From Pearl Harbor to Black Hawk Down to 30 Days of Night, Josh Hartnett has been in some pretty perilous situations through his acting career.
That’s all peanuts compared to what his character faces in Penny Dreadful, a new historical horror-thriller TV series that debuts Sunday, May 11 on The Movie Network and Movie Central in Canada, and on network-of-origin Showtime in the United States.
Penny Dreadful, which is set in London, England in the 1890s, is one of the oddest shows I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a mishmash of well-known fictional figures from the era, along with other characters who were created specifically for this, with dark supernatural elements poisoning the mix.
“The interweaving of the historic horror characters and our characters is almost, I mean, it’s seamless,” Hartnett said. “You won’t watch the show and say like, ‘Oh, well, there’s a character we’ve all seen before.’ Because I think that even the people who are playing characters you’ve seen before are playing them in a different way.
“It just feels unique from beginning to end. You’re not seeing an interpretation that has been done before.”
Hartnett plays Ethan Chandler, the American star of a second-rate Buffalo Bill-style “wild west show” that has travelled to London. As a money-challenged sharp-shooter who isn’t afraid of a little violence, Ethan gets sucked into working for a couple of creepy strangers named Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) and Vanessa Ives (Eva Green).
Let’s just say what Ethan sees on his first night working for Sir Malcolm and Vanessa would have sent me swimming back to North America in a hurry.
“(Ethan) finds himself in London in the middle of this intriguing situation, and he decides to stick around and see what happens,” Harnett explained. “We don’t know why really, and that’s why you have to watch the show.”
Just, uh, don’t watch it alone.
bill.harris@sunmedia.ca
@billharris_tv