[caption id="attachment_69583" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Ciarán Hinds stars in ‘The Woman in Black’."]
British film star Daniel Radcliffe has nothing but the highest praise for Belfast-born actor Ciarán Hinds, his co-star in the summer blockbuster “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II,” as well as the new release “The Woman in Black.”
In James Watkins' gripping big-screen adaptation of Susan Hill's 1983 supernatural suspense novel, “The Woman in Black,” Radcliffe portrays Arthur Kipps, a young Victorian-era London lawyer sent to the English countryside to settle the affairs of a deceased client. He travels to her derelict home on the outskirts of a small village and finds the house is not as empty as he expected. As he speaks to some of the terrified townspeople, he learns their children die shortly after a woman clad in black is spotted by someone at the house at the focus of Kipps' investigation.
Hinds, an accomplished stage actor who has also appeared in the movies “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “The Debt,” “Eclipse,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Veronica Guerin” and “Road to Perdition,” plays Sam Daily, one of the less superstitious neighbors in “The Woman in Black,” a low-tech, old-fashioned ghost story. Daily tries to help Kipps unravel the mystery, even though he and his wife, played by Janet McTeer, have lost a son of their own under questionable circumstances. The tragedy has left Daily heart-broken and his spouse slightly insane.
In a promotional clip taped on the set of the film and posted on YouTube, Hinds said the relationship between Daily and Kipps is something of a paternal one in nature.
“But you have to understand the man is in denial, as well,” Hinds noted. “[Daily] hasn’t fully faced up to his own grief and history, so it’s not as if he’s fully forthcoming with everything. He’s almost like a guide, but at the same time he’s looking for help, as well.”
The 58-year-old actor went on to describe the movie as “a spine-chiller about an atmosphere that is created by what goes on rather than the things that go bump in the night.”
“You don’t know what’s behind that door. You hear a sound and maybe there’s something, maybe there’s nothing. Maybe it’s your imagination. So, it’s quite psychological, but things do manifest themselves, as well,” he noted.
Radcliffe told the Irish Echo during a roundtable interview with reporters in New York recently he was thrilled to again share the screen with Hinds after having worked with him briefly on “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II.”
“It was an amazing cast, particularly Ciarán,” Radcliffe said of “The Woman in Black.” “Janet is amazing, but I only got to work with her for four days total, but she’s great. Ciarán. I’ve seen loads of amazing actors, but nobody makes it look quite as easy as Ciarán Hinds. Ciarán just has an ease about him and a natural instinct. He’s just amazing. Most actors, you can sort of see a shift or something when they hear the word ‘action’ and Ciarán sort of slides into it and you never see a shift. Suddenly, he’s just acting. It’s just wonderful.”
Hinds also has kind words for his 22-year-old co-star’s first major film performance as an adult.
“Daniel is such an open-hearted person by nature and very committed to what he does,” he said in the online video clip. “This is a great thing for him because he’s got to hold this thing on his own. He’s the protagonist. You see it through him. He’s got to go through the whole emotional journey of it.”
Even though the stars had previously met when Radcliffe was playing the titular wizard and Hinds portrayed Aberforth Dumbledore in the last “Harry Potter” film, the younger actor said they didn’t really get to know each other well until they reunited for “The Woman in Black.”
“We worked together on that brief scene [in ‘Potter’] and got on really well,” Radcliffe recalled. “I really liked him, but it was three days we were filming on that. I’ve filmed with so many actors for that brief scene where they come in, you get to meet him, get to work with him and then they go and you see them at the premiere. And if you got on, then you chat with them. But, with Ciarán, it was actually wonderful because we did that brief scene, then went off and made ‘Woman in Black,’ and then had to re-shoot the scene between me and Ciarán for the ‘Potter’ movie. It was one of the scenes we had to re-shoot. So, that was actually helped a huge amount by the fact that by the time we got back to re-shooting it, we had worked together another 6 ½ weeks. It was great.”
Radcliffe also joked about the one downfall of working with actors of Hinds’ and McTeer’s stature on “The Woman in Black.”
“The combined tallest height in film history of a couple,” Radcliffe groaned. “That was pretty intimidating for little ol’ me, which is why every time I watch the scene – particularly if I’m watching it with someone I know --where I’m talking to Janet outside the mausoleum, I say, ‘I step onto the box; step off of the box.’ Because you can really see the moment where I’m like, ‘Right, I’m tall now.’”
“The Woman in Black” was No. 2 at the North American box office its opening weekend.
