Richard Armitage explains influencing his own The Stranger character
Your latest Netflix obsession is getting closer, with the first trailer for new eight-part thriller The Stranger having dropped earlier this week.
Based on the novel by Harlan Coben, The Stranger stars Richard Armitage as family man Adam Price whose life falls apart when he has a mysterious encounter with a woman in a diner who tells him that not everything in his life is what it seems – leaving him embroiled in a conspiracy.
And it turns out that quite a bit of Adam's character was influenced by the actor who played him, according to the show's writer Danny Brocklehurst.
Speaking to Digital Spy and other press, Brocklehurst revealed that Richard himself brought a significant amount of background to the character of Adam which ended up featuring in the show.
"Inevitably, you know, I think you'd say the same: if you've got someone who's the sort of lead character, as Adam is, you have to try to get into the mind-set of that person, and you have to sort of try and have believable reactions, and think: 'How would this feel?'" Danny said.
"Richard did this amazing thing which I've never really had a lead actor do before, where you wrote an incredible backstory ... for the character. It was like picking up on some stuff that was in the book, but also inventing a lot of stuff".
In fact Brocklehurst decided that he was so impressed with the character ideas that Armitage came up with that he wrote several of them into the scripts – something the lead actor didn't know was happening until he read them.
"I didn't realise you were (adding the ideas) until I started reading it," Armitage said. "But you know that one of those stories actually happened to me? I'd written it as a fictional biography but something actually happened to me that I read in the script and went, 'How does he know that?'
"I'd forgotten that I put it into the biography, and I'd forgotten that it was coming out of a real memory for me. So it was really weird. It was like a kind of rebound. I was like, 'Is he reading my mind?'"
And the writer of the original book was impressed too, praising Armitage's work ethic.
"He worked really, really hard, and I think was challenging us to make sure that we got this character and this story right, and so that we weren't slacking off in any way – in a positive way. It was always lots of great suggestions," Coben said.
The Stranger also stars Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Anthony Head as Adam's father, but don't expect him to be as lovable as Giles, with Coben saying: "It's a very different role for Anthony. I don't think you've seen him quite this sort of frosty, almost, before. He's not nice."
The cast also includes Downton Abbey's Siobhan Finneran, Ant-Man and the Wasp's Hannah John-Kamen, comedy legend Jennifer Saunders, Academy Award nominee Stephen Rea and Broadchurch's Shaun Dooley.
The Stranger will arrive on Netflix later this year.
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