How did you prepare for the role, and what attracted you to it initially? Beyond The Pole has a genuinely off-the-cuff, natural feel to it – were any of your scenes improvised, or was it more scripted than it appears? That natural off the cuff feel is purely down to the direction and performance as it was all scripted. The only scene we really improvised was the biscuit scene with the Norwegians (but that was still based on a bit of script) and a few lines at the end when we get near the pole – but we had freedom to paraphrase at times to make it feel more natural. We couldn’t film at the Pole, but we were still filming on floating ice and in the Arctic Circle, and hundreds of miles from a Starbucks. Difficulties were weather conditions, some days if there was a storm we simply couldn’t leave our cabins. Everything is slow as you can’t just drive to a location and set up – you have to load cameras, lights, sound gear, props and people into wooden sledges on the back of Skidoos (or whatever they are called) and then as we were on floating ice we had to use huskies to pull us everywhere. How long did shooting last? We shot for 10 days in Greenland and Iceland, then two or three weeks in Litchfield. We filmed some pick up scenes a year later after the ending was changed. It was a lot of fun. How were the scenes with the polar bear shot? I hate to disappoint and ruin the magic but it was stock footage. A local had a bear skin that we wrapped around some pillows to look like the real thing had been shot. Finally, did you really spit in Stephen Mangan’s mouth, or was that some kind of special effect? Rhys Thomas, thank you very much! Beyond The Pole is out on DVD and Blu-ray now. Our interview with producer Helen Baxendale is here
