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Christopher Maynard : Sleepwalker is the latest film from director Elliot Lester troubled by bouts of sleepwalking and disturbing nightmares, Graduate student Sarah Foster goes to her University Sleep Research Center for help when she wakes up after her first night of being monitored, The world she lives in seems to have changed in subtle Twilight Zone-esque ways. In fact, every time she goes to sleep now she wakes up in a slightly different version of her world. With the help of her sleep researcher Dr. Scott White she tries to work her way back into the reality she started in. But when they finally succeed it's revealed that Sarah's world is not what she thought at all. Today my guest is one of the stars of Sleepwalker Richard Armitage. Tonight we talk about his work on that film as well as his work as Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit films as John Proctor and The Crucible and his upcoming films Ocean's 8 and the Julie Delpy directed film My Zoe. Sleepwalker is now about available on digital HD and on-demand.

Richard Armitage : Nice. We've just got a hurricane coming into New York. It feels like that anyway so nice to be indoors today.

Christopher Maynard : Yeah. Absolutely. Um but thank you for taking time to take us to discuss Sleepwalker I really do appreciate it I really enjoyed the film.

Richard Armitage : Oh great thanks.

Christopher Maynard : But before I went into that I saw something else that you were doing that actually kind of really piqued my interest and that was that you did a reading of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for Audible. How did that come together

Richard Armitage : Um.. I've done quite a lot of work for Audible over the years and um you know whenever they throw something at me I find it very hard to say no because I love the way that they represent the work and the time that it takes and the producers that they use, And they came to me with this as a Halloween special and I'd never read the books before, But... um... so I was really intrigued to find out what the real story was and the thing that really struck me about it was that it feels like medical documents from, from a psychologist or a doctor in its form. So it was a sort of heightened sense of reality even though it's a fictional piece by Robert Louis Stevenson. I was just I really, really enjoyed it. It was great. It was really interesting to, to sort of find a voice for that kind of medical journal style.

Christopher Maynard : And that was actually exactly what I wanted to ask you about because it is such an unusual style the way that book's put together so for whatever reason there can be things that sound fine in our heads when we're reading them but when it comes time to actually say it them out loud or perform them. It can be come out totally different. Was there any part of the book or any passages that stood out as particularly challenging?

Richard Armitage : You know it took me by surprise because I didn't realize when I was reading with my eyes that the very final document is actually from Dr. Jekyll himself so it's very much a first-person account of, of what happened in the form of I did this and I did that and I found that to be interesting because you have to from every other perspective it's always a observed and it's obviously it contains the opinion of the person observing whereas when it's in the first person you really understand that the person writing this moment in time is talking about what's happening to him in real time and that was really interesting.

Christopher Maynard : Hmm.. And is that something where you like taking on those challenges of just looking through the stuff you've worked on in the past you have quite a diverse career so far and do you like the challenge of working with existing properties that people know like in The Crucible or The Hobbit films or even now with Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde or do you like to be the one that introduces the world to the character?

Richard Armitage : I like a bit of both. I mean I've always been inspired by literature. I think it's what drew me to acting in the first place because I was quite a bookish kid so I was always kind of reading something and you know your imagination is formed by the material you read whether it's a very childish book or you know as I got older more sophisticated material. And, and actually in later life I like, I like nonfiction but for some reason my brain will always sort of fictionalize or create a world in which this, this story exists and so whatever medium I'm working in whether it's an audiobook or a TV show or a film. I, you know, when I open the script to read it I start to create the world in my head and I think that's the first point of call for me is something whether it's on whether it's something I'm interested in. I do find it hard to engage with something that I possibly wouldn't watch myself. I think, you know, the ground has to be fertile to, to draw an audience in.

Christopher Maynard : Yeah absolutely I think if you're not invested in the story how could you expect anyone else to be?

Richard Armitage : Yeah.

Christopher Maynard : And that's something that ties in perfectly with Sleepwalker because it's something that right away from that opening scene it just grabs your attention and it pulls you in. You know that this isn't going to be a passive experience watching this film. Is that how it read when you got the screenplay?

