Being Human and Doctor Who alum Russell Tovey turns in another excellent performance in Viaplay‘s The Fortress—a bleak and complex drama set in 2037 as Norway isolates itself from the rest of a crumbling world. Tovey’s character Charlie Oldman is a dogged but determined husband and father who’s doing everything he can to get his wife and child from the United Kingdom into the presumed safety of Norway. But that is no easy process, and the endearing Charlie might also find out that this safe haven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“The hook was the state of the world,” Tovey told Fangirlish in an interview before the series premiere. “We shot this about three years ago, so we [were] in [the COVID-19] pandemic, and this is a show about the pandemic. I was fascinated in seeing what art would come out of that time, and this script came my way. It was filming in Norway and Lithuania, two places I’ve never been, and [I] felt excited by that.
“I loved the character,” he continued. “I can normally tell when I read a script, within the first two or three pages of dialogue, if I want to play that person or not. It’s an instinct. And this character Charlie, I went, I want to play that guy. I know who he is, or I know who I think he is, and I want to inhabit him. It just felt compelling and the writing felt honest, and the character felt like someone I’d want to inhabit.”
“Now these shows feel like they could happen,” Tovey pointed out. “In some ways it’s scarier inhabiting it, because it feels a possibility. Pre-pandemic, I think this drama would have felt [like] Contagion, the movie. When that came out, it was like, that was just so terrifying, but that would never happen. And then something very similar did, and suddenly this feels even more relevant and even more possible.
“Putting yourself in that position—we’re filming on set in masks, we were filming in pandemic regulations. It’s like life imitating art, imitating life. As an actor, you stretch yourself to access certain stories, but this one, we were living it to a certain extent, so it felt very authentic.”
The Fortress is a different role than audiences may be used to seeing the actor inhabit. Viewers know Russell Tovey for the charming awkwardness of George Sands in the UK’s Being Human, or the more thorny roles he portrayed in HBO’s Looking and ABC’s spy drama Quantico. But The Fortress spotlights how vulnerable Tovey can be, and the character is incredibly relatable because everything he does is out of love for his family. It’s impossible not to root for him.
“I think Charlie’s a survivor,” Tovey reflected. “He pushes himself forward through adversity for the sake of his child, for the sake of his wife. As the show goes on, you see what happens in those relationships. I’m incredibly proud of the people I worked with.
“Everybody’s got different storylines, so actually, when we shot, I hardly saw any of the other actors who are the leads in the show,” he revealed. “And when those storylines start to cross-pollinate, that’s when it gets really juicy and exciting for me, and I think that’s when the story ramps up. But there’s a lot. He’s a very emotional guy, but he’s a regular guy. There’s nothing extraordinary about Charlie, but he ends up becoming extraordinary without trying to be.”
“This guy felt like a story that I wanted to tell,” Tovey added. “I wanted to go on this journey with him and take an audience with him. With every character that I approach, [the] majority of them, I find them from a place of love, a place of wanting to survive, wanting to connect, wanting to celebrate life. Charlie is full of love. Charlie is full of compassion and empathy and kindness, and he’s terrified, and he could be any one of us. And that’s what felt so beautiful about him as a person, is that he is good. That felt nice, to give him that energy and to show goodness in this world, where actually that is few and far between.”
The actor also spoke about how the experience of The Fortress‘ international shoot affected him, and gave him even more to think about.
“Telling stories in these places was an exciting prospect. It was really odd,” he explained. “When we got to Lithuania, which was a post-Soviet country… I remember walking around thinking what that would have been like…. [The] Ukraine war kicked off, and where we were filming one night was like ten kilometers from the Belarus border. They were doing military training, and I heard loads of guns going off and everything… I was like, this is too close to home. This is so terrifying.
“Then we went to Bergen, and a lot of the crew were contracted to leave Lithuania with us and travel to Bergen for continuity, and many of them opted to stay behind in case something terrible happened to Lithuania and they weren’t there,” he said. “Those conversations and those realities were unbelievably raw and unbelievably discombobulating and frightening. You’re making a show like this alongside the realities of the world, [that] made it feel even more relevant and made everybody work a bit harder and concentrate more [to] make this as good as it can be.”
The Fortress is now streaming on Viaplay.
