His Father’s Death, Season 2

SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers for the first season of “Young Sherlock,” now streaming on Prime Video.

In 2012, the Guinness Book of World Records declared Sherlock Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV history. In the last century, Holmes has been played by — among many others — Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey Jr., Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, Jonny Lee Miller and Christopher Plummer.

But in the new Prime Video series “Young Sherlock,” writer Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective has been reimagined as an anarchic adolescent, played by “After” star Hero Fiennes Tiffin, who has yet to evolve into Baker Street’s most renowned resident.

“He is this brilliant man, obviously, but the Conan Doyle Sherlock is also a very odd character,” “Young Sherlock” showrunner Matthew Parkhill tells Variety. “He’s very eccentric. He’s very detached. He’s very strange. He’s very much an outsider in many, many ways. He hasn’t really got any friends; he has one friend, Watson, and even that is not an equal friendship. So I was very interested psychologically in this idea of what made him become that person.”

Executive produced by Guy Ritchie — who had previously directed Downey Jr. in two Sherlock Holmes films — and inspired by Andrew Lane’s young-adult novels, the eight-part first season introduces the detective’s origin story. After being wrongfully indicted for the murder of an Oxford professor, Sherlock teams up with his new friend and future foe, James Moriarty (Dónal Finn), to get to the bottom of an international conspiracy. Their investigation leads them back to Sherlock’s absentee father, Silas, who viewers learn midway through the season is a power-hungry, nefarious businessman looking to revolutionize the future of warfare with a deadly chemical agent. (In a fun bit of casting, Silas is played by Joseph Fiennes, Hero’s own maternal uncle.)

Below, Parkhill opens up about crafting an origin story for a legendary literary hero, the creative reason he chose to cast two generations of Fiennes men as father and son — and why he thinks the heart of this show, with a multi-season arc he’s already mapped out despite not yet having a formal pick-up, is the reimagined relationship between Holmes and Moriarty.

What was the most difficult part of this adaptation for you to crack? Did you give yourself any parameters when deviating from the literary canon?

I don’t see it as an adaptation, which might sound like a strange thing, because I didn’t adapt the books. There’s a huge weight on you when you do something like this, right? Many brilliant writers and actors have done this, so I had to find a way into it that would allow me a sense of creative space and not feel the pressure of the canon too much. I said to myself quite early on, “I’m not going to touch anything after ‘A Study in Scarlet’” — the first book — “but before that is my playground.” So when I say I don’t see it as an adaptation, these are obviously not my characters. But one of our writers, Stephen Thompson, who also wrote on the BBC “Sherlock,” was telling me how when they did that show, they were mining all the stories in the canon for ideas. We didn’t do that in our writers’ room. We said, “That all happens there, and we are now going to try and invent a new origin story.” Now, we pay homage to Conan Doyle, and we’ll hopefully have lots of Easter eggs in our show where people will start to go, “Oh, that’s why this happened. That’s how that happened.” 

The series uses the recurring narrative device of Sherlock’s vivid, overactive imagination as a way to re-examine evidence. How did you and Guy Ritchie find the visual language of the show, specifically the depiction of his imagination?

The Benedict Cumberbatch “Sherlock” used a lot of VFX to dramatize his imagination. A lot of those VFX, at the time, were very cutting-edge. Now, we are in a time where there’s just so much VFX, and it’s very hard to bring anything new to the audience. I was very interested, in the conversations with Guy, in doing something that was very analog, so the vast majority of the way we dramatize his imagination is in camera. You’ll see in Episode 1, Sherlock walks into his own imagination. It’s just old-school techniques of shooting over the shoulder of someone you think is Sherlock, but it’s not Sherlock.

