E-Paper
Donal Finn shares how he brought ‘empathy and humanity’ to playing James Moriarty in Young Sherlock
Actor Donal Finn talks about giving a new perspective to the iconic villain James Moriarty in Young Sherlock and his chemistry with Hero Fiennes Tiffin
The quirky character of consulting detective Sherlock Holmes has been attempted on screen several times, and him and his arch nemesis James Moriarty have become one of the most iconic fictional rivals. The recently released series Young Sherlock, where actors Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Donal Finn play Sherlock and Moriarty respectively, gave a new insight into their equation as it explored their friendship and not their rivalry.
The focus on this new angle gave Donal Finn a bigger canvas to play the iconic character in the Prime Video show which has been brought to life on screen multiple times before. “Cleaner slate is a great way of putting it,” he says, adding, “I think it's hard not to be influenced by some of the amazing portrayals that have come before [of Moriarty] because they’ve been so dynamic and kind of bold. I didn't go back and revisit them but they were always like something that I really looked up to from the time when they were released.”
Watch the full interview with Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Donal Finn here:
Talking about taking up such a renowned character, Donal says, “People have asked ‘did you feel a certain amount of pressure stepping into that same role’ but given that we meet him at a totally different time in his life, I think it allows for a lot of empathy and humanity into the character as it just shows that no one's born evil. He's not growing up in Ireland thinking that he just wants to devastate the British government. But it's through the experiences and the events that happened in his early life that he's learned something there, that's changed his ethos of how the world works. He says really early on that the world isn't fair and that's because he has evidence to support that. Sherlock and Moriarty have two different ways of looking at the world and for that kind of young malleable mind where we meet him, that's fair for him to see the world like that and it doesn't make him a bad person.”
Donal also insists that irrespective of his actions, Moriarty is “a good friend” to Sherlock, and he agrees that it came out such on screen too due to his chemistry with Hero Fiennes Tiffin. He says, “Hero was cast ahead of me. So, it meant that I came in and met him for chemistry reads and already from that moment, I just felt like a huge level of encouragement. All ideas were there to be tried. We were looking over each other and looking over our shoulders at the same time, but there's also this sense of balance and yin and yang. If he was looking over that shoulder, I look over this shoulder and we'll both catch the camera. This sense of being synchronized just helps us think that they are on a radio level, just on the exact same frequency. I think that's exciting to think about the potential of where that can go if they work together.”
