Yes, Guy Ritchie is back in the director’s chair for Prime Video’s Sherlock Holmes prequel series – but the showrunner wants to make it clear that this not an origin story for a young Robert Downey Jr.
“When I get involved in this project, Guy was already involved”, Matthew Parkhill told Zavvi. “His movies were an influence on the tone, but we had an early conversation where we both made it clear this wasn’t a young Robert Downey Jr. - we wanted to build a different universe for this character.
“I’m still a huge fan of those movies, and we were very conscious in trying to recapture the sense of fun, and that attitude and swagger they have. But there are big differences; there’s that famous boxing scene where Downey’s Sherlock figures everything out in the ring and is introduced us this great fighter, but we wanted to go completely different.
“Our Sherlock can’t fight to save his life. There’s a lovely moment in episode one where he puts his fists up and it looks ludicrous; it was a conscious thing of wondering how funny it’d be to see him before learning how to fight.
“Tonally, we want the series and the movies to feel like close cousins, but we always wanted the two Sherlocks to feel significantly different.”
Hero Fiennes Tiffin plays the 19-year-old Holmes in this origin story, dragged into a murder investigation after crossing paths with James Moriarty (Dónal Finn) at Oxford. It’s a case which threatens him directly, and the series thrives on this unlikely central pairing as we see a master detective honing his skills for the first time on the job.
Readers of Andrew Lane’s Young Sherlock novels will have noticed it’s a loose adaptation of those origin stories. It was originally planned to be more faithful, but that changed after Parkhill caught up with them.
“I didn’t end up using the books at all, even though I did read them when I got involved – both me and my 14-year-old daughter loved them, but they didn’t offer me a chance to tell the stories with Sherlock I was interested in. I always loved the idea of starting with Sherlock in prison, developing that Butch and Sundance friendship with Moriarty, and exploring a dysfunctional family – things you can’t really do with a 14-year-old!
“I told the producers and the team that I loved the books, but I wanted to come at this slightly differently and start somewhere else. I was trying not to think about the weight of this being a Sherlock origin story and a new generation’s introduction, as that could have been a creative straight jacket, and I wanted the freedom to play.
“One of the biggest early decisions was ensuring we didn’t touch anything after A Study in Scarlet, so we knew the playground we could have fun in. From there, we had a blank page to play around with the character, and the starting point was just following whatever made me and the team laugh - it’s a lot less intense than thinking about introducing a whole new generation to this character!”
However, even with this in mind, Parkhill went back to reread the Arthur Conan Doyle novels he loved growing up, to ensure he wasn’t going to far afield with his new interpretation of the characters.
“I wanted to be respectful of that incredible work that I loved as a kid, and I was very conscious of it even if we don’t touch it. There are times when we put in Easter Eggs, like in episode two, where a different detective rocks up with a pipe and a deerstalker, so you can imagine that’s where Sherlock got it from, but we didn’t want to lean on that too heavily.
“Steve Thompson, a wonderful writer on the BBC’s Sherlock who also wrote for our show, was telling me about their approach, as they were mining the books for stories they could modernise. We don’t have that, as we’re showing up before any of the Doyle stories start, but we had a lot of fun in the writer’s room throwing around ideas for where we could plant nods to them that meaningfully shape his character.
“One of his most famous lines is said in episode five, but it’s Moriarty who uses it, and he’s not the great boxer Conan Doyle’s Sherlock is. He spends most of the show with a bloody nose, and any lessons he learns are from Moriarty – we were very conscious of certain aspects of the lore and didn’t want to deviate from them, but we did want to develop them.”
Tiffin has confessed to experiencing “imposter syndrome” after being cast as an iconic character, but Parkhill couldn’t be clearer that as far as he and Ritchie were concerned, he was the only choice for the role.
“Guy had worked with him before on The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and loved him, and the way scheduling worked out, he was the first potential Sherlock I saw on the very first day of auditions. He was on holiday in Thailand and calling over Zoom, and even from that, I saw that he played it with a sense of wonder I found really interesting; he was incredibly charming, but what struck me was that he wasn’t trying to be a Sherlock figure.
“We saw many great actors for this role, but Hero’s approach stayed in my head. When I get involved in casting, I’m drawn to actors who bring perspectives on a character I hadn’t considered – I love seeing them bring these characters to life in ways that surprise and excite me.
“If he can do that to me in an audition, then he has a chance to do that to the audience when they see the series.”
The search for Moriarty wasn’t quite as smooth. Dónal Finn, best known for playing Mat Cauthon on Prime Video’s Wheel Of Time, was unknown to the showrunner prior to this project, and his tape was buried in the middle of hundreds.
“And when I say he was deep in the pile I watched, I’ve committed it to memory that his tape was number 156 I watched that day! I saw a lot of great auditions, but his was the first that made me think: “who the hell is this guy?”
“We brought him in to read with Hero, knowing that he had an incredible magnetism, but putting them together I really noticed he has this ability to smile at you with a flash of darkness, to make you feel comforted and scared at the same time. Finding him is exactly why the old-fashioned casting route of watching an awful lot of auditions still works!”
