Interview with Tom Goodman-Hill for Humans

26 May 2015

Tell us about Humans, where does the story begin?

When we join the story we’re with the Hawkins family and they’re what you would call your pretty average family, mum and dad, and three kids. All the kids are at school, both parents work. Laura is the main breadwinner; she is a lawyer and is away from home working on a case that is going to pay well.

Joe’s at home doing his every day job; a good steady job, he works for a packing company but he is one of the few humans that regularly works there and it’s almost all synths working at the company. But he’s having to look after the kids as well, so he decides it would be a good time to get a synth, so that the synth can allow him to lead what he thinks is a slightly more normal life.

He hopes that when Laura returns it means he has more time to spend with his wife because they’re not getting on so well. They’re not communicating. And they have barely any time to talk. He believes that if you’ve got a synth who does all the washing and prepares the food and makes sure the kid’s clothes are washed and dried and ready for school the next morning, that you can have a bit of time to talk to your wife.

 

How would you describe Joe?

He’s a dad and a husband. He has a very straightforward everyday job that he doesn’t dislike, but he doesn’t particularly enjoy. Joe really enjoys being a dad but can’t quite cope with the logistics of it when Laura is away earning the real money. He’s a very straightforward man, he’s perfectly capable but he’s not particularly proactive, he’s just a good guy.

 

What attracted you to the role?

Usually when you first read a script the first thing you look for is, ‘what is it that makes your character remarkable?’ And particularly like me, I consider myself a character actor, which is no bad thing, it’s a great thing to be, but when I read Humans what I loved about Joe is there is nothing remarkable about him. He is a completely ordinary Joe. I mean Joe is exactly the right name for him. He’s a completely ordinary bloke, in an extraordinary situation and that in itself was the most attractive thing about it. It meant that you just wanted to find a really level place for Joe to be, so that everything that happens to him knocks him off balance and he doesn’t really know how to cope.

I’ve always played flawed characters or remarkable characters or very intelligent characters or people who are in some way slightly unbalanced, but Joe is just absolutely level. He just makes some poor decisions which aren’t really based on any failing in him they’re just based on a lack of information and being in a situation that has never occurred to him before.

 

What would you say sets Humans apart from other AI dramas?

As a cast, we’ve talked a lot about what it is with Humans that is going to be attractive to an audience and we’ve always come back to the same thing which is; that it’s really hard to define exactly what the genre is. It is science fiction, but it’s also a very human drama about a family in a world that looks not unlike our own. In fact almost exactly like our own.

And what makes that interesting and what is really appealing about it is it allows you to ask questions about what makes a family work, what makes a society work, what the moral and ethical questions are about technology influencing the fabric of society. What that does to both society as a whole and a microcosm of it on a small group of people.

That makes all those questions endlessly fascinating and they resonate in all sorts of different ways, because whilst it’s a thriller in a lot of ways, it’s also a very close detailed family drama. It’s also science fiction and it’s also political in a socio political way. It’s about what gender roles are and what anybody’s role is in society and how technology affects the generational gaps as well.

 

How normal is it to have a synth in this world?

When the show opens you won’t think there’s anything particularly strange about the world we’re in. I hope you’ll look at it and will think well this is the world we live in now. It’s just that instead of everyone having an iPad or an iPhone or a laptop, everyone’s got a walking talking combination of all three, something that does the washing up and the cooking as well.

So it should feel like the world we know but it means that the synths are a walking embodiment of artificial intelligence, both in the way we interact with it on an a day to day basis and in the way we fear it might become.

 

How is mankind reacting to synths, how do humans feel about the existence of synths?

I think mankind’s reaction to the synths is close to our reaction to technology at the moment. There’s a sense that it’s slightly overtaking us that we’re losing control of social networking. A kind of completely barrier-less ,frontier-less attitude to technology and information which is perhaps running away with us a little bit and we feel like we need a little bit more control of that technology.

I think the moment you put a pair of legs on technology and give it a face and the ability to walk around with you and doing things more efficiently than you are, that’s just difficult to deal with. We see an element of society in the show that can’t cope with that and is actively protesting against it. For the most part people are just getting on with it and see synths as a good idea.

But there’s some discomfort, there’s just a little underbelly, a little undercurrent of dissatisfaction that provides a tension to what everyone else sees as a normal way of life.

 

Would you say that the synth, Anita, is a good thing for the Hawkins?

Anita is a really good thing for the Hawkins, I think, because Anita is the synth that everyone hopes they’re going to own, that will do what you want it to do. But is Anita all that she seems? There are lots of questions and that’s where there is tension for the others surrounding her.

I think what’s really clever about the way the show develops is we see other synths that are exactly as most families expect them to be, which is subservient and, while they are clever, they are not sentient and they’re not independent.

However, with Anita there is a sense that there is an element of independence and consciousness and that is completely unexpected and unnerving. As you can imagine it would be. If your iPad suddenly started talking back to you, you’d wonder what on earth was going on or if your iPhone said ‘I don’t feel very happy about the phone call you’re making’, you’d start to worry a little bit.

So there’s that tension that allows the Hawkins as a family to slightly unravel as well because of all the tensions that have gone on with their own internal relationships which start to come to the surface, both between Laura and Joe and between Toby and Mattie. It makes the world that Sophie experiences as the youngest member of the family just skew out of normality a little bit which is when everybody gets scared. You know if Sophie is in trouble, then everyone is in trouble and that’s a really exciting thing to see happen.