The other element was not trying to have a hard and fast set of rules. Sometimes, we get into the imagination through a whip pan. Sometimes, we get into it through a click of a finger. Because I felt that if you do it the same way every time, the audience very quickly becomes tired of it and is like, “Oh, here we go…” As opposed to, “Hang on, wait, what’s happening? Oh, right!” So that was the conversation, and then it expanded into the VFX we did use. When you see the Paris sequence with the pheasants flying off in Episode 6, it’s all pencil drawn. That came from one of my favorite stories as a kid, Raymond Briggs’ “The Snowman.” It’s a very old-school, pencil-drawn animation. So when I talked to the VFX team, it was almost like, “Imagine VFX being done in 1871.”

You and Guy chose to model this new take on Holmes and Moriarty’s relationship after Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s characters in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” What do you think Holmes and Moriarty see in each other that makes them such great friends but also such formidable adversaries later in life?

For me, they’re both outsiders. Moriarty is an Irishman on a scholarship in Oxford, and Sherlock is an outsider, partly by dint of the fact that he’s a scout at Oxford. Yes, he came from a beautiful home, but he had such a traumatized childhood that he’s gone in on himself, and that in his own way makes him an outsider. But they recognize the brilliance of each other; they recognize sparring partners. When Moriarty sees him after the mass lecture [in Episode 1], it’s a recognition of each other’s mind. I always think that they’re very much two sides of the same coin.

We know how this is going to end, so part of the fun of the journey is working out how we get there. What I want to do, if we are lucky enough to keep going, is explore this question of why some people turn to the dark side and why some people don’t. Sherlock gives this line in “The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes” or “Return of Sherlock Holmes” where he says to Watson, “I would’ve been a great criminal mastermind.” So there is something in Sherlock that is drawn to that. It’s not a given that Moriarty or Sherlock is going to turn out how he turns out. We will explore more — hopefully, if we do a Season 2 — the nature-nurture idea.

So much of this show is built around that central friendship. What did you see in Hero and Dónal’s chemistry read that made you believe they would work so well together onscreen?

We cast Hero first, and Dónal was a very old-fashioned casting process. I think I’d watched 155 tapes before I saw Dónal’s tape, and I didn’t know him and instantly was like, “OK, who’s this guy?” We brought him in with Hero — and Hero has told this story. I think he was a bit tired that day, but Dónal came into the room and they started working, and Hero was like, “Oh shit, I better go up my game, because this guy’s bringing it.”

They obviously had this incredible chemistry together, but the truth is you do these chemistry reads — and some people may disagree with me here — but I don’t think you really know [if it’ll work]. Because it’s one thing to do a chemistry read; it’s another thing to do it day after day after day for seven months. I think until you’re probably into your first week of rushes or dailies, and you’re seeing it on set day after day after day, you can be like, “This is working.” Their chemistry is the heart of the show, and those boys do a beautiful job together. So there’s an element of luck to this. I know people don’t always like to say that because there’s an incredible amount of hard work as well, but there’s an alchemy. Sometimes, the alchemy works and sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, it does.

Was young Moriarty always going to be Irish, or did he become Irish after you cast Dónal in the role?

No, he was always going to be Irish. I don’t think it’s ever specified in any of the books that he’s Irish, but it’s an Irish name, so we were definitely looking at Irish actors. For me, it was important that he is someone who can play roles. It’s important that he felt like an outsider. But as you’ll see in various places in the season, he switches into English; sometimes he’ll pretend to be a bit of an aristocrat. So it was very important that Moriarty could do that, but I think we only ever looked at Irish actors.

Holmes and Moriarty’s investigation into this international conspiracy puts them in the firing line of a young Chinese woman (played by Zine Tseng) who impersonated the princess Shou’an and arrived in the U.K. to kill the professors responsible for testing a chemical agent that killed half of her village, including her own parents. She feels like a worthy adversary to young Sherlock in the same way that an older Moriarty was the ultimate rival to the older Sherlock. Why did you choose to create that character?

A lot of credit [goes] to Zine here, because she brings a unique power to this role. When we were casting this character, I remember saying to the team, “This is someone you’ve got to believe can eat Moriarty and Sherlock for breakfast.” I was really interested in having an adversary where there’s some connection between them, but I didn’t want to go down a traditional romance and do that love story. It’s just not the right thing for Sherlock, but I wanted there to be this connection between the two of them.

