The dramatic thriller Temple, which is available to watch through Spectrum on-demand, follows Dr. Daniel Milton (Mark Strong, who’s also an executive producer on the TV series), a haunted man who sacrifices everything out of his love for his wife by opening an underground surgical clinic. As the criminal underworld becomes aware of his clinic, it puts him in danger and his work in jeopardy, leading him to make some very risky moves that test his morality.

During this 1-on-1 phone interview with Collider, British actor Mark Strong talked about how he first became aware of this material, playing such a conflicted and multi-layered role, wanting to show a different side of London, what’s been most challenging about embodying this character, how they determined the ending of the season, and what he’s most looking forward to with Season 2, which he’s currently shooting. He also talked about playing a good guy vs. playing a bad guy, the fun he had making Cruella, and waiting to return for Shazam! Fury of the Gods.

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Image via Spectrum Originals

Collider: This is such a fascinating character, who’s a little bit of the hero and a little bit of the villain, all in one. Was that part of the appeal?

MARK STRONG: Yeah. These are the kind of parts that I’m always looking for. You want to play characters that are interesting, multi-layered, conflicted, and sometimes morally dubious. If you’re too much of one or the other, it’s too one-dimensional. When you get some more realistic characterization, it just becomes more interesting. What you do when you watch drama is you compare yourself to the character that you’re watching and you compare your life to the narrative, and you make choices about yourself and wonder whether you would do the same thing. That’s why I enjoyed this particular character because it asks questions of the audience.

When you watched the original series, how did you originally come across the show in the first place, and what was it that made you decide to turn this into a series in the UK and be in it?

STRONG: I watched the pilot of the original Norwegian series and I was engaged by it. Good television has to be great storytelling and I was really pulled in by how eccentric and unique the storyline was and the characters were. So, we jumped on a plane, went over to Oslo, met the chaps who had made it and said, “Can we have the rights to make the UK version?” They were very happy to let us have them. They didn’t place any stipulations on us at all. In fact, what we did was adapt their original. It’s very different from the original. Some of the characters are similar but the storylines we created ourselves. It was just a great jumping off point. I thought that the original was unusual. I hadn’t seen anything like it. The giant leap you make from seeing this very supposedly normal guy with this very comfortable life, suddenly ending up doing illegal surgery underground, I just thought was the stuff of good drama.

How far into watching the original series did you see yourself able to take on something like this?

STRONG: Oh, that’s a good question. I can’t remember, to be honest. I initially started watching it and it wasn’t in order to adapt it. I was literally watching it as a television series. It was only after awhile that we wondered if the rights have been bought by anybody, just because it was a great central character, a really good collection of characters, and a good storyline. Basically, it ticked all of the boxes for me, for the kind of television that I like to watch it. It doesn’t spoon-feed its audience, it’s a little bit unusual, and it felt like a crazy story for crazy times. Those were enough boxes for me to tick to be interested. I can’t remember exactly at what point I thought it would be a good thing for me to do, but I was just enjoying it initially as a fan.

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Image via Spectrum Originals

I love that even though this guy is a doctor, it’s not a medical show. It’s much more about how far he’ll go to protect what he’s doing. Was it important to you that you not do something that falls into that procedural trap?

STRONG: Absolutely. I’m always trying to find things that are unique, wherever possible, and certainly a little bit different. Actually when we tried to define what this show was in order to talk about it, we found it very difficult. It has medical sequences and he is a doctor but it’s not a medical show. It’s funny and it has a dark humor to it but it’s not a comedy. People wanted to call it a thriller, and to a certain extent it is, but I think it’s much more a character-driven piece. You’re introduced to a group of people who all prove to be unlikely bedfellows, and then you basically watch them live their lives for a period of time. In that sense, it doesn’t really fall into any neat category. I love the way that London is represented. Often, as a Londoner, I feel that my city is represented by bobbies on the beat and red buses. That’s a part of London but not the London we live in. I feel like we created a show where, even though it was originally set in Oslo, it’s much more London-centric. That was really the only thing that I felt you could say about it. It’s a very London-centric show. I hope U.S. audiences will come to it and see it as something maybe exotic and a little bit unusual. That’s what I’m hoping.

Is it also fun to show a side of London that people don’t typically get to see?

