Breaking Baz: Jared Harris Aboard As Treacherous Uncle In ‘Hamlet’ For Royal Shakespeare Company, Says Play Was A Favorite Of Dad Richard Harris
deadline.comJared Harris (Chernobyl, The Crown, Mad Men) is going full circle and returning to the Royal Shakespeare Company for the first time in 34 years to play Claudius, the treacherous uncle in Hamlet.
It is a play much-loved by his father Richard Harris, who played Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies and Marcus Aurelius in Ridley Scott’s original 2000 Gladiator.
Harris said that when he and his brothers, thespian Jamie and director Damien, were kids, their stage-struck parents — dad Richard and mum Elizabeth Rees-Williams — would sit around the dinner table and discuss the productions they’d seen and “Dad would actually get up from the table and act them out for us boys.” His father “adored” Hamlet and many of Shakespeare’s other plays. “I saw his version of [Laurence] Olivier’s death scene in Coriolanus quite a few times,” he chuckles from his hotel room in Iceland, where he’s shooting director Michael Russell Gunn’s movie Reykjavik, about the breakthrough 1986 Icelandic Cold War summit attended by President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union.
Jeff Daniels portrays Reagan, while Harris plays the Soviet leader. Harris will play Claudius in a new production of Hamlet, described as a “high concept” version by its director Rupert Goold (Judy).
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