of the set, actually.
I've never done anything in here.
It's just a nice little area
for a bit of flourish in different scenes.
I mean, in the last series,
my mother was in here for a few scenes, I think.
Literally, if you look, everywhere you look,
there is something else going on, which is beautiful.
The paintings are real.
This series, we've done a shot from up there
which looks down on us all--
there's quite a few of us in the scene--
and it just revolves,
and that'll be quite nice to look at.
Series 3, I've come back from the First World War.
I've opened up a nightclub.
It's a fantastic place to work in
because you have the band, the Dixieland band,
and so whenever you step on set, it's like a soundtrack.
There's music playing, and really infectious music
that really wants to get you dancing, you know?
With all the supporting actors as well as the main cast
going in there, it's a fantastic place.
It's rocking, it's pumping.
Well?
They're good.
GRAVELLE: I didn't know much about Dixieland, Lindy Hop,
but thank God, you know, you can be all elbows and knees,
so I've managed to hold my own and keep my head above water.
A few of the steps
from the Dixieland, the Lindy Hop, and the Black Bottom
I've tried in some of the clubs in London.
Whether it's a success or a failure,
I don't know, that's not for me to say,
but yes, I've tried a few of the moves out.
The other place I always love visiting when I go on set
is the exterior, which is shot at Chatham Docks.
It's often been called the Selfridge's Bungalows.
We have just a first floor
of the corner of Oxford Street and Duke Street,
and it gets completely taken down
and completely put up every year,
and it is, like, a miracle.
In fact, it was a bit of a close call this year,
I seem to remember, because we had a terrible downpour
just when we started filming it.
The rain pours down outside,
and when you're trying to dress the shop windows,
the rain often would pour down inside the shop windows as well.
And on the day, there's 80 extras,
there's horses, there's vehicles,
there's road cover, there's CGI, there's riggers.
It's quite a big number.
Fortunately, one of the good things
about going forward in the series
is we're going through different periods,
and it's amazing to watch the costumes change
as the fashion's changing.
We've tried to bring new, fresh elements in,
influences from Paris fashion, trying to get rid
of the more heavy, traditional Victorian style.
The wristwatch, yeah, it's new, new fashion.
The wristwatch is meant to be a bit more with the times.
Lots of other people are going into sort of casual suits,
softer materials and soft collars.
Unfortunately, Mr. Crabb is sort of stuck in the Victorian age.
It's like a dream, everything looks so beautiful.
The colors are all jewel-like.
So I think in reality, in the times,
everybody wore a lot of dark colors
because they couldn't afford
to have light colors that get stained all the time,
so everybody was wearing dark,
so it was quite a drab look in London at that time.
But the costume designer and the set designer
and everybody has just gone for it.
Well, this is my... it's so beautiful.
It's made especially for me,
with my lovely teal colors with the...
Yeah, I've never had anything ever fitted and perfectly made.
Rosalie has been on a romantic trip with Serge, her husband,
and she's come back with kind of Parisian-style things going on,
and so she's completely embraced it.
So this is a new dress.
My first scenes were getting married,
so it was kind of authentic.
It was really incredible.
I tried on all these wedding dresses
because in the first episode, I get married,
and then they actually made a wedding dress for me,
so it was completely bespoke and fitted perfectly,
so I feel like I got married in a very extravagant way.
Flying is why Serge fell in love with Rosalie.
He came to me and he said, "Mother, she is an angel."
(crowd laughs)
To Serge and Rosalie!
ALL: Serge and Rosalie.
Za zdorovie.
(laughs)
A lot of research has gone into my costumes--
well, everybody's costumes-- and particular colors are chosen
specifically because she comes from Russia.
She also lived in Paris for some time.
The detail is very important to me as well,
and that helps me as a character.
It's not mine, in case you can't tell,
and this is my very beautiful, expensive, lovely wig,
which has just been freshly cut.
It feels like mine, though.
Basically, the wig, it's human hair.
Each hair is knotted into a little cap
that's made to individually fit their head,
and it matches exactly their own hairline.
And then each hair is individually knotted in
in the right direction that you want it to go.
We finished at 7:00 yesterday,
and there was a flurry of activity in the makeup trailer,
and I asked, "When do you go home?",
and they just sort of stay until they're all set.