STRONG: It’s fascinating, the idea that it’s rooted underneath Temple tube station. Anyone who’s ever been to London knows about the underground and the tube, and they know how old it is. It was built in the 1800s and we’re still riding those tunnels. It’s very, very deep and it has an enormous amount of history but what people probably don’t realize is quite how many tunnels there are under the city. They say that they find up to 15 new spaces underneath London every year that were previously unknown of. The Victorians were very gung-ho about building underground. If you had enough money, you could basically dig a shaft and create some tunnels down there, and there are hundreds of tunnels underneath London, which we found really intriguing. To set a show there, underneath London, I just saw thought was curious and interesting. It’s a part of London that exists but not a part of London that people know.

With a character like this, he’s somebody who’s certainly at the center of the story but he’s not really the hero of this story. Does it feel like he makes enough questionable, moral, and ethical decisions that it disqualifies him from being the protagonist of the story?

STRONG: He’s not a hero or protagonist in the true sense of the word. What I liked was that he is part of a group of people who are all living their lives and trying to get on with their lives but he has the most intense choices that he has to make. I love the fact, too, that everything he’s doing is for the love of his wife. In trying to deal with all of the stuff that’s thrown at him, bearing in mind that he comes from a very comfortable background where he’s in control of his life the whole time he’s been on the earth, suddenly he’s having to make choices in an arena that he’s completely unfamiliar with. As a surgeon, when you undertake surgery, you start and any problems that might occur during that surgery that’s your responsibility to deal with. Should you accidentally nick an artery, you have to get it sewn up before there’s any blood lost. Should you find a problem in there, you have to deal with that before you close up the patient. You literally deal with everything as it comes along, and that’s very much Daniel Milton. He deals with each of the problems that he’s faced with in the best way that he can in the moment. Unfortunately, those aren’t always the best decisions to make. Ethically and morally, he makes some very dubious choices but he’s doing it with the best of intentions.

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Image via Spectrum Originals

How do you feel this character really challenged you in ways that other characters you’ve played haven’t before?

STRONG: Ironically, what was most difficult about it was that he’s probably closer to me than most of the characters I’ve played. I like to play characters where I can discover something different, like an accent or a piece of clothing or something that just removes that person for me. That’s what I always thought acting was. When I started out as a young man, I wanted to play characters where I could be different from myself. Those are the things that I’m often most comfortable with. I think of myself as a character actor. This is much more of a leading man. He’s much closer to me because he’s my age and he lives in my city. Even though I’m not familiar with surgery and the medical world, it’s a world that I could slip into relatively easily from my background. That was probably the most tricky thing, to play somebody closer to myself than I’ve ever really done before.

We learn a lot about this guy as the series goes on. What did you grow to appreciate about this character the longer you played him? Were there aspects of him that you didn’t necessarily realize were there when you started out on this journey with him?

STRONG: I underestimated his tenacity. I question whether I would have been able to have the same stamina for carrying on this path that he’s chosen. I became impressed and also slightly appalled by his drive, if you like, because that drive leads into some very dark places. At the same time, it’s admirable that it’s being done for the love of his wife.

How do you feel about where the season ends and what made that the right place to end this portion of the story when clearly there’s more story to tell?

STRONG: Well, you’re right. We’re filming Season 2 at the moment, and we have some great storylines and a great place to take the show from where it is in Season 1. If you enjoy [Season 1], there’s more in store. We never intended or started shooting with a view to there being a second season. We were only gonna make the eight episodes as they are. There was never a second season of the Norwegian show. So, the second season that we’re doing is all our own work. We felt we needed to tie up as many loose ends as we could by Episode 8, which I think we do in Season 1, but also wanted to leave things on a knife’s edge, to leave people who grow to enjoy this group of characters wondering where they go from here.

When the story starts, we’re in a world above ground that we recognize. It moves below ground and that bunker becomes a source of intense fascination because it’s so unusual, it’s weird and it’s such a strange place to have a clinic. At first, the attitude towards that bunker is that you’re slightly confused by it, but over the course of the show, it turns around completely and suddenly there’s this little family down there and that becomes a safe haven. By the end of the [season], we’re safe under there, but then we introduce some jeopardy to this family environment that we’ve bizarrely built out of this underground bunker. We realized that was a great leaping off point to tell some more of the story. I think it’s a satisfying ending and it could end there but we just wanted to take it further, and we did.

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Image via Spectrum Originals

What were you most excited about in continuing to explore who this guy is? How are you expanding on that in the second season?

