An interview with Helen Hunt

Who do you play in World on Fire?
I play Nancy Campbell, who is an American reporter who is based on a few reporters of the time - one of which was a 29 year-old journalist called Clare Hollingworth, who broke the story about the beginning of the war.

She was traveling on the German-Polish border and saw sacks hanging on a fence, and  when the wind blew them up and there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of German tanks. It was on the front page the next morning. So I think she’s the inspiration for Nancy, along with a few men who were also reporting at the time. This is a woman who is drawn to be there and I think feels uniquely qualified to witness and report, so that the world knows what’s happening.

What attracted you to play this part?
It’s among the most compelling stories in the history of our life on earth, but it was Peter Bowker and our director’s joint objectives to tell it in such an intimate way that drew me to it. You need that intimacy to tell all these stories.

I thought I knew a decent amount of detail about the history of the war, but I didn’t know hour by hour, day by day. One of the things that makes this piece unique is that our whole stretch of seven episodes is simply the first year of the war, and a lot of my work takes place on 30 August and 1 September, and then 3 September, and I really didn’t comprehend what the first moments of the war were like.

Can you describe a bit of the world that Nancy inhabits?
I sat down to research female reporters during the Second World War, and there were a lot of men that popped up but very, very few women. So she often has that experience of being the only woman in the room, and being marginalized - or at least has people try to marginalize her.

She’s experienced violence and so I think she comes into the story having been through enough that she’s already proven she’s the right person for the job. She can stand it, whereas other people might not have been able to withstand that treatment.

How relevant does Nancy seem in modern terms?
I’m playing a character who is hoping her credentials aren’t revoked as she tries to tell the truth, which in America right now is very relevant. I’m interested and very moved by this idea that your calling is to bear witness. Before we could all bear witness on our cell phones, it was people like Nancy we relied upon to ensure that the truth wasn't massaged or flipped. 

She is there in order that people don’t forget, so they really understand the details of the suffering and aren’t able to just dismiss them as something happening 'over there'. I was very moved by that, and could relate to her desire to memorize what she sees and try to get as much of that sent out via news to as many other parts of the world as she can.

Can you tell us a little of Nancy’s relationship with the Rosslers and what she’s trying to do?
My character lives in Berlin and she’s there by permission of the German government. She has been given an apartment next door to a family that has a young girl with health issues. For most of the story, I’m the one ahead of everybody else, saying, you don’t understand what’s coming, you don’t understand how this is different, the rest of the world needs to get here and fast. 

However, in this part of the story I’m behind, because I have no idea why her parents are so terrified that anyone would find out about their daughter’s epilepsy. My character begins to investigate and discovers a programme that was put in place - and began in earnest - in 1939. What seemed like normal clinics were really death clinics for disabled children and adults.

She is discovering this news whilst simultaneously trying to help the family, which in itself is problematic as she doesn’t want to draw attention to them or to make the situation worse.

Can you tell us a bit about her relationship with Harry?
Jonah (Hauer-King) who plays Harry is so adorable and our characters just adore each other. My job in much of the first few episodes is to say to the younger characters in the story, you don’t know me or trust me; you haven’t seen what I’ve seen - and I do that with him. I slap him around a little bit, look out for him, and you see their friendship and respect for each other start from there. It’s a very unusual relationship and really fun to play.

Describe her relationship with Webster?
Webster is her nephew and a doctor in the American hospital. At the start you see Nancy calling him incessantly on the eve of the war and then the early days of the war, and he, like everybody else says he is fine in Paris. But Nancy can see what’s coming. She is the character in the drama who sees the scale of this before other people do, and so she’s telling her nephew to get out and back to America.

Nancy is a strong woman with an equally strong look. How did you collaborate with the costume team to pull her look together?
Our costume designer is spectacular. The last three movies I’ve done I’ve been unable to come for a fitting ahead of time, but for this, we did remote fittings and our designer Nic Ede created these clothes so that they literally fall onto my body perfectly. I tried them on in the States and skyped him and we both had a like-minded feel for everything we were trying to achieve. In addition to the hair and make up, it helps me enormously to have the look walk the line between the period and right now.

You’ve done your own research, but does it bring back any family history or anything that you were thinking of from your background?
About 15 or 20 years ago, when my father and my aunt were still alive, I got my father and his three siblings together, as I wanted to get them on film talking about their life. They were deep into this conversation and I asked them what their earliest memory was and someone mentioned their oldest brother serving during the Second World War. I asked if they were on the front - they weren't - but after Buchenwald was liberated it was his job to go in and look for mines. So he went through his own version of the trauma of the war and his family never even knew about it.

