In the latter days of March, Netflix sent the internet into hysterics with the release of its highly anticipated first season of 3 Body Problem, an 8-episode offering from the creators of Game Of Thrones: David Benioff, D. B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo. The story is an adaptation of the Hugo Award-winning Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, a project many considered “unfilmable.”
The story is one of extreme complexity, and one of China’s most celebrated works of science fiction, delving into historical facts — with a spine-chilling opening line as we watch a physics professor being beaten to death in public at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1967 — whilst approaching humanity’s path to the apocalypse, a set of highly dense talks around theoretical astrophysics, and… alien invasions.
At the core of the project is a stellar cast, featuring Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza González, John Bradley, and Alex Sharp. Here, we catch up with Sharp to discuss his tour de force performance embodying Will, as he talks us through his artistic upbringing, character preparation, and multi-layered skillset, recalling his months in Florence learning the craft of leather bag-making fresh from the set of 3 Body Problem. Keep scrolling…
And watch the trailer for the series…
Hi Alex! How are you doing today?
Good, thank you!
When did you first start acting? Do you remember your first role?
I played Piglet, in a Winne the Pooh play when I was seven. I think in most of my scenes I was meant to play quite sad. I seem to remember his scenes were wistful, but I decided to go rogue and recast myself as the comic relief, quite irreverent version of Piglet. I was a bored and cheeky 7-year-old: a dangerous thing to put on stage!
Working across theatre and film, you have had a variety of different experiences in the industry. What are some of the differences between the two and do you have a preference?
I grew up doing musical theatre because that was all that was accessible to me. For some reason folks in the Devonshire countryside love musical theatre, almost exclusively. Something that continues to be one of life’s great mysteries. They take it very seriously. It was always comic characters I did, in things like Strauss’ operetta Die Fledermaus, or Fiddler on the Roof, or Godspell, or a Pantomime… whatever was available I did it and tried to make people laugh with it. I think without knowing it, the films I watched, the things I started reading, I was sort of training myself in comedy just via natural interest. Physical comedy, clowning almost. When I went to acting school and then onto my first job which was on Broadway in a straight play, I was keen to focus on drama, mostly to see if I could even do it, and because it freaked me out.
The experiences are very different, in a play you do one take, once a day, of the whole story, live. And on screen you are capturing moments, for months, with no audience, that then get glued together. Screen is an exercise, I find, of almost religious levels of patience and focus. You have to doggedly protect your energy. Especially if you are playing a quiet, dying man, in an epic and explosive sci-fi thriller. I just pretended I was shooting an intimate character-driven Indy, with a really strange, spread out schedule. You have to block out the noise uncompromisingly, whilst still being open.
When did you first hear about 3 Body Problem and what drew you into the project?
My agent Tor Belfrage sent me the audition, it was presented as a ‘huge sci-fi show’, and my knee jerk reaction was that it was not for me. Then I heard the three magic words: Woo, Weiss, Benioff, and I cancelled my plans, and made a self tape.
What was the process of getting into character? How did you manage to create such a powerful arc with the role?
Ah, thanks. Well, when you are first sort of ‘meeting’ a character, it’s through the script, and you can immediately identify the things you have reference to and the things you don’t. You’ll observe they feel betrayed, for example. We have all felt betrayed, etc. And you can use that to start to tether in who that character is, and to close the gaps between the two of you, on the differences, in a way.
When I read Will on the page, I observed clearly, in David, Dan and Alex’s simple, beautiful writing of him, that he reaches a place later in the season, of genuine and total acceptance of his own mortality. I remember thinking, “Oh, Jesus. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what that is.” I remember then, feeling mysteriously annoyed. I sort of put the scripts down and walked about the house thinking, ‘Well, I don’t know, maybe I won’t bother, maybe I won’t do this’. Which I find hilarious now.
But it set something off in me, that made me want to run away from it. I was dealing with a lot of loss in my personal life at the time, and I think I had sort of steeled myself against pre-existing grief and impending grief. Anyways, I got weirdly annoyed that day but I was also so intrigued by the idea of going somewhere I hadn’t gone before with a character. And intrigued at my own childish annoyance. So I did, and the journey to understand that mindset, clarity, acceptance, grief of self… which was more of a state, than a character, took me down all sorts of fascinating roads. I worked with and met some of the most incredible people I ever have in my attempt at getting close to that. I felt used up and spent, in a good way, by the end. It really altered a lot for me in and outside of acting.