They have to be painstakingly reset every day.
I'm getting it ready for the next time she wears it,
so I preset it and then leave it in.
It's gonna be set on these common rollers and hot sticks
to get the period look for that time.
And then we dress it out...
They live over there with the other wigs.
Properly set, ready to dress out when she comes in.
These are Elsa, our new character Elsa,
she's got various wigs.
Every time we see her, she's in a different club look.
And that's the daughter,
the back of Mr. Selfridge's daughter's head.
On this particular program, it's been nice to come in
and completely reinvent all the characters
because the time has moved on.
We've changed the way the characters look.
They didn't really wear makeup before,
so we've introduced makeup
because it's now come into the marketplace.
Yeah, it's been nice.
(applause)
KATE LEWIS: When we sat down this year as we do every year
and we talk about how we can make the world bigger and better
and more exciting for our audience,
this year, we very much focused on the CGI.
People always ask me what's the difference
between working over here and working in the States,
and I think over here,
they somehow magically get it all done for less.
We built the ground floor of Selfridge's exterior,
but the company D-Neg have actually built
the rest of the Selfridge's store, so up we go.
And they've done the rest of the street
left and right of Selfridge's.
It's really made the world that much bigger
that we couldn't have done with sets.
It is fun when we go to Chatham
and you're right next to a battleship
and a submarine and a rope factory
and when you look at it on the screen,
suddenly it's Oxford Street.
It's incredible.
Looking back on Series 2,
we were really excited by some of the possibilities
and some of the brilliant things
that D-Neg achieved on our Chatham sets,
particularly because that is very reliant on CGI
because it is just one floor.
Just a portion of the front of Selfridge's,
and then you've got green screens outside.
The green screens are very odd
because you don't know what's going to be there.
They're just green screens.
We don't actually film in front of them,
but they sort of go into the distance.
So I'm always amazed when I actually see it.
You always feel like you're on the set of something epic--
well, you are, you know--
and it can be sometimes like, "Okay, this is quite bare,"
but when you see it on the screen,
when the effects are in and everything,
YOU 90. "Oh. Okay, right."
We've got two cameras working today,
so we've got the option
of getting a high shot and a low shot.
As you can see there, the buildings,
we've only got the lower story of the building.
The rest is all CGI.
That's all recreated in a computer.
Some shots are more expensive than others.
If we move the camera with some shots,
that can cost a fortune, so there's quite a lot of times
when we say, "Let's do this static."
Other times, when we can afford to do it,
we can MOVE “18 camera.
HAYDEN JONES: I'm here to take care
of all the digital and visual effects needs.
So what we do is we create the wider world around the set.
So as you can see behind me,
we've got a massive 50-foot green screen
on either end of the set,
and we replace that with our digital world,
which extends Oxford Street both east and west,
and we create digital cars, people,
and put them all in and make it look as seamless as possible
so you feel that Selfridge's is this massive building
on a bustling high street.
So yeah, the bulk of our work is back in the office,
so really we're here
just to make sure everything's filmed correctly
so that we can manage to put all the assets in.
But back in the office is where it all really takes place.
So this is a digital scan, which we had a machine on set
before the filming commenced
which is able to let us make, inside the computer,
an exact representation of what the set was.
This is one of the more complex shots of the show
because for the first time,
they wanted to see Oxford Street east.
Now, Selfridge's Series 2, we only ever looked down the west.
However, this series, one of the main briefs we got early on
was the idea to open up the world
and to have a larger, vast environment
and make that environment more rich.
We wanted to give the directors the ability to shoot
what they wanted to shoot as much as possible
and make it work for them
rather than give them boundaries in which they had to stay into.
What this is, this is an example of a production
wanting to widen the Selfridge's universe,
and this is a great example
of one of the most difficult shots we've faced,
to have a whole CG Oxford Street
and a pan from looking down on the floor,
look up over London and then onto location,
which was meant to be purposed as the top of Selfridge's,
where a wedding was taking place.
Oh, don't put the flowers there.
That's where the wedding cake's going to go.
A whole day's taking squandered,
and all this is getting in the way
of the spring promotion.
The peacocks have arrived!
