Sean Bean on the making of Time, new British prison drama by Jimmy McGovern, and the gallows humour that helped cast deal with grim scenes
- The veteran British character actor plays a mild-mannered teacher serving a four-year jail term who is singled out for abuse by the other inmates
- He talks about the brilliance of Jimmy McGovern’s scriptwriting, staying in a prison cell, his character’s redemption and the gallows humour among the cast
Forget lockdown. For Sean Bean, it’s more a case of locked up in an unsparing prison drama that confronts a British penal system failing both its inmates and the society it is supposed to protect.
Three-part series Time is a sometimes brutal – and, according to old hands, brutally authentic – look at existence behind bars. And such authenticity will be no surprise to anyone familiar with the works of its writer, Jimmy McGovern, whose “previous” includes such creations as Cracker, Broken and Accused.
Bean, a familiar face from any number of blockbuster films and television shows you might have heard of – GoldenEye, Sharpe, The Martian, Game of Thrones among them – is also a bellowing, sword-slinging salesman in a current TV advertisement that makes tea-drinking look terrifying. It plays up to his regular hard-man image and seems like perfect practice for playing a convict.
Which is where Bean subverts convention as Mark Cobden, a meek and mild teacher jailed for four years, whose life experiences thus far prove useless in coping with the career criminals and psychopaths suddenly surrounding him. Singled out for verbal and physical abuse, Cobden is intimidated and adrift. Did the character and his incarceration remain with Bean post-filming?
“Not really – I think I woke up in the middle of the night screaming about being in the hotel,” he jokes. “And a window blew out in a storm; I think I’d have been better off in the cell, because it was a bit more comfortable than the place where we were staying!