Interview with Neil Maskell for Humans

26 May 2015

Tell us about Humans, where does the story begin?

Humans is set in an alternative now, in which synths – the word the series uses for robots, basically – are performing all the menial jobs and are acting pretty much as slaves for humans.So part of what the series is about is what happens when that goes wrong.

 

Can you tell us a little bit about who your character and where we join him in his life?

Pete is a Detective Sergeant in the police force and he deals with synth related crime – him and his partner, Karen Voss. They deal mainly with synths being vandalized or damaged or misused in all sorts of awful ways.

When you meet him, his wife has been involved in a serious car accident and has broken her pelvis, so they have to have a live in synth that acts as a sort of physiotherapist, personal trainer and carer for his wife. So whilst he’s dealing with crime in the day, fairly mundane boring stuff that he’s dealing with, he’s coming home to find a very handsome and competent synth helping his wife through her physical trauma. And that he finds quite stressful: that invasion of his space and of his territory and the fact that he can’t seem to escape at work or home from synths is a source of great stress to him.

 

Do things go wrong with the synths?

Things start to go wrong pretty quickly. In the series this has been the situation for a long amount of time, you know, the public are very used to these humanoid synths. Even the debate is old and tired and gone, you know, this is the way the world is. But, very early on, what starts to happen is this suspicion that some synths are committing crimes themselves and maybe even are sentient.So for Karen and Pete, it becomes more about investigating that than it does about crimes against them.

 

Is there a tension, because he may prefer a world without synths?

Some would say he’s a luddite, for want of a better word. He struggles with technology a bit. We developed with the writers and Sam Donovan (who directed the first block) the idea that he’s kind of drowning in technology, that he really is a pen and paper man and now he’s got all these gadgets, he’s kind of trying to deal with how technology has overrun the job of policing – and this with the added complications that come with dealing with the synths, both in the job and the crimes involving synths.

The fact is, Pete struggles to even understand it, let alone investigate and have any kind of moral perspective on it. I mean he has an electronic cigarette, he can’t just have a cigarette anymore. All these things are very complicated and stressful for Pete.

 

Do you think Pete has what it takes to find a balance with his work, his relationship with Jill and his loathing for synths?

So that’s Pete’s struggle really. How he’s going to balance his disdain and dislike for the synths and the way they’ve taken over our lives, with the necessity of dealing with them both at work and indoors.

 

What attracted you to the role of Pete?

I got sent the first couple of scripts and I had to go for a meeting as you do for most roles and just thought it was really compelling. In the past, I’ve not been a fan of science fiction particularly but this seemed like a really human story and actually it’s lead to me researching for the part and as result, I’ve become a lot more interested in the genre and have become a real fan of Asimov.

 

Does it tell us about how our relationship is with technology now?

When I was explaining the series to friends, I always said the question that the show is bringing up isn’t ‘What if there were robots?’ It’s more like: what if the robots we already have looked like humans?

So your phone in your pocket is to some extent a robot. You can ask it things, it will tell you the answer, it has all sorts of information and uses. If that was a living, breathing human being then that has different implications but really it’s just a sort of magnification.

It’s just those questions are magnified if the thing looks like a human being. If your dishwasher was actually a human, stood at the sink doing your washing up for you, it would still be doing exactly the same job but you’d relate to it in a different way, wouldn’t you? I think that’s the issue of the series, not so much what if we had them but, what if they looked like you and me?