Peacocks?!
What I want to show you is some stuff that we did
regarding Paddington Station.
The important thing was really that the lighting
had to be correct.
I mean, Paddington is a big, vast, open space,
and when I spoke to the director about it,
we talked about what sort of atmosphere
and ambiance was going to be in the station.
What I found was, in research,
were some fantastic old drawings from Paddington in the 1930s.
And this here is the original end window,
and it's got all the dimensions
and all the technical drawings and everything.
This is actually quite different
to the end windows that are there today.
The design is quite different,
so I thought it was important just for authenticity's sake
to make sure that as many elements,
as many ingredients that I've found researching were correct.
Train stations are very romantic places,
so we wanted something that had light cascading
through pockets of light.
We couldn't do a big move on the shots,
so we had a lock-off camera,
and so we positioned it in such a way
that we would get the train moving out
and all of the action coming towards camera.
We immediately sort of focused on the CGI
as being somewhere where we could broaden the show
and create much more production value.
We've been very ambitious with that in Series 3,
and I think it's really paid off.
We go up to the roof terrace
and there's a big tilt up over the whole of London,
and when I first saw it, it absolutely blew me away.
It's incredible.
PIVEN: They have spent so much time and energy
on getting it right on these sets,
and yet, just when you think,
"Well, they probably don't have anything left for the CGl,"
yet they'll be incredibly adventurous with that
because we're creating a lot of different worlds.
They're overachieving on every level, and it's really great
because now we're exposing the roof at Selfridge's,
and so we're kind of recreating that.
I think it's gonna put the pressure
on Selfridge's themselves to open up that roof,
because they make it look really incredibly beautiful,
as it was back in the day.
The best thing that I've learned on the show
is working with the other actors.
Some amazing names, some amazing talent on the show.
I've learned so much, I can't emphasize that enough.
It's just... it's blown me away a little bit, really.
I didn't even think I could grow a mustache.
They were like, "We're gonna make you a mustache,"
and I was like, "Okay, yeah, that's fine."
And I decided, "You know what,
I'm gonna see if I can grow one myself,"
and I showed it to the makeup and hair team
and they were like, "Oh, we actually quite like that."
They still color in a little bit
because the testosterone has not kicked in enough
to fully give me a proper beard or anything.
But yeah, I feel like I'm trying to emulate Harry in a way
with this bit of facial fuzz.
When we were first doing the first series,
John Jones was the first director,
and he gave me a wonderful note
when we were talking about the characters to begin with.
He said, "lf Selfridge's decided to go to Disneyland for a day,
"Mr. Crabb would argue against it,
"saying it's a waste of money and it's terrible.
"But when they went to Disneyland,
"Mr. Crabb would be the only one
who went on all the rides twice."
So on the first day, I met Jeremy Piven and Zoe Wanamaker,
who I didn't know was going to be in it,
so it was sort of...
It was on the shop floor,
I hadn't met anybody, it was a massive set,
Jeremy, that's quite a big deal meeting him,
Zoe, that's a big deal, so it was quite nerve-racking.
But it always is like the first day of school.
No, I don't think it made it harder.
I think because there are so many cast members,
people stick with the actors that they do their scenes with
and then you tend to not see any of the other actors.
There's people I'm only just meeting still
that I will never see because I'm working with Jeremy a lot.
Yeah, it wasn't intimidating.
That first day was, but now I'm into it.
If it was Lord Loxley against Harry Selfridge,
I reckon that Lord Loxley would take him by surprise
and try and hit him while he wasn't looking.
But yeah, I think it's pretty clear
that I'd have my ass handed to me
if it was me and Jeremy or, in fact, actually
if it was Lord Loxley and Mr. Selfridge.
Yeah.
Aidan is one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life.
The Irish are just these very sweet, open, poetic bunch,
and that's one of the great things about Aidan as an actor
is he's incredibly sweet and open and present as a person,
and then he plays this villain who relishes evil
and plays it beautifully.
So, you know, Aidan and I would never mix it up in that way.
It would never come to that.
But in terms of characters,
if Harry Gordon Selfridge and Lord Loxley
were to mix it up, you know, it's one man talking,
but I would put my money on Harry Selfridge.