Actor Sean Bean discusses his return to Silent Hill in Silent Hill Revelation, out now on DVD and Blu-ray.
What made you want to return to Silent Hill?
Sean Bean: I had a good time on the first one, I enjoyed it and thought that the end product was good. It has a really disturbing quality to it which I quite like.
I’m fascinated by that and who comes up with these characters, they come out of nowhere and they’re so weird and eerie and disturbing.
I like that kind of thing. I play, compared to the other characters, quite a sedate and grounded guy. I suppose that’s part of the attraction as well. In the midst of all this mayhem, you’ve got this guy who’s trained to just keep his daughter Heather on the straight and narrow, but he’s aware of what’s gone before and the dangers.
Where are your character Harry and his daughter Heather in their lives, when we first meet them?
Sean Bean: Harry Mason and his daughter Heather are just trying to get on with their lives. She’s going to school. He wants her to grow up as a normal teenage girl as much as possible. But he knows that she’s still got this attraction to Silent Hill. As did her mother and people before her. So they’re kind of living as travellers I suppose.
On the run all the time, fugitives. They’re constantly moving, constantly shifting. It’s a very unsettling existence. So he is trying to bring some security to her, some stability.
So would you say he’s quite a supportive father?
Sean Bean: Yeah he’s a good father and he’s always aware that there is the danger of her going towards that particular world.
What would you say about getting to work with your other co-star, brit Kit Harington, from Game of Thrones. He seems to be like he would be a lot of fun to be around?
Sean Bean: Yeah he is Kit, he’s a nice guy and we worked together on Game of Thrones where he played my bastard son and I was shunned by most of society. But it was a very different situation, he was playing my daughter’s boyfriend. But it was good, it was just different.
Would you say when you’re making a more scary movie like this, there tends to be a more jovial atmosphere between takes than perhaps on another genre?
Sean Bean: That’s right yeah. People seem to think it’s depressing when you’re working on something like this but it’s actually much more fun.
I suppose it’s got to be really because there’s that much horror around you and this sort of claustrophobia and a feeling of doom, that you have to lighten up a bit inbetween. And it is actually good fun. A lot of my scenes I didn’t actually spend a lot of time with these scary guys.
I was in the kitchen or I was in the house, and I was searching for my daughter. But when I saw it in the end I thought it was brilliant. How Director Michael Bassey put it together and really squeezed everything he could out of this story and put it up there on screen. I thought he did a great job.
Which of those terrifying monsters did you personally find frightening? For me it was those terrifying nurses with those brain faces.
Sean Bean: Yeah they kept stopping and moving. And there were those funny men that were all bent that had cords round them, they looked like they’d been skinned. A good moment was when he pulls some skin off this guy and they just throw it in the frying pan. (whistles) He’s been working in a restaurant and just chucks it in a pan. It was like a piece of somebody’s flesh and it’s like a piece of steak. And the funny guy in the bus that kept going (laughter). He was an old man and kept laughing and it was really creepy.
It’s those little touches isn’t it?
Sean Bean: Yeah, yeah
And what particular Horror has given you sleepless nights over the years?
Sean Bean: Films like the Exorcist. That’s something that I still think about now. It makes you have to turn the lights on sometimes if you really think about it. It really made a big impact on me. It scared the shit out of me. But I think anything like that. Horror and stuff I’m kind of ok with, but when it’s something that you can’t quite understand, that’s when it becomes quite disturbing I think.
I heard that Adelaide Clement, who plays your daughter in the movie, let out a massive scream before she started on each scene. Have you ever gotten into any rituals when acting on a particular project, or just generally?
Sean Bean: No I haven’t really. No. Sorry. (laughs) I think I can remember a scream now, I wondered what that was. But then she’d come over and say ‘Hi’. Everyone’s got their own way of approaching it.
What do you make of the Blades chances this season and how do you think they’re playing?
Sean Bean: They play well at the moment and they’re unbeaten. They’re the only team in that league that’s unbeaten. They’re third from the top, I think they’ve got a good chance of being promoted. Yeah definitely. Whether they’ll win the title I don’t know, but they’ll definitely go up. Fingers crossed. (laughs)