Obviously, she arrives as one character. You realize in Episode 3, she’s another character, and she is the adversary. And then later in the season, they become allies. But once Zine was cast, I talked to her a lot about that character. Zine even came up with the name. She was called something else originally, and I had to change the name and get legal involved. I said, “OK, let’s find another name for this character,” and she went away and came up with a list of 10–15 names. So she got very involved in forming the background of that character. But the very last scene in the credits of the last episode [where the character reunites with her friends back in China] is one of my favorite scenes. It’s probably the only moment of pure happiness in the entire show.

Joseph and Hero both credit you for having them play father and son, and in retrospect, the casting feels like a stroke of genius. What specifically did you see in Joseph as an actor that made you think he would be up to the task of playing Silas?

I knew we’d had Hero. I didn’t know Joe personally, but I knew his work. I was a huge fan of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” I’d seen his theater work, all the way back to “Shakespeare in Love.” At first, I wasn’t sure. I was like, “Is it too cute to do this?” So I had a coffee with him, and very, very quickly I realized the love that he had for Hero, and he told me how he used to do magic tricks for Hero. Actually, I asked him later on, “Can I use that?” In Episode 7, you see him do a magic trick for the young child Sherlock.

I realized that Joe’s genuine love for Hero would only enrich our story — that was the first thing. That was very intentional. Secondly, I knew there’s that incredible scene in Episode 6 in the kitchen. I always knew that even though we know Silas’ true nature, you needed an actor that could persuade you, could make you as an audience doubt yourself, could gaslight you as an audience and [make you] go, “Wait a minute, have I got this wrong?” Joe has this incredible power behind his charm and his ability to do that.

What intrigued you about the complexity of Sherlock’s relationship with his father, and how do you think that paternal relationship influences the way Sherlock moves through the world as a young man?

After the death of the sister, Silas becomes a very absent father. The mother [Cordelia, played by Natascha McElhone] is in an asylum, and the one who bails Sherlock out of trouble, the one who has to take a responsible job, is Mycroft [played by Max Irons]. Sherlock drives his brother mad, but Mycroft loves his brother. But Sherlock wants his father’s approval. When he comes back and says at the beginning of Episode 5, “We’re going to solve this together, my boy,” that’s all Sherlock ever wants to hear.

The one case Sherlock can’t solve is the only case he has to solve, and he can’t solve it because he has this emotional blind spot where his father’s concerned. If you look at Episode 5, Sherlock doesn’t solve anything. Moriarty solves it all. Sherlock can’t see the wood for the trees, because of his emotional blind spot for his father. Even when it becomes apparent that that’s the case, he can’t accept it. He keeps looking for reasons why Moriarty might be wrong. When they finally blow up and have that fight, it’s because Sherlock refuses to see the truth.

When did you settle on the twist that Sherlock and Mycroft’s sister Beatrice (Holly Cattle), who they believed had died as a child, was actually alive, and that Silas had lied to the rest of his family about Beatrice’s death?

I knew very, very early on before we started. We cast Holly pretty much straight out of drama school. She’d done a show [called “Cobra”] with Robert Carlyle, but she was quite new and we had to cast someone [unknown]. It couldn’t be a big actor because the audience would be like, “Well, why are they taking that role?” And it would give it away. So we knew that that was going to be one of the big twists of the season. It’s funny because I’ve spoken to a number of journalists now, and there are quite a few like, “I pride myself on getting the reveals and the twists — and I didn’t see that one coming. I did not see the end of Episode 7 coming.” It’s a great reveal, and something I’m very protective of, obviously.

This version of the Holmes family always felt a little bit like a Greek tragedy, and it feels fitting that Silas was going to die at the hands of Sherlock, his most worthy successor. Was there ever any doubt in your mind that Silas was going to die in the finale?

