Gemma Chan interview for Humans

26 May 2015

So tell me a bit about Humans, where do we join the characters?

Humans is set in a parallel present, in a very familiar world in London and you first meet the Hawkins family when they purchase a synth called Anita. Synths are a highly developed robotic servant which are very human in appearance; they are the latest aspirational product or gadget for a family to have.

 

Parallel present? Is that one the viewers will recognize?

Yes, the world of Humans, it could be today, it could be tomorrow. To the viewer it should be very recognizable. In that sense Humans isn’t traditional sci –fi, it is set in a very grounded universe.

 

Who is Anita and what attracted you to her as a role?

I was attracted to playing Anita because I like a challenge. She is a very complex multi layered character but also obviously, a character that isn’t human. I read the scripts and loved them. Reading the first three, I just wanted to read more. I hadn’t read anything like it and I’d never seen the subject of AI approached in this way before. So that for me was really refreshing and it raised a lot of questions and lots of interesting themes.

Anita is an enigma and a challenge: there are many layers to her which you get to see more of as the series goes on. The challenge was to be able to plot the arc she’s going to go on, revealing little by little about what she is and why.

 

How do the family initially respond to the arrival of Anita?

I would say that each member of the family starts off with a certain perception of Anita, which changes for each of them in a different way and for different reasons. Certain relationships develop in an unexpected way.

When you first meet Anita you aren’t sure whether she is a threat to the family or what her deal is and what’s going on. But things aren’t as they seem and they might not be what you first suspect either. Laura in particular feels initially quite threatened by her presence. She never wanted one of these things in her house and she’d always said that she wouldn’t have one and she comes back to find that her husband has made an impulse purchase and bought Anita and just brought it home without her permission.

I think she does feel like her place is being usurped in the family with Anita being completely brilliant at every domestic task; cooking cleaning, looking after Sophie, so there’s a lot of mistrust and fear.

 

How does Laura feel about Sophie relating to Anita so quickly?

I think the fact that Sophie befriends Anita and is completely at ease and affectionate towards her so quickly does trouble Laura and makes her feel left out and a bit threatened within the family. I think the fact that she mistrusts or she doesn’t completely trust Anita from the start, it all feeds into her slight paranoia about Anita’s presence in the house.

 

There seems to be something quite different about Anita, how does that start to play out?

Well when you first meet Anita no one really suspects there is anything different about her but then certain members of the family, Laura and Mattie in particular, notice things about Anita which are slightly strange. Her behaviour is somewhat different to other people’s synths, she seems to be a bit more perceptive.

 

 

Tell us about being a synth, what’s involved?

Well we have had a brilliant movement director called Dan O’Neill who has guided us from the start. Before we started filming we did a few weeks of what we called ‘Synth School. He and Chris Fry (our producer), really wanted a uniform language of movement for the synths to have, so every actor who played a synth had to go through it.

Synths are basically machines and everything that they do is going to use up energy or battery power, so everything they do has to have an economy. As an actor, it was about finding ways to do things that are actually very counter intuitive to how we would traditionally do things: so it was really learning all the basics, how to stand up, sit down, walk, turn a corner. The things that sound so easy but actually you have to really pare back your physicality and do it in the most economic way. It’s really hard actually when you realise how many physical ticks you have and you have to kind of strip those back.

 

Was Dan with you on set for each scene?

Thank goodness Dan was there every day! He would be able to give you notes and say “you know your feet aren’t parallel” or “your left hand is fidgeting in the shot”, so yeah we really, really needed him.

 

What was the effect on hair and makeup and styling? Did hair and make-up take longer than a more usual role?

Our make-up designer came up with the hair and makeup which I think looks great on all the synths. The synths are meant to look perfect, so it’s a nod to a kind of sheen on the skin and a flawless finish to the hair and makeup. So yes it does take a little longer and has to be maintained throughout any given day, but I think it really works.

 

You have quite a dramatic underwater sequence, what was that experience like for you?

I had never had to do any underwater work like that before so it was a real challenge but really good fun as well. We shot it at Pinewood – they have such a great team there.

I had a session the week before just to introduce me to the water and learn how to breathe off a regulator. They took me down to the bottom of the tank and took away my mask, took away the regulator and I had to swim around for a bit and then be able to take the regulator back and then put the mask back on and clear it and then work my way back up to the surface. But then you have to be able to do all of that and try and act on top of it. I really enjoyed it but there was half of me that was loving it and half of me that was on the verge of panic.

The team are brilliant and you know that you’re safe and that if you look like you’re getting into any trouble they would be right in there and, you know, your diver would be looking after you.

 

How close are we to the world we see in Humans?

It’s just a step away from what we have now. I mean the technology we have already with iPhones and Siri; we call up a call centre, or ask our phone a question; you don’t necessarily have to speak to a person, you speak to a machine. This is just a step on from that in imagining a world where we do have humanoid servants or robots that do all the jobs that we can’t be bothered to do anymore. I think in parts of the world that’s already the case, where a lot of the work force has been replaced by machines, so we’re not far off really.

 

Do you think it tells us anything about how we treat and relate to our technology now?

Definitely, I think it reflects loads of things about our relationship with technology, both our dependence on it and our ambivalence towards it. I have a love / hate relationship with my phone. I’m completely dependent on it, but I also hate how dependent I am on it.

In the world of Humans you get to see people’s fears and prejudices towards technology and the benefits and possibly the downsides of our lives being made easier in a way. But you know in gaining some things, you lose other things.

In today’s age with the internet we seem to be so much more connected to the world and yet there’s a disconnect as well: we might talk to our family and friends less, we have less real interaction and I think the show explores all of those themes.