As he plays a miner whose extraordinary bravery helped turn the tide of the First World War, Sam Hazeldine tells whynow about his twin lives in acting and music, as well as the claustrophobia of filming in trenches and tunnels.
The War Below
Sam Hazeldine is a big believer in the transformative power of a moustache. The 49-year-old credits facial fuzz as one of the key elements which allowed him to get into character for his new movie The War Below, in which he plays the leader of a group of Yorkshire miners sent to dig beneath No Man’s Land to take out German forces during the First World War. He told us that the “intense” atmosphere of the three-week shoot made it easier for him to disappear into the role.
“Sometimes I’ll be going to work thinking there’s something missing or that hasn’t clicked with getting into it, then they take you into makeup and shave off your beard and you’ve got this enormous moustache and put the really, really itchy uniform on”, he told us. “You get there and you just think ‘oh, whatever that thing was that was missing is now there’. You’re in a trench, it’s muddy and it’s cold and you’re wearing this stuff that smells funny in a tight, enclosed space. It just gives you enough that you can make that leap of imagination and make sense of it.”
The film was a passion project for director J.P. Watts, who makes his feature debut with the movie. It was inspired by the true story of the Battle of Messine Ridge in 1917 and what became one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in human history. Hazeldine and his co-stars spent a lot of time filming in a network of dark tunnels – a claustrophobia sufferer’s nightmare. It’s Sam Mendes’ blockbuster 1917 meets The Descent.
Sam Hazeldine is a big believer in the transformative power of a moustache
But Hazeldine nearly ended up rocking out on a stage in front of screaming fans, rather than digging his way through countryside slurry in the name of cinema.
The star – son of the late London’s Burning actor James Hazeldine – left acting behind as a teenager after two years studying at RADA, choosing to chase his dream as a musician instead. “We got offered a record deal. I went off and did band stuff for nearly 10 years. I didn’t start acting again until I was 30,” says Hazeldine. His group recorded two singles and an album but were dropped and, although they eventually reshaped the act and earned another deal, that was also scuppered when the label shut its doors. Hazeldine found himself at a career crossroads, which only became more profound when his father passed away in 2002.
“It was gonna be a bit tough and I didn’t know exactly what to do,” he admits. “I was very close to my dad, and he had been urging me to get back into acting and so had one of my best friends from drama school, so during that time of grief I took the plunge where I had been too scared to do so before and too worried about what people would think. The wonderful thing is that nobody really cares, so it was quite liberating.“
The War Below
Hazeldine secured himself an agent on a trial basis and then landed a plum gig working alongside Helen Mirren on Prime Suspect. He spent the next decade balancing stage work with TV appearances in the likes of Emmerdale, Waterloo Road and Holby City. More recently, he portrayed a member of an Italian gang in the second series of BBC crime drama Peaky Blinders and has shot a small role in Ridley Scott’s medieval epic The Last Duel, which will be released later this year.
There’s certainly a deep affection for war movies like Hazeldine’s latest in British cinema, with both 1917 and Christopher Nolan’s World War II tale Dunkirk competing for Oscars in recent years, while smaller projects like the terrific 2017 remake of Journey’s End have told different stories from the battlefield. For Hazeldine, our love affair with these films is down to the resonance of the sacrifice British forces offered in the trenches. He says that “their duty was to their country and to each other. Not just the brotherhood of the soldiers there together, but thinking of their families at home depending on them doing their duty and winning the war. We’re so removed from that now.”
For Hazeldine, our love affair with these films is down to the resonance of the sacrifice British forces offered in the trenches
Hazeldine hasn’t left music behind completely, writing piano pieces for a recent play and composing for a short film in which he acted. He says he’d love to score a feature – though his “technical know-how is not up to date” – and believes he has been able to parlay elements of his musical background into his work in front of the camera. “I think I have quite a good ear for accents. If I’m doing a bad accent, I can hear it. The rhythm of the way people speak, as well as the pitch and anything aural to do with acting and rhythm, [music training] lends itself well to. It’s a good tool to have. But moustaches are also very important.”
It seems we know the real source of Hazeldine’s acting talent. The top lip is absolutely vital. Presumably he’s after Kenneth Branagh’s ludicrous Poirot ‘tache next. He could definitely carry it off…
The War Below is in UK and Irish cinemas from 10th September.