Richard Armitage : It was a really difficult read actually and I think you know this is a genre and this style of filmmaking is also quite a difficult thing for an audience to receive because it is so blurred with what's real and what's, what's in the imagination or the dreams of the character that, you know, people like a very singular strong logical narrative and when you get into sort of the depths of the subconscious. You can get, you can get lost in it a little bit so it was it was quite hard to follow the script and I had to sort of label parts of the script you know this is, this is real this is sleep and then at one point I even realized that the character I was playing possibly didn't even exist and that's a really difficult thing to wrap your head around that you're playing somebody that doesn't exist it's just a figment of somebody's imagination or dream but I liked that challenge I like the idea of that.

Christopher Maynard : Absolutely and it's almost like a David Lynch-ian thing where that sort of dream logic but taking on something like Memento where every scene that you're watching is redefining what the film is about and so where your character has that atypical trajectory where it's just your relationship to the story is constantly changing so.. I mean you mentioned you're having to take notes on this is that something you're having to sit down with the director to kind of go through scene-by-scene with it and know exactly where you're supposed to be?

Richard Armitage : A little bit, but I also like, I like to sort of just be free of my personal restraints so I, I enjoyed the fact that I didn't always know where I was in the story or which part of the story it was and I, I sort of threw myself into the hands of Elliot and actually Ahna as well because you know some days I turn up as one character and then the next day I turn up of another character and then I just it was nice to sort of just ride that wave with them but it's interesting that you talk about Memento because there were so many things that I was inspired by that sort of led me to choose this project because you know I loved obviously a lot of Memento but another of my favorite films was a film called La Doppia Ora which was translated as The Double Hour by Giuseppe Capotondi. It's a similar idea of the internal workings of a mind of somebody that's possibly in a coma and you don't know what's, what's real and what's not and other psychological drama like.. Um.. I think it's Hitchcock but it's a 1938 film called The Lady Vanishes and I've got a feeling it's Hitchcock but I'm not exactly sure...

Christopher Maynard : Yep, it's Hitchcock.. yep, it is.

Richard Armitage : But it's just this idea of a reality which changes another audience we start with the character so we know what their reality is and then when they're.. when someone's trying to convince them that it is something is not true. I mean it couldn't be more topical for the time that we're in at the moment where we know the truth and then we're trying to be persuaded that, that the opposite is true. It can be.. it's incredibly frustrating but in terms of drama I think it's, I think it's a really interesting thing to play with.

Christopher Maynard : I hadn't even considered that part of it, my god, that you know, because I honestly these types of films that go into the subconscious and sort of dream logic those have always been ones that I've been attracted to where it's not all given to me on the first viewing necessarily where I think I could probably explain the film or understand it in a very simple one-sentence explanation but then there's so, they're so much deeper and so much richer you can go back to them time and time again and it's usually something where they tend to divide audiences down the middle.

Richard Armitage : Absolutely.

Christopher Maynard : Yeah so and you know, something like Lost Highway is something that I think a lot of people just flat-out hate but that's one that I don't even know that I understand it but I go back to it every couple of years because I feel like I need to just take another stab at it.

Richard Armitage : Oh that's a new one to me, I'll have to check that one out but, but I know I agree with you and I think you have to be really, really careful with the audience because I think the worst, the worst type of drama is this the, the you know, they used to do it a lot in soap opera where they'd want to get rid of a character so, so a character would wake up from a dream and everything had been a dream and then they could carry on with what was real and it was a way of dispensing with all of the story but it's so.. I mean and it actually happened to me in a drama that I did in the UK called Spooks which the character turned out not to be the person that he said he was and but then of course all of the history that you've put in place from before suddenly becomes false and irrelevant and I think that's.. you have to be really careful that you don't betray an audience by making it too obscure and you know one of the, one of the risks with Sleepwalker is that you know still allowing the audience to follow and to sort of not cheat them out of the explanation at the end and hopefully we did that.

Christopher Maynard : Yeah, I think you without ruining it to getting into anything overly specific with it. I think it walks the audience enough to it where they're satisfied by it. I can just use my wife as an example because she really does hate ambiguity in film, but it's something that I've very attracted to and she enjoyed the film so I think that if we're both satisfied you definitely got the balance.

Richard Armitage : Oh that's great and the thing is you know one of my.. one of the mantras that I have as an actor and a storyteller is that I always, I always put in place everything that's real and everything that exists but you don't necessarily have to show everything or know everything.. you.. It's often.. And it's often useful that the character doesn't know a lot of the story and but the audience doesn't see a lot of the story or a lot of the, the happenings in the piece it's as if we that the whole thing exists but we only shine a light on portions of it so you just get glimpses of something. I think you know in the same way that music and art can also do the same thing that get certain moments different, different themes come forward and the others remain in the shadow is already I think that, that adds a really kind of rich texture to whatever piece you're working on and this genre in particular is was very much in that vein and I remember Elliott referencing a kind of film noir actually it's towards the end of the movie when this thunderstorm happened and I really loved. Maybe I've always said I'm an actor that I love working in the shadows and just kind of stepping into the light occasionally and it really suited my personal taste.