“No” is the simple answer to that question. It’s funny you said it’s a Greek tragedy. I like the way you phrased that, because there’s that line Moriarty says in that wonderful dinner scene in Episode 8, which I just adore. He says, “This is not a squabble. This is a Greek tragedy.” There are elements of that, absolutely. I remember Joe picking up on that when we had our conversations about this whole thing. Beatrice does what she does at the end [turning on Silas] because she knows, in her heart, she’s given her whole life to this fucker and yet she knows that the one he really wanted to follow in his footsteps was Sherlock. Sherlock’s the golden one, and it drives her mad because whatever she does, she’ll never be that person.

Sherlock struggled with the idea of killing his father, even as the people around him made it clear that he had to meet a fatal end. In his final moments, as if he is taunting Sherlock one last time before falling to his death, Silas says, “I always knew you loved me, my boy.”

I think Silas knows the game is up at that point. Sherlock can’t kill his father. People that you love sometimes in life do terrible things, and acknowledging that is an incredibly hard thing, especially when it’s a parent. Even when Sherlock knows he’s done all these terrible things, he doesn’t want to go to the pub with him and have a pint, nor does he want to kill him.

Did anyone ever try to plead with you to keep Silas alive? Could you find a way to bring him back somehow?

[Deadpans] Several times. I get calls every day from Joe saying, “You should keep him.” No, this is the problem sometimes with casting. I did this show called “Deep State.” Mark Strong did Season 1, and Walton Goggins did Season 2. I had this wonderful character played by Alistair Petrie in Season 1, and he was so good. I was like, “You’re an idiot. You’ve killed him!” I designed an entire storyline in Season 2 to do a parallel story structure, with one from the past, just so I could bring him back.

For a story like this, which is very intricate, you need twists and turns, and you’ve got to figure this stuff out before [filming] because it’s this huge machine you’re feeding. So before you start casting, you know who’s going to make it through and who’s not. Then, of course, you start working with these incredible actors, and you kick yourself every day going, “What are you doing, Matthew?” But I always knew. I’m sure people tried to convince me. There’s a lovely dressing gown that Joe wears in Episode 5, and I tried to get that dressing gown [back] and Joe wouldn’t give it to me. I said to him, “Dude, you want to come back? You gotta give me the dressing gown.” So I’m still waiting for that dressing gown. So we’ll see. I’ll let you know what happens.

Silas leaves Sherlock with one last clue: a key hidden inside a copy of Charles Darwin’s book about the survival of the fittest. What is that key meant to represent, and why was Mycroft so adamant about Sherlock literally and figuratively closing that book and moving on with his life?

If we come back, the key is central to next season, so I won’t talk about that because it’ll be giving away a spoiler even before we’ve made the season, which would seem strange. Mycroft knows Sherlock’s like a moth to a flame about these things, and he knows trouble lies that way, so what he’s saying is, “We’ve had enough. Just let it go.” It’s his way of saying, “Please stop,” because what he knows is if Sherlock gets in trouble, who’s going to have to bail him out? Mycroft.

In the final scene of the season, Sherlock and Moriarty realize they now have something the other wants — Moriarty has the full solution to the deadly chemical agent that Silas was planning to sell to foreign governments before his death, and Sherlock has this unknown key from Silas. How will the dynamic between Holmes and Moriarty shift in the next chapter of this story?

I have a multi-season arc worked out. Whether or not we’re lucky enough to do it, I don’t know yet, but I have it worked out. The friendship is the key to this show, and the disintegration of this friendship is almost the final act, but I will end it before “Study in Scarlet” begins. That’s what I’ve always known, but [future seasons] will tell the story of this great friendship. What happens if Butch and Sundance fall out? That’s the question. We don’t want them to fall out, do we? Can you imagine if they didn’t die at the end of Butch and Sundance, and you had a sequel where they were enemies? You’d be so upset! So that’s the dynamic we get to play with and tease the audience with and have fun with.

This interview has been edited and condensed.