Interview with Anders Hayward for Gap Year

14 February 2017

Q: Introduce Dylan to us and just tell us what your thoughts are of him?

 

Dylan is an absolute hopeless wreck of a boy who pretends he is a man. He thinks that he knows a lot about the world, knows a lot about himself and women, but actually knows nothing at all. He thinks ‘I’ve been to university for a year and I know what life is like and I’ve experienced life and you haven’t Sean.’ When Sean’s had this real working life and Dylan just has no grasp on what reality is or how things work in the real world. He’s just a hopeless romantic wreck.

 

Q: He’s essentially a positive person; you’ve got to engage with him on at least one level. Did you recognise him when you started reading it?

 

At first, his whole journey is just 'Lauren' – that’s his only thing. He’s all about getting Lauren back and then we’ll be happy ever after. Then obviously after it goes all tits up and morphs in to something else. I don’t think Sean comes in to mind at all in the beginning, I think later he’s like “Oh shit, I’m actually travelling with my friend.”

 

Tell us about your relationship with Sean, what’s the deal? How do you think you guys have got together and how do you think you stay together? There are so many opportunities for you to just go…

 

We’re so totally different, I think a lot of people have that though – a friend that you’ve know for years and years and you grow up with them.

 

You both meet at primary school and you’re best friends through primary school. Then you go to the same secondary school and you are best friends through secondary school. Then you just kind of don’t see each other for a while, then you come back and you’ve got nothing to talk about. You’ve both totally changed, not that one is better than the other, you have just got nothing in common and nothing to talk about anymore.

 

They’ve still gone on this trip together to say ‘Yeah, we’re still best friends’. Of course, they manage to find friendship back again through travelling but it’s like: they can’t be best friends because they are so different.

 

When you and Ade were together on your scenes, you had to take into account that you’ve been friends forever.

 

I feel like we both know our own characters and a bit about each other’s character and how they play them and I feel like I’d want to be Sean in real life - me and Ade are really good friends anyway. It helps that were both open to ad-lib with each other, which is really good.

 

What do you think the mix up is with the two themes that of being a foreigner both in a country and from each other?

 

I think if you line us up, the main five characters, they are all so different…

 

I do find it interesting that we all speak the same language and we’re all travelling together. But there are some moments you’re like - ‘What? what are you?’ They are all so different from each other, there’s one thing we all hate about one another and another thing that we absolutely love about one another. That keeps us together as a group.

 

Eventually we are all just there for each other, it’s cliché, but it becomes like a family. We all can say nasty things to each other and it will all wash over by the end of it. They are a very miss-mash group of friends.

 

How important do you think the balance is between the comedy and the drama of it? There is a pathos to the show, how important is that to you?

 

Firstly, I think that the writing is brilliant, the way that the writing is done. You can have a serious scene, but the writing will make it funny and tragic at the same time.

 

I feel like Greg has a lot of those moments. There is a section where his life is deteriorating and it’s tragic - this guy has lost everything but it’s still funny... it’s still light-hearted to stop the audience from feeling too down on it.

 

It’s like we all know a Greg but Greg is not a cliché. Tell us about the generational side of things…

 

Yeah, we were shooting in Vietnam for a bit and we decided to stay for a bit longer, we were just out for a drink. Then these three guys invited us over to have a drink with them, and they were like “Oh, is this you and your dad?” I was like “Yep, this is me and my dad, my names Wes and this is Tim.” Because at the time my nickname was Wes for some reason, so we were Wes and Tim. They were four lovely guys from Vietnam, very limited English but they liked to talk about Wayne Rooney a lot, so we thought ‘Yeah that’s great’.

 

So, that’s kind of how the night went; we ended up having this weird disjointed conversation which involved drinking and trying to stagger our way through who they were and what they were about. It was brilliant. They were such nice guys. It was a surreal night.

 

The guys would say ‘Your son shouldn’t be drinking’ and Tim would go ‘Oh it’s fine’ and then a cigarette would go around and they’d say ‘Your son shouldn’t be smoking’ and Tim was like ‘Oh, he’s allowed one’. I don’t smoke.

 

Can you talk about the journey a little bit and the locations?

 

Me, Ade and Tim got to KL on the 13th May and the other guys got there a bit earlier and we were in KL for a week doing rehearsals and just getting used to each other.

 

Then we went to Langkawi which was our first shoot. We spent two weeks in Langkawi then came back to KL for a little bit, then we went to Taman Negara which was the jungle region. The jungle was for Episode 5 and then we came back to KL, then went back to Vietnam for a few days, came back to KL for a bit. We then went to China for another 10 days.

 

Where did you go in China?

 

We went to Beijing and shot all around Beijing, which was an incredible place. Then we shot by The Great Wall for a few days, again… mental, and then we finished off in Shanghai.

 

What surprised you about China?

 

I thought it was just going to be mad, I didn’t know if I’d like it or not. I was a bit sceptical of China. I ended up loving it, it was one my favourite places that I’d been to, it almost feels like a Vegas. Everyone is plugging away doing their thing, there is no real structure to it, it’s just kind of mad miss-mash of things. It’s crazy; it’s an absolutely mental place. The air there, the smog is so bad, you can’t breathe.

 

Tim was saying that it’s hard to take in that The Great Wall of China just goes on and on, how do you take that in?

 

On the first day we got to The Great Wall in the afternoon. Then me, Molly, who does all the costumes, Tim and a few others started to go on a walk. We were in the middle of nowhere so we thought ‘lets just go for a walk’. Then we got on to this wild part of the wall. It was the first time we had seen it. We just got on and there was this moment of... I don’t know, I felt quite emotional because it’s so epic, you’re on top of this wall, and there was nobody for miles and miles. It was such a surreal moment, you just wanted to stay up there forever. It was a euphoric moment, you felt like Rocky at the top of the steps.

 

Do you ever get these moment where you’re in a situation where you’re not filming, but you think ‘This could be a Dylan moment’?

 

I’ve found so many similarities with Dylan that I’ve tried to beat out of myself. I was like ‘Jesus, I’m like him, I would do that – I should really stop doing that!’

 

Janeane's character Sam is at the other end of the travelling experience, having done and seen so much. Is Dylan her polar opposite?

 

Sam’s obviously been there, done that, got the t-shirt, she’s done all of that and knows exactly why kids go travelling. She’s met every type of traveller and thinks they are all just tourists at the end of the day.

 

She looks at us and thinks, "There is another bunch of tourists coming and ruining this beautiful country. It’s quite a pessimistic view on travellers. I guess she’s just quite bitter and sees these two boys and has their journey mapped out in her head, she knows exactly what’s going to happen. We do end up going to Thailand, she says, ‘Have fun in Thailand’ and we say ‘we’re not going to Thailand’ and she says ‘you will go to Thailand.'

 

What did you find was the most difficult thing for you about this project?

 

For me this is my first acting job, I was dropped straight in to the deep end and I think it was just acclimatising to what set life is like and how takes work.

 

If I do get my lines wrong, it’s not the end of the world, we can always do another take. At first I was overwhelmed thinking, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’ Everyone on this job has been incredible and it’s been nice to have a really supportive cast and crew. I think just totally being out of your comfort zone, of being on a different continent, in the heat and then the whole added pressure of ‘this is my first thing'