Actor Hero Fiennes Tiffin took on the role of the iconic consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in the recently released web series Young Sherlock. The show has been getting a lot of love from the audience, especially for the casting of Hero Fiennes Tiffin as Sherlock Holmes, and the series creator Matthew Parkhill informs us that the actor was actually the first person to have auditioned for the role.
He tells us, “Guy Ritchie (co-creator) had worked with Hero on a movie called The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. So he knew him already but Hero was the first person to audition for the role. I remember, when we did his audition, he was on holiday in Thailand and he did a Zoom call from his hotel room. In the show, Sherlock has a sense of wonder and innocence in the way he looks at the world. Hero did that on that first read and then all the other Sherlocks I met after that, I kept coming back to Hero. That’s usually a sign that he’s your man for the role.”
Watch the entire interview with Matthew Parkhill here:
Ask Matthew Parkhill how did he ensure that Prime Video’s Young Sherlock isn’t just another adaptation of the fictional world but a string entity of its own, and he says, “It’s something I was very scared and nervous about because you come into a job like this, we’ve got this material but a lot of brilliant writers and actors have done this. So I had to find a way of giving myself permission to sort of play, otherwise you just feel like you’re sort of writing in a straitjacket.”
He adds, “The pressure is too much, so I went back and read the books again. I listened to a wonderful audio recording which is 72 hours long and I thought I will not touch anything after the first book, Studying in Scarlet, and before that is my playground. So that unlocked something and gave me creative permission to play. That was my way of trying to not feel too much weight of previous adaptations.”
Young Sherlock also gives a new insight into the eponymous character as it sees him as a human first, and a detective later, something quite different from any previous adaptation of it. Mention it to Matthew and he replies, “I never thought of it quite in those terms, but for me, it was like he’s not a detective. In every Sherlock adaptation before, he’s already a detective. But here, if he’s not a detective, he’s not just going to take a case. So, for me, it was like how do you drag him into it where he has no choice but to try and find the answers to this mystery. Even in the Young Sherlock movie by Barry Levenson, from the very beginning he’s sort of interested in taking a case. In this show, it is more like he is pulled into the case. In our world, he can’t be a detective because the moment he becomes a detective, he’s Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock, he’s grown up. That was how we approached it.”
While Matthew admits he is fascinated by Sherlock’s detective skills, he wanted to explore how he came into becoming that person through the show. “I’m always interested in the Conan Doyle’s Sherlock. He is a very strange character. He’s very eccentric, a loner. He has no friends apart from Watson. He’s an oddball and I love that about him. So for me, it was like how does he become that person?” he says, adding, “I liked the idea of our Sherlock being kind of a live wire. There’s a line in one of the old Sherlock Holmes adaptations where he says to Watson how he’d make a great criminal. I was like why would he say that, and I thought maybe when he was young, he got into trouble with the law. So that was how the Sherlock in our show started to form in my head.”
The popularity of Sherlock Holmes across the world, including India, could add to the pressure, but Matthew didn’t let it get to him. “I try not to think about it because it’s too daunting,” he says, revealing an interesting connection between Young Sherlock and Bollywood: “There’s a character Mrs. Tilcott in the later episodes, who adopts or looks after a major character in the show. She played Elizabeth in Lagaan.”
So, what does the future of Young Sherlock holds? “I have, in my head, multi-seasons like where we go and where we end. If people love the show, we’ll get to do that. I’d love to keep going because it’s a beautiful world and it’s a wonderful team around us,” Matthew signs off.