“It seems almost an obvious thing to do to make one of our main characters female, it seems rather regressive not to,” says Tennant. This version of Phileas Fogg has only ever been as far as Edinburgh.” That is dramatically interesting to meet someone in that moment of crisis, especially that he didn’t see coming – that when he wakes up that morning, by that evening he will be on a boat to France. Because of that, he’s propelled onto this journey that, otherwise, this human being would never have made. We meet him on a day when a number of events occur all at once.
He will no doubt be hustled into an early grave with gout.” He just goes to his same stuffy club every day. Says Tennant: “Phileas Fogg is an unhappy man who feels that he has not fulfilled his potential, who has not lived his life, and that he has wasted his life by virtue of his privilege he’s undoubtedly wealthy. Pharoah and Ranson had dramatic material to play with, meeting their main character on a day when everything changes on a dime. It makes sense that this is a story that we keep revisiting.” And then you go to all these exotic locations, and then you do it with people that, by definition, are out of their comfort zone. You’ve got that dynamic pulsing under it the whole time, which is a great place to start. There is an actual ticking clock pursuing them around the world. Obviously, this is a story that has been told many different times, in many different ways, and I suppose that’s because it has this out-of-the-box dramatic structure,” he says. “Already, you have got a built-in tension there. And I suppose that, from an acting point of view, was one of the attractions of playing someone on this journey for which he is fundamentally unsuited. He floats above the action, assuming that everything is going to work out, which is very different to the Phileas Fogg that Pharoah has created for this particular telling of the tale. “Phileas Fogg is an interesting character in the book,” he says. Tennant follows in the footsteps of a string of notable actors, including David Niven and Steve Coogan, to have played the role. “I do think there is something fascinating about the fact that Phileas Fogg, starting out from the Reform Club in the stuffiest corner of Old England, in a story created by a French man, that there is something about it that gives it a timelessness that perhaps it would not have had without the benefit of someone looking at it from across the English Channel,” he says. We look back on those times, particularly the time of Colonial Britain, with an eye that wasn’t being used at the time,” he says.Įven before Brexit, Britain looked like a peculiar place from mainland Europe. “I think what Ashley did with the script is that he gave it a contemporary spin without taking it out of the time from which it is set. It’s wonderful but it’s probably not how you would tell the story now.” “I had read the book, I realized, when I read the script.
“It feels like the version of ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ for the 21st century,” says Tennant. Daro Film Distribution is the associate producer.
#David tennant around the world in 80 days series
The series will be broadcast on France Télévisions, ZDF, RAI and Masterpiece/PBS, which serves as a co-production partner, alongside Peu Communications (South Africa), Be-FILMS and RTBF (Belgium). In the original story, Detective Fix is a Scotland Yard detective that suspects Fogg is responsible for a bank robbery and shows up to nail him mid-journey. Leonie Benesch plays the newly created role of Abigail Fix, a journalist ewho rebels against writing under a male byline. In this version, he proposes the idea himself – for undisclosed but seemingly romantic reasons – and is accompanied by a plucky female journalist, while French-Malian actor Ibrahim Koma plays the role of the valet Jean Passepartout, updating the original white male storyline.
#David tennant around the world in 80 days update
Tennant responded to British screenwriter Ashley Pharoah (“Life on Mars”) and Caleb Ranson’s (“First Light”) update of the classic novel, written by Jules Verne.įirst published in French in 1872, the original story follows an eccentric Englishman, Phileas Fogg (Tennant), who responds to a wager at his posh British Reform Club to circumnavigate the world in 80 days.
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