Emmy Award-winner Jane Seymour stars in and executive produces Acorn TV’s new murder mystery series Harry Wild. Seymour plays the titular character, a retired literature professor who discovers she has a knack for solving crimes.
Harry finds a kindred spirit in Fergus Reid, a young man who mugged her (played by Rohan Nedd). The unlikely duo put their sleuthing skills to work solving assorted crimes (including murder) over the eight-episode season.
Jane Seymour kept busy during the pandemic, working on two series (Harry Wild, B Positive) plus the dramatic film Ruby’s Choice – all while managing to avoid getting Covid.
“I was filming in Australia and Ireland. Everyone’s been really very careful, especially Warner Bros. on B Positive, and [these are] three completely different characters. I mean, unrecognizable,” said Seymour during the 2022 Television Critics Association’s winter press tour. “So, I’m just very grateful to have been working during this time and particularly grateful for having material like Harry Wild, which is very much written for me. I mean, it’s the most amazing writing and amazing show and one I’m so proud of.”
Seymour further praised Harry Wild creator David Logan and Jo Spain’s scripts, describing their writing as hilarious and smart.
“I mean, it was all there on the page,” said Seymour. “Of course, I’m playing an English professor so I spend the whole time correcting everyone’s grammar, deciphering terrible murders from my knowledge of English literature and history and the rest of it. And Rohan, who plays my sidekick, who quit school and doesn’t want to learn anything, I’m getting him through his schoolwork while he’s teaching me how to be street smart, which clearly I’m not.
But the fun part was that my character does go undercover quite a lot, so sometimes she’s Irish, sometimes she’s Scots, sometimes she’s a harmless little old lady. But for me to be doing an action thing and have it be that intelligent – and I think when you watch Harry Wild, if you’ve never read a book, you are now going to be interested in Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, and a few others.”
Harry Wild is very much about the human condition, according to Seymour. “Harry has book smarts but she’s not street smart, and vice versa. But, also, she gets to understand from Rohan’s character what life is like when you have nothing and you live in the wrong side of town and everyone in your family is a crook. Why are they and how did that happen?”
Seymour added, “And I think what’s really cool too is the relationships. My character never gets married. She’s had a son. She uses men like men usually use women, and it’s a really cool, very big, character-driven that happens to have a murder mystery in the middle of it.”
Jane Seymour recalled that just as filming was getting underway, she smashed her kneecap. Fortunately, her on-screen partner in crime-solving, Rohan Nedd, looked after her while she was hobbling around on crutches.
“We bonded big time,” said Seymour. “We spent every waking minute we could together and we had a great time. And he taught me so much. He’s an amazing actor. When they showed me who could be my sidekick on this, there was no question of anyone else. I went, ‘That guy,’ Rohan. And unbeknownst to me, he’s a perfectly wonderfully British-spoken person who never broke out of his Irish accent – not till the day we finished. And every single person on the crew was utterly convinced he was Irish; they were convinced they knew where he went to school and what street number he was from. I mean, he was unbelievable.”
The relationship between Harry and Fergus is strictly platonic, a refreshing change from the clichéd ‘will they or won’t they’ partnerships found in many dramas.
“The real thing is that when you look [at] relationships it’s usually about a romantic relationship. But actually, relationships you have with people you work with are much longer-lasting, number one, usually,” said Seymour. “And [they] are much more interesting because you’re both having separate lives with things going on.”
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The Acorn TV original series premieres on Monday, April 4, 2022, with two new episodes arriving weekly through April 25th.
