Larry Lamb is Dennis

What first appealed to you about The Inheritance?

It’s a great idea for a story and the script is really clever with lots of twists and turns. The audience discovers a fascinating mystery that evolves through the series and it’s very well-written, with the action flashing backwards into this family’s past. I like the way my character, Dennis appears quite sporadically throughout the story, but that made it quite difficult to tell at first whether this was a role I could do well. When you’re joining a company of actors you want to be able to bring something to the piece but as I looked at the script more closely I saw Dennis kept popping up and gradually I realised he was the keystone to the whole story, even though he’s not there constantly and felt it was a great role to play.

Aku [Louhimies], our director, is a lovely man and I’d seen one of his films before, The Unknown Soldier, which I thought was just so good that I really wanted to work with him. I’d also worked with Samantha Bond before, although we didn’t get any time on screen together in this series, but we had a nice little chat in the lobby of the hotel where we were staying for filming!

Is it difficult to create instant chemistry with other actors when you’re cast as a family?

It’s often the case as an actor, developing instant chemistry – you could find yourself in the situation where it’s, “Oh hello, I’m your husband, shall we get into bed for this scene?!” They try to avoid that these days by having rehearsals in advance, but it certainly happened in the past. On Gavin & Stacey, to me what formed our family chemistry was living together in the same hotel night after night, so everybody would meet down in the lobby, and we'd all sit and chat. That’s where that familial cohesion came from, the back and forth family banter around the fireside after work.

On The Inheritance I was the old ‘visiting fireman’ on set, Gaynor [Faye], Robert [James Collier] and Jemima [Rooper] (the actors playing Dennis’ children) got a chance to get to know each other before I started but they’re a really lovely bunch of people and I quickly became part of the family as there’s an instinctive camaraderie that develops between actors, that comes from knowing what it’s like walking onto a set when your character is really integral but you’re meeting everyone for the first time. Nowadays whenever I do a job I’m usually the ‘old geezer,’ so they kind of knew me anyway! I can remember back when I was starting out, working with some older actor in their seventies and listening fascinated to stories of the jobs they’d done and the life they’d lived working in the profession. And now that’s me!

Most of your scenes are flashbacks in the style of family home videos, what were they like to shoot?

It was a really interesting process because I was filming the scenes myself on a phone. There was a degree of improvisation because Aku is a director who really likes to work like that, so I was thinking about what I was saying, but also how I was filming it. They figured it would be too technically complex to use a film camera looking over my shoulder, so I was holding the phone and that footage is what actually appears on screen. I just about pulled it off! 

Did you enjoy filming in Ireland?

I loved being there, it’s always a great place to work. We had a terrific all-Irish crew, so it was just a lot of really good craic. I'm a cold-water swimmer, and they fixed me up with a place down on the river near Kilkenny where I could swim early in the morning, it was very fast flowing but lovely. Aku and his editor are both Finnish, so they were both up for it too. It was early spring, so it was still dark at 7.30am and the water was pretty fresh, but I’ve been into swimming for a long time. I go first thing in the morning, although actually this is the first year I've managed to swim right through the winter without breaks for filming.

The swimming just makes me feel much better and it’s evidently great for your immune system and circulation, and it’s psychologically too. You need to start in the summer and get your body in the water every day so that when the temperature starts to drop, you accommodate the change day by day and steadily acclimatise. I don’t wear a wetsuit, just a little insulated swimming hat and some special gloves and boots once it gets really cold.

Do you still get a buzz out of acting?

Yes, I do, as long as it's absolutely the right character and I feel it’s not too demanding so I can actually handle it. I’m not really up for doing eight shows a week in the theatre anymore, and working on set involves getting up at 5am and maintaining your energy levels the whole day, (maybe with a little kip at lunchtime as it can be really exhausting). I've done two or three small films over the last few years and it's certainly not as easy as it used to be. Whoever you are, as an older person you do start forgetting things, and when you’re trying to hold onto lines that’s an extra weight on your shoulders, that was never a concern when you were younger. It’s a bit of a bore if you forget your words in front of the camera, but I'm probably about as sharp as I can be. I swim and I ride my bike every day and I do everything I can to hold on to what I've got. I’m also writing at the moment, so my mind is occupied with that.

What are you writing?

I wrote an autobiography that came out in 2011 and I tried to write a novel straight after that, but I just couldn't get it together, it wasn't in me. So i read voraciously over the coming decade because that’s how you learn, and then an old friend dared me to fictionalise an element my life. So I’ve ended up writing a story about a guy in his mid-30s, who works behind the camera in the film business and goes off with a crew to make a film on a quiet little island in the Caribbean, but everything starts to go wrong. It’s a story about what happens ‘backstage,’ and my head has been in that for about three years now.

What do you hope viewers will most enjoy about The Inheritance?

It's very cleverly written and directed, with a great mystery at its core, so I’m sure it will keep a viewer on their toes from beginning to end – you won’t really know where this drama is going until you get there!

Watch The Inheritance Monday nights at 9pm on Channel 5. Stream it on My5. 

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