Space.com: What resonated most with you about the Hugh Howey novels and this big-budget"Silo" adaptation?Well, probably how relevant it was to recent history. From the isolation of the silo, to the infringement on a woman's bodily autonomy, and just the idea of the official narrative and anyone that deviates from that official narrative is suppressed. My job as the head of the IT in the silo is to make sure that there isn't a counter narrative.
I also thought it was a great challenge to play a part that was a person in a position of power and what that entails. What is personally compromised when someone has to be the person that does things that may be counter to his idea of right and wrong, yet he has to do it because someone has to do it in this society?Space.
I don't think Hugh Howey faced those kinds of challenges, but what he did was create an amazing allegory about what truth is, what freedom is, and what happens in a society where truth is suppressed. But most importantly, how there's something in the human spirit, embodied in this story by Juliette [Rebecca Ferguson], that is irrepressible. The human heart finds its own truth. She wants to find out how her loved one died.
Space.com: In composing your complex Head of IT character, how did you use the confines of the claustrophobic"Silo" sets to help craft that persona?Bernard is a character who is very much behind the scenes. I had to be very careful about being too full of any personality. Bernard is the one who's never seen. He's in a position of power but he's not out front because he's not comfortable there. There's something about him that has to be anonymous.