An interview with Zofia Wichłacz

Who is Kasia and how do we first meet her?
We meet Kasia in episode one, just before the war starts, and she’s at this perfect moment in her life. She has a loving family, a loving boyfriend, Harry, who she’s madly in love with. She’s just young, independent and happy. Then the war starts and everything falls apart. During auditions I only had a few scenes to read and Adam said something about her journey and that she’s going to have to change and that intrigued me. I wanted to know more.

How did you want to portray Kasia?
My idea at the beginning was to show Kasia as this very independent, happy, strong young woman. She is still a girl at the beginning but then she has to very quickly grow up and be strong. Even from the beginning I felt that she was strong but she just didn’t know it. You see her in love, but as the story develops we see her grow in resilience and strength and face all sorts of horrors.

Why are Kasia and Harry drawn to each other?
During rehearsals we had some time to really talk about the relationship with our director Adam Smith, and Jonah, who plays Harry. We talked about how Kasia and Harry met and why they fell in love.

It’s been so great because in the episode, you only see small snapshots but then you have to think about all the things that are left unsaid. How do they spend their time and where do they go on their dates? We had these ideas for how they met - because the café that Kasia works in is on the way to the embassy where Harry works, so he probably stopped in for a coffee. Then perhaps they had the same sense of humour and they started joking and maybe he started learning some Polish. Jonah is just amazing and he gives so much of himself to his part, which is so important.

What was it like shooting the dancing scenes with Jonah?
Scenes like that are easy for me, because it’s about having fun and working on the chemistry with your partner on set. I loved the dancing so much. We went for a lesson the day before and learned swing and blues. Days like that on set are just fun, when you know you have scenes which are sad and difficult coming up, you want to enjoy these as much as you can.

What was it about the costume and production design that helped you get into character?
I loved my costumes so much. The costume should be your second skin and the moment you get the costumes on you inhabit your character. You have to feel comfortable. Then when I stepped on set and saw a whole square they had built, with so many different buildings, cafes, it was so amazing and immediately gave me the vibe I needed. The art department did such an incredible job and it really helped us out when it came to finding our characters.

How does this series mix the light and dark?
There is a huge explosion just before Harry proposes to Kasia and it’s full of humour. It’s the humour, you know, that’s makes the show amazing. It’s very important to find a sense of humour, especially when the film or the series is sad and dark. We were trying to find humour in the scenes where you maybe wouldn’t see the place for humour.

What do you think it is about this story that will resonate with the audience?
I love the work of our DP Susie Lavelle. She shot this with a lot of close-ups because it is so important to be close to the characters. We want to feel their emotions and Susie has been magical at that. It helps people relate to their characters and you feel you are with them in every moment.

Tell us about the part of the story where Warsaw gets bombed.
When filming such scenes it is of course just a set, and the bombs aren’t real, but it stills gives you a certain feeling. For Kasia it’s an important part of her journey and she witnesses the bombing of Warsaw. She runs through the barricades and there is fire everywhere. It’s at that point of the story that her world falls apart and she has a real struggle to take control of it again. It hardens Kasia. I like to think of her as a fighter.

How was it filming those emotional scenes with Jonah and Eryk?
That was a very emotional scene to shoot when Kasia says goodbye to Harry. He doesn’t know that she is going to send her little brother on the train to England instead of her. It was a really emotional day. She has to try to save her little brother and she knows that this is more important than her happiness with Harry. She stays in Warsaw to fight and to stay with her mother. I guess that tells you a lot about her strength of character.

Did you do any other research for the role or was it all in the script for you?
When I got the part, I did some research. I wanted to create a world for Kasia including things she liked, the books she would read and what she might be interested in and why. She’s independent, earning her own money and I was so inspired by things that I found in my research. I read a lot about Warsaw at that time before war and how vivid the city was. I wanted to know the places where she could have taken Harry on a date. What music she would have listened to, and I listened to it a lot myself. That was really important for me to get the essence of her character.

How would you sum up the show?
World On Fire tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people. It is universal. It’s about love, about freedom, about wanting to be free when you can’t. It’s about young people who are full of life yet they’re in this difficult time and very dark place. It’s a very emotional story.

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