Craig Mazin’s five-part adaptation of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 begins with Jared Harris’s Valery Legasov taking his own life. It is, says Harris, the inciting mystery in a story that …
finale, perhaps because of the show’s unsettling parallels with the disinformation age in which we live. For Harris, Mazin’s scripts were too enticing to refuse.
What I found in the script was that this event was potentially so much more dangerous than just the fallout from the initial accident. Of course, nobody at the time heard about the tremendous sacrifice and heroism of the people on the ground who were trying to contain the damage. It became such a gripping story in the way that Craig put it together.
But I got the first four, and easily within 10 or 20 pages I was gripped by the story. My character only really popped up briefly in that time. But I was gripped, and that’s what you need, because we’re all storytellers. Every character is telling a story that’s part of a whole tapestry, so you need to see the forest and you need to see the trees. Very quickly you got the idea that this was an amazing story, but also that Craig, even at that point, absolutely knew the whole thing.
I’d say I’d put Emily Watson’s character, Khomyuk, into that innocent category too. But yes, everybody else has a degree of culpability to them. They’re part of the system, and in that sense they bear some responsibility for the way the system operates. Although there really is no mechanism to hold power to account. Everybody knows that and there’s a certain cynicism to them that has been bred in by the system. Nobody tries because everybody realizes it’s pointless.
When you were shooting those scenes, the thing to remember was that, In Legasov’s mind, Shcherbina was always the Ace of Spades. He’s always the alpha, so anything Legasov wants to get done, he has to tell Shcherbina what it is and get him to do it. In our script, Shcherbina was the person in charge. Now, in real life, I suspect that may not necessarily have been the case. I’m not sure, but just from what little I’ve seen of Legasov, I think he probably had more agency than our version.
And yes, there’s a journey that these characters go on with one another. There was some discussion, for example, over the first time that his character would call me “Valery”, and the first time I call him “Boris”. Little things like that, which you’re aware of, signal the journey without smacking the audience over the head.
You’re working in a different medium from documentary. This is fictionalized. It’s the magic of “what if” as you start to watch it. We accept that, and understand we’re being told a story. Over five hours we’ll hear a story that actually took place over two years. Of course a lot is going to be left out, and the narrative will be telescoped.
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