Nicholas Barclay, a young Texan, was 13 when he was last seen, playing basketball with friends. He went missing from his neighbourhood of San Antonio on June 13th, 1994. Three years later a young Frenchman named Frédéric Bourdin who had assumed Barclay’s identity was flown to the United States. He claimed to have escaped a child-prostitution ring. He had a pronounced accent and brown eyes; Barclay’s eyes were blue. And yet, for almost five months, he lived with the family as Nicholas.
This strange case has already inspired a feature film, The Chameleon, from 2010, and a documentary, The Imposter, from 2012. Reawakening, the second feature from the writer and director Virginia Gilbert, is the latest movie to take cues from the Bourdin case.
Juliet Stevenson and Jared Harris play a London couple divided by the sudden return of their daughter (Erin Doherty) after a 10-year absence. The unexpected reunion thrills the young woman’s mother but arouses suspicion in the father.
“Virginia mentioned the documentary The Imposter,” says Harris. “There are several real-life examples of people who have been in similar positions. That was important for Erin’s character. For Juliet and myself, it was getting into the turmoil that the parents were going through. The not knowing is the thing. Wondering what has happened to their daughter and what that has done to them over the years. And holding out hope that the reunion is real.”
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Harris, whose father was the actor Richard Harris, returned to Ireland earlier this year for the film’s red-carpet premiere, at Dublin International Film Festival. The trip allowed him to catch up with Irish family and friends but also entailed watching himself on the big screen. That never gets easier, he says.
“No one is a harsher critic than yourself. There’s a little goblin whispering in your ear the whole time. ‘Why did you do it that way? You could have done it this way.’ That’s impossible to switch off. And sometimes you have seen the films several times already. So now you know the points to look out for.
“There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s finished. And for me, personally, it takes me about 10 years to be able to watch it completely dispassionately, without remembering all of the circumstances around filming all of those individual scenes.”
The Dublin trip was a sort of homecoming. Harris has extended family in his father’s native Limerick. His mother, who was married to Richard from 1957 until 1969, was the Welsh actor Elizabeth Rees-Williams. Dad grew up in a well-off family on the leafy Ennis Road. Even as a young fellow he was known as a spirited individual. In the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, he enjoyed a beery Celtic heartiness that gave newspapers much fodder. You don’t get chatshow guests like that any more.
“He brought us here,” Harris says of Dublin. “We used to come here a lot when we were younger – like seven, eight years old. But it stopped around the time that they got divorced. And he was not around that much any more because his career was taking off in big way. When we were older we started to come back again. My wife, Allegra, loves the rain.”
As well as taking on an emotionally gruelling lead role, Harris executive-produced Reawakening. The actor’s fruitful collaborations with independent film-makers defined his early career. He is sneering, cool and fragile in Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, from 1996, in which he plays the artist. He’s coercive and sleazy as a Russian student in Todd Solondz’s enduringly upsetting Happiness, from 1998. During that decade, when Sundance Film Festival was buoyed by new and hip art-house practitioners, Harris also appeared in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Paul Auster’s Lulu on the Bridge and three films by Wayne Wang.
“It was definitely a golden age,” he says. “But then bigger stars started flooding into these movies and working for scale and getting big Oscar campaigns. And because the star is working for scale” – which is to say for the minimum daily rate agreed between studio and the actors’ union – “everyone else has to. Before that, you could do independent movies and make enough money to pay your rent. But that became harder to do. And now it’s actually much harder for films that aren’t these giant tentpole movies with special effects and people who wear their underwear on the outside of their clothes.”
The 63-year-old is one of those performers to have profited from the rise of high-end television around the turn of the century. Harris was enormously touching as the doomed Lane Pryce, a tender Englishman among brash Americans, in Mad Men. He was equally good as George VI in the Netflix royal drama The Crown, which portrayed the king as a decent chap overwhelmed by events.
“Once Hollywood decided that they only were making big event films, they effectively chased away the audience for prestige storytelling,” he says. “They had no interest in making the films that I fell in love with in the 1970s. And the slack was picked up by HBO and streaming platforms.”
He mentions another prestige TV series, AMC’s gripping take on Dan Simmons’s nautical horror novel The Terror. Harris joined fellow crew members Tobias Menzies and Ciarán Hinds in eluding a spooky maritime entity in Arctic waters during the middle of the 19th century.
“I’ve got a special place in my heart for The Terror,” he says. “Because it’s still being discovered. It didn’t get a good outing the first time around. But there’s an incredibly loyal fan base, and it has gone on to achieve a kind of cult status. I’m not recognised on the street very often. Women of a certain age know me from The Crown. For men of a certain age it’s Morbius or Resident Evil. But with younger people it’s often The Terror.”
I remember being in Norway when he was filming The Heroes of Telemark because I got my head stuck in a barbed-wire fence
— Jared Harris
Harris was born in London when his dad was still on the way up – This Sporting Life, Harris snr’s big break, didn’t come along until Jared was two. His father’s legend formed while Jared and his siblings were at boarding school.
“I remember being in Norway when he was filming The Heroes of Telemark because I got my head stuck in a barbed-wire fence,” Harris says. “I remember visiting him when he was doing The Molly Maguires. We were just on the studio lot. I remember being on the set for Orca – a big water tank filled with little icebergs and fake whales.
“We visited him on the set of Don Quixote. He was gone for 10 months making that with Orson Welles. I think the real reason we were invited was because the actor who played the Master in Doctor Who” – Roger Delgado – “was there. He knew we’d be interested in him.”
You get a sense of what Richard Harris meant to his children in Adrian Sibley’s recent documentary The Ghost of Richard Harris. Jared Harris and his siblings poignantly sort through their father’s effects in a storage facility. Jared ponders the suite at the Savoy hotel in London that his dad called home for more than two decades. It’s now named after Richard and is available for a minimum of £2,950 a night. He came a long way from the Ennis Road.
“That sucked up such a long time to get made,” Harris says. “The nature of the project changed over time. When Adrian was first talking about it, we were helping him, in the sense that we were going to make phone calls for him and get people to agree to participate. We were giving access to all of my father’s archives and stuff, but we weren’t going to be in it.
“There was a point at which there were four or five documentaries being made about him, and we hadn’t said yes to participating in any of those things. We didn’t want to be part of the story. We wanted it to be about him. Then we realised that what we had was unique.”
It’s a legacy to be reckoned with.
Reawakening opens in cinemas on Friday, September 13th