Christopher Maynard : I think that, that, that actually in a literal sense but as the aspect of that, that yeah you need to just if your film is nothing exposition and you're laying that the entire time it can be very and frustrating to watch actually. I think that's more frustrating to be to my hand held through a story as opposed being left on my own to figure it out and I'm just wondering as far as the of the world building that you do and you're with the character is that something that you try to do that on your own or is that something you expect to work through with the writer/director?

Richard Armitage : It depends on the taste of, of the writer/director. With Elliott, he was really into detail so he.. we both created a sort of playlist of music in tandem with each other and so I listened to a lot of Nicoletti and Max Richter and all kinds of different textures of sound but he also was very interested in, in smell as well for the other actors so I... he said go find a kind of fragrance or smell that, that one character will wear and then on the days when you're playing another character don't wear it so that there's that you can give.. you can offer the other actor a sort of almost like a sense memory that, that you're programming the other actor with, which I, I've never done that before and I think it was really interesting to play with it

Christopher Maynard : That's so brilliant, I never..

Richard Armitage : It's very subliminal.

Christopher Maynard : because if you think about it in your own personal lives there are certain smells that you have that can be so evocative and so powerful and they can instantly pull you back. You know, I can think of, you know, bread cooking fresh in my mom's kitchen when I was a kid and those kinds of things with wisps of that it just takes me back emotionally to that place.

Richard Armitage : Yeah I mean and it.. it's the same with taste. I mean I studied Proust in drama school and the essence of his story is all about the triggering of memory and of course this piece is about dream and memory. And all of that recall comes from smell, taste and sound so music, you know, a fragrance on the body of somebody or the tea that you're tasting it's all connected to our odd deep subconscious and you know, you as a person you get, you'll just get hit with a sudden what, what wave of memory that's triggered by something. You don't always know what it is you can simply just walk past you... and you smell them but and it was really interesting to just offer that to honor. So for the days in the hospital bed when she was waking up. It, you know, it, that, that character would smell different to the guy that she was in a relationship with so it was interesting.

Christopher Maynard : And can you talk a little bit more about your working relationship with her? How was it to sort of find these characters together because it's your relationship is definitely one of the more complex ones so I would imagine that you've had to take on.

Richard Armitage : We had such a good time working together and actually we... all of my work was with her whereas she worked with lots of other members of the cast but I actually, I actually felt very protective towards her because I could see, you know, it was.. it was quite a fragile character and you know she was leading the movie so I could see, I could see sense that there was a weight on her shoulders so you know I, I guess I fell in line with Dr. Scott and I started to feel, you know, kind of paternal towards her and then of course they're in a relationship together and I didn't want her to get hurt so I.. you know.. the both of those things kind of moved between actor and character but we sort of stayed in contact and then, you know, later on last year she was doing a musical and on off-broadway and I kind of went to see her and then I ended up playing in the same space that she was in, in a play that came in directly after so she came to see me and so it was really interesting how but just a little thread of relationship from the film kind of moved into real life and, you know, I'm somebody that I, I really wish the best for her I sort of want to champion her as an actor so it was really nice to find that through, through a film.

Christopher Maynard : And I mean she's wonderful in the movie and I mean I think I probably first noticed her in Fruitvale Station but she's, you know, and going back through it and she's been doing some really interesting work and it's somebody that I think she could definitely become a huge name for sure.

Richard Armitage : Yeah, definitely. And you know, what she's got an incredible singing voice and I don't think she knew it until she tried to do it and so I was like wow I didn't know you had that voice and she said neither did I. So yeah, she's adventurous and really quite daring. You know that was it what she did in the film was, was really brave and daring in places.

Christopher Maynard : And are you a musical theater guy?

Richard Armitage : I used to be yeah many years ago it's how I found my way into theater and I realized I was kind of on the wrong track so I went back to drama school and retrained in classical theatre and but yeah this I touch on that occasionally and I enjoyed certain aspects of musical theater but I think I'd rather watch someone else do it and than do it myself.