Is there a sense of responsibility to get things as right as you can?
Yes absolutely. You just always want to get it right. You want to do no harm, you want to help people feel seen rather than not. So it’s the same job all the time. But you do get a sense of how recent the history is, how it really isn’t that long ago that this all happened.

What do you think audiences will take away from this drama?
The best pieces of work, whether they’re slapstick comedies or epic Second World War ensemble pieces, will either make you feel less alone or completely wake you up. I don't think it gets political, but audiences may be taken aback by how relevant it is right now. All we can do is be the very best at our job and, hopefully, when all that comes together it affects people personally and politically.

Character Descriptions

NANCY CAMPBELL

Played by Helen Hunt
American broadcaster and journalist NANCY CAMPBELL is addicted to war. She can’t stay away. It isn’t just the adrenalin, but the puzzle of war - the puzzle of human nature – she craves. NANCY, in Warsaw in 1939, crosses the border to Germany and spends the first eighteen months of the war in Berlin as part of the overseas press corps. Her ability to befriend her German neighbours as well as army officers sees NANCY report those stories at the very forefront of the Nazi regime; some they are happy to have broadcast to the world, while others, they are determined to keep hidden. No surprise then, that NANCY is driven by getting those forbidden stories out of Berlin - at huge personal risk.

ROBINA CHASE
Played by Lesley Manville
When her son HARRY, finds himself on the wrong side of the law protesting against Oswald Mosley, ROBINA CHASE despairs, only slightly comforted in the knowledge he is soon to travel to Warsaw for a job as a translator. After HARRY’S father died in the most tragic of circumstances, ROBINA was left to raise HARRY alone. She has done so with the sole aim of making him a man of great social standing, but so far, HARRY is proving only to disappoint. His love for two different women - both, in ROBINA's eyes, highly unsuitable - has far reaching consequences, and her frustration is exacerbated when HARRY returns prematurely from Poland, following the Nazi invasion, with a Polish refugee in tow. ROBINA - despite her will and better judgement - finds herself with a house guest she had never expected. Against the odds, the war is set to change this cold and austere woman, as much as it will HARRY.

DOUGLAS BENNETT
Played by Sean Bean
DOUGLAS BENNETT is a pacifist who was mustard-gassed in the First World War. He watches as his son and daughter go off to war, despite the fact that he is a pacifist. With both children away, he finds solace in unlikely friendships; with HARRY CHASE’s mother, ROBINA, and the young Polish refugee she has reluctantly taken into her home. DOUGLAS’s worst fear looks set to become reality when his son TOM finds himself aboard HMS Exeter, a ship that eventually faces German ship the Graf Spee in one of the first major battles of the war. Desperate for news of TOM, the uncertainty of his son’s wellbeing and the haunting horrors of his own experience of battle look set to overwhelm him, until unexpected news from his daughter LOIS gives him renewed hope for the future.

HARRY CHASE
Played by Jonah Hauer-King
HARRY CHASE is a young Englishman with a flair for languages, deceit and heartbreak. A talented translator, HARRY is in Warsaw Woking for the British embassy. Caught in an explosive love triangle between his Mancunian girlfriend LOIS BENNETT, and local Warsaw girl KASIA TOMASZESKI, when war breaks out, HARRY has choices to make, fast. With KASIA's life in danger, he knows that there is one place she would be safe: Manchester. But how will he explain this to LOIS, and, what's more, to his mother? Funny, handsome and clever, life has been easy for HARRY so far – but war changes this forever. An idealist, a rebel, perhaps HARRY always just needed a cause – and the cause is the war. The series will take him all the way from Warsaw to Dunkirk, as he learns to lead, to fight, and to find out what he truly believes in.

LOIS BENNETT
Played by Julia Brown
LOIS BENNETT is a Mancunian factory worker. At home she is the lone girl in a family of men with the responsibility of looking after her fragile father and a wayward brother. Despite opposition from his snobbish mother, LOIS is in love with HARRY. HARRY betrays her with KASIA whom he meets in Warsaw. His betrayal seems to simultaneously break her heart and open her mind. Later, she will reflect that it was as though love blocked out the rest of the world; once he had gone, she could finally see what she was missing. A talented singer, LOIS and her musical partner, CONNIE KNIGHT are determined to make their own contribution to the war effort. LOIS finds her place – and adventure – in the form of ENSA, the War’s Entertainment Corps, and heads off to perform for the troops in Northern France.

