Hero Fiennes Tiffin achieved global popularity with his work in the After film franchise. His latest work sees him take on the role of detective Sherlock Holmes in his early days in Young Sherlock. Having accumulated a global fanbase from a young age, Hero Fiennes Tiffin admits to have seen the good and bad side of fame, but shares how he has learnt to deal with it.
He says, “It definitely gets overwhelming. I think it started pretty overwhelmingly. I know it’s really easy to say, but I never really wanted fame or really expected it. At the start of any journey, you’re just like, ‘I’m going to see how this acting stuff goes. I’ll give it my best and you take it one day at a time’. Then the best thing you can do, even when it does become a bit bigger, is just to continue to take it one day at a time.”
Watch the entire interview with Hero Fiennes Tiffin here:
The actor even shares his mechanism to cope with all the attention. “ It’s just about having a good group of friends around me and I definitely do have that. I’ve got friends who keep me grounded and I have a good routine. I still live in the same area I grew up in and play football with the same friends. I still feel like I managed to live a very normal life. When you talk about scrutiny and support, I’m really grateful that the support massively seems to outweigh the scrutiny for me. So I’m really grateful that all the fans of After and everything else I’ve done, have been nothing but supportive,” he says.
Hero asserts that unlike previous portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, which focused on him as a detective, the Prime Video series looks at him as a person first, diving deep into his psyche. “It was something I actually overlooked because when Sherlock’s a detective, it’s a job and he can kind of emotionally detach from the mysteries he’s solving. Someone might be telling him how a family member or a loved one’s passed away, and he’s so unempathetic and just wants to figure out what happened. But with this show, Matthew needs to facilitate a mystery and the only way to do that for someone who’s not a detective really is by making the mystery directly affect them,” he says.
Hero adds, “I overlooked how much more emotionally involved Sherlock was going to be in our version of the story and I said this a few times to Matthew that I’m really excited to be able to tackle these mysteries in a much more nonchalant way than how Sherlock usually does because I think it’s actually almost even more fun to watch Sherlock trying to solve these mysteries with the added emotional kind of burden or at least, the emotional tie to what he’s trying to figure out.”
Young Sherlock also focuses on the friendship between Sherlock and James Moriarty, who becomes his arch nemesis in the future. Ask him about building the camaraderie with actor Donal Finn, who plays Moriarty in the show, and Hero says, “Guy Ritchie (director) and Matthew made us aware of the importance of that. And we were very quickly on board. We’d be really excited before scenes in the makeup trailer to run the lines. If I had a paragraph, then he had a paragraph, we’d quite often be like, ‘well, how about I say this line, you say this line. So we’ll share my paragraph and then share your paragraph’. It kind of feels like they’ve got one mind and they’re finishing each other’s sentences. When we would hear that noise, we’d both make sure we looked at the same time. So it feels like their actions are in sync and their conversations flow off each other,” he ends.