It is undoubtedly the expression of weariness on his face at rest that makes him an excellent prophet of doom. In recent times, Jared Harris has warned his contemporaries of coming calamities. In the series Chernobyl (2019), he interpreted the engineer Valeri Legassov, and in The Terror (2018), the role of Naval Officer Francis Crozier, caught in the Arctic ice. And here he is now in Hari Seldon, the inventor of psycho-history, a science that allows us to predict collective behavior.
Hari Seldon is the central character of the cycle Foundation, written by Isaac Asimov throughout the second half of the XXe century. On November 19, the tenth and final episode of Foundation – with an “u” – the series that David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman have taken from this monument of science fiction, will arrive on Apple TV +. And, from Los Angeles, where he resides, Jared Harris returned to this character a priori impossible to embody, this human but extraterrestrial scientist, omniscient but vulnerable, who, in addition (beware of disclosure), dies in the second episode, to continue then to intervene in the destiny of beings and planets.
For him, Hari Seldon “Descended from Tiresias, the blind diviner of Greek mythology, who prophesied on the slopes of Mount Helicon. Moreover, Asimov gives birth to Seldon on the planet Helicon, the reference is obvious ”. But Asimov also makes Seldon a big talker, leading conversations over dozens of pages. “Impossible to stage”. For Jared Harris, the challenge, “Which is not very different from that of Chernobyl, is how we transform the exposure of a situation into a dramatic one, because if we don’t succeed, the public realizes that we are stuffing it with information ”.
The actor achieves this, by resorting to humor, dispensed in homeopathic doses, by preserving a part of ambiguity in this character who could be a paragon of virtues, by making the most of the relationship between Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell), the young prodigy who becomes his pupil. “I also read biographies of those scientists who revolutionized their field. They have a huge ego, which implies both arrogance and loneliness, explains Jared Harris. When you come to such a deep understanding of something, there aren’t many people to converse with. “
From beer to boards
At 60, the actor had time to think about his job, which allowed him to stand up to creator David S. Goyer, when the latter was reluctant to communicate the entire scenario. : “I don’t know why, he didn’t like the idea of me knowing what was going to happen. I never understood why it was useful to keep the actors in the dark about the story. He wanted the character to be impenetrable … I encouraged him to give me a little freedom, to trust me. “
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