TOM BENNETT
Played by Ewan Mitchell
On the pull or on the make, TOM BENNETT brings nothing but trouble to sister LOIS and his father, DOUGLAS. With the police having caught up with him after his latest swindle, TOM avoids prison only by vowing to join the forces, when all the while he intends to dodge action altogether, as a conscientious objector. By the end of episode two, however, TOM has joined the Navy, and is about to face a personal and a military battle of equal, epic proportion.

KASIA TOMASZESKI
Played by Zofia Wichłacz
KASIA starts the war as a waitress in one of Warsaw’s many bars and cafés, already in a passionate love affair with the young English translator, HARRY CHASE, unaware that he already has a girl at home. Her father STEFAN and brother GRZEGORZ depart for Danzig to defend against the imminent German invasion, leaving KASIA with mother, MARIA and younger brother, JAN, at home in the city. Within days of the war beginning, KASIA’s family has each faced the cruel reality of this brutal conflict, and KASIA is faced with terrible choices between protecting her family and her own safety and freedom. KASIA joins the Polish resistance and her war becomes one of subterfuge, excruciating danger and constant fear of betrayal.

GRZEGORZ TOMASZESKI
Played by Mateusz Więcławek
GRZEGORZ TOMASZESKI is not built for battle. A naïve and loving teenager, he wants only to prove himself to his father. Entirely unprepared for the horror that awaits, GRZEGORZ heads to Danzig with STEFAN to defend the city at the outbreak of war, only to face tragedy before the day is out. Like his sister KASIA, life is set only to get tougher for GRZEGORZ, and the devastating battle at Danzig is just the beginning of his wartime anguish. He makes firm friends with KONRAD, a brave man more suited to the challenges conflict brings, and together they eventually flee Poland and make their way through Europe, in the hope their lives can be spared, as so many of their fellow countrymen brutally lose theirs.

WEBSTER O’CONNOR
Played by Brian J. Smith
When we discover WEBSTER in September 1939, he is working in the increasingly busy corridors of the American hospital of Paris. When France is threatened and occupied, despite the efforts of his aunt NANCY, WEBSTER stays in Paris and he fights. At first as a surgeon in a neutral hospital, and then a surgeon in a neutral hospital under Nazi occupation, WEBSTER finds himself fighting on all fronts; for his own identity and freedom, for his lover ALBERT’s freedom, and for those patients who, as of May 1940, are prisoners of war. With the help of friend HENRIETTE, a local French nurse, they begin a system of smuggling patients out of the hospital and beyond, all beneath Nazi noses.

ALBERT FALLOU
Played by Parker Sawyers
Jazz musician ALBERT FALLOU is deeply in love with American doctor WEBSTER O’CONNOR. When the Germans invade, ALBERT grows worried for his and WEBSTER’s safety, and for his own freedom as a Parisian of west-African heritage. When WEBSTER and his colleague HENRIETTE trial their plan to smuggle patients out of the hospital, ALBERT is keen to leave too, and turns to WEBSTER for help. WEBSTER is keen for them to stay put. Before long, however, ALBERT’s fears become their reality, and he is interned in a camp just outside Paris, where he defies their racial profiling by forming a classical orchestra of inmates.

STAN RADDINGS
Played by Blake Harrison
HARRY’s sergeant, STAN RADDINGS, is a working-class southerner with an enormous heart, sometimes concealed behind an unwittingly tactless exterior. A brilliant soldier, STAN is a committed, knowledgeable and loyal sergeant, and when, in their early days of battle, HARRY becomes overwhelmed by the task before him, STAN steps up to set him, and their unit, back on the right path.

HENRIETTE GUILBERT
Played by Eugénie Derouand
HENRIETTE is a nurse at the American hospital in Paris and WEBSTER’s closest ally there. She is a brilliant nurse and they’ve grown close over time. HENRIETTE, as well as being a little in love with WEBSTER is also hiding a more important secret. When war breaks out, and Paris falls to the Nazis, HENRIETTE conceals her Jewish heritage, working with WEBSTER to smuggle French prisoners of war out of the hospital under the noses of the Nazi authorities.

Programme Information

• Episode one
• Episode two