about themes that I’m fascinated by, and that means a lot to me.A lot of the actors have been friends of mine for a lot of my life. So it feels very real.” “I’ve been a fan of Michael Sheen since I knew what acting was,” enthuses Scott Howells, who rose to prominence as Colin in It’s A Sin. “Owen’s a lot more spunky, a lot more badass (than Colin), and what I loved doing in this role was really showing people that I can do more.” The riot scenes were a particular highlight. “I’d never done anything like it before so I just threw myself into it,” the 24-year-old says. “At one point, I head-butted a riot shield and had to take a break.” “The themes are very close to my heart in terms of the setting and the crisis that this family find themselves in,” says Rhodri, who grew up in Morriston, a town eight miles from Port Talbot, which he describes as a foreshadow of what the steel town could become if industry deserts it. “But it’s not just a story about Port Talbot and the strike – that was a device in a sense to set up the story of a family on the run,” he continues.As well as tugging at the industrial strife rippling across the area,The Way was conceived as a story that flipped migration on its head – a British family forced to desert home and relocate, their future thrown into uncertainty. “I really could see the way that a family has to come to terms with their own story within this vast scale,” Rhodri, 56, continues, “and the decisions they have to make on the run and the enormity of those decisions. That fleeing of home and what it means and the myths that you carry with you from your culture and society, but also within your own
little family.”
The past haunts the town, the family, and each individual within it – made manifest by apparitions and ghosts.
“It’s about the idea of:‘Can you let go of your stories?’” says Sheen.“Our stories are a comfort to us.They can help us in all kinds of ways, but they can also hold us back. And that’s both for a family and a culture.And we see that throughout the whole story.” “Wales maybe lives in the past,” adds Rhodri. “Its industrial past is such an important part of it and yet it’s almost non- existent now. But that industrial past created myths and legends. Any Welsh person will tell you that the past is something that we’re very proud of, but I think also holds us back.”
Social realism is tinged with horror and mysticism. The glitchy, genre-flitting nature of the drama was intentional.
“I wanted the experience of watching it for the audience to feel like what it has felt like for the past 10 years living in our society,” explains Sheen,“where you don’t know if you’re in a horror film or a sit-com, and something that feels life and death stakes suddenly goes incredibly surreal and absurd and then goes back to being incredibly scary again. “Increasingly, as the story goes on, you realise that one of the big questions that it’s asking is:‘How do you do the new? How do you leave the old behind? And do you have the audacity, the courage, to do something new?’”
The Way comes to BBC One on Monday February 19.
Photo: Mark Lewis Jones as Glynn and Mali Harries as Dee- The Way
Photo: Sophie Melville as Thea - The Way
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