STRONG: Now, we have to make choices about whether we like him or not. Having watched him have things thrown at him in the first season and having to make decisions about those things and what he chooses to do and how he chooses to cope with everything; in the second season, we do more of that. When we begin the second season, he’s not longer a fairly average guy with a very comfortable life. He’s done some very dubious moral things, and yet is trying to get back the life that he had originally, while he’s now tarred with a certain amount of criminality and a certain amount of ethical duplicity. I start from a slightly different level. Daniel Milton is now tainted and we take him even further in the second season.

You’re at a place where you’re playing a lot more bad guys or at least morally questionable characters. Do you approach or prepare playing villains or characters that are in that gray area differently in any way from playing the good guy?

STRONG: Do I go around threatening people in the streets? I think we all have a little bit of good and bad inside us. We all have the potential irritability, anywhere on the scale from irritability to rage. It’s just a question of being able to tap into that when it’s required. Actually, playing the bad guys has been fun because it’s not something that I would ever really do in my daily life. It’s something that I do at work, if you like. I’m a good guy, if you can believe that, in my real life, and I enjoy tapping into all of the feelings and emotions that you can’t really demonstrate in real life. I do that as part of my work, which is almost a bizarre therapy that allows me to get it all out there, and then I leave it there when I go home in the evening. For me, that was always what acting was.

Acting is playing something that you’re not, and experiencing emotions and feelings and using them to portray a character that you’re not. The Brits have a great tradition of that. If you look at our theatrical history, our heroes aren’t the homecoming king or the president, perhaps like they are in the States. Our heroes are people like Richard III who murdered the twins in the tower and Macbeth who kills a king and Coriolanus whose pride causes all sorts of problems for the people in his city. We have a whole tradition of questionable characters who are also called heroes, so I don’t really have any trouble playing those kind of characters because it’s so very different from me. Having said that, Daniel is closest to me. I suppose what I mean by that is that the comfortable element of his life is closest to me. The emotions that he experiences and the decisions that he might make, I’m not sure that I would necessarily make those myself but that’s what’s fun about being an actor.

You’re also in Cruella, which we know is the origin story of the Disney villain Cruella de Vil. Without spoilers, what’s it like to be a part of something like that, where you have a hand in telling the story of such a famous character?

STRONG: Well, I had a great time. Craig Gillespie, who directed it, I was a big fan of. I loved I, Tonya and I loved Lars and the Real Girl, the films that he made before I got to know him. Just liking the stuff he’d made meant that we wanted to work together, and he asked me to play this part in Cruella. It was fantastic being on set. It’s such a massive production. There are huge fashion and ballroom sequences in it, which are just so impressive. I got to be on set during those days and spend most of my time with the two Emmas – Emma Stone and Emma Thompson. It was just great being able to shoot the breeze with those guys during the downtime, and then play with them, telling this fantastical story that I think people are thoroughly going to enjoy, when the cameras were rolling.

I’m definitely excited and curious about the film. I’ve always been fascinated by that character, and I’m hoping that we’ll get to see the film at some point soon.

STRONG: What the film does, which is brilliant, is try to throw a light on where the Cruella that we think we know has come from. It’s a development story, as you see Cruella grow into the Cruella de Vil that we know and love to hate.

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Image via Warner Bros.

What are you looking most forward to in getting to return to do Shazam 2?

STRONG: I had such a great time on the first one and it turned out to be such a success. I’m just waiting to hear. I think the script is in development and they’re trying to get ready to do it. Obviously, it’s been interrupted by this pandemic, so things are on hold until such time as it can be filmed safely. At the moment, it’s all under wraps. I honestly know very little about it. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you anything about it. It’s just that I don’t actually know very much about it.

One of your first major roles was the mini-series Our Friends in the North. What are your memories of that project? Did you have any idea at the time that your co-stars would go on to become James Bond and the Doctor on Doctor Who?

STRONG: No, I don’t think any of us really knew, at that time. I’d come out of the theater and it was the first time that I’d really done anything meaningful in front of the camera for any long period of time. Having been in the theater, it was fantastic for me to be able to play a character that ages from 20 through to 50, and everything in between. I saw it as a theatrical role on film. And the story was such an overreaching, overarching story, set from the ‘60s through to the ‘90s, that was a big historical piece. At the same time, it was the social story of these four characters, played by Christopher Eccleston, Daniel Craig, Gina McKee, and myself, and we all benefited enormously from that show because it was such a seminal British television show. Who knew that we would all go on, with those guys playing iconic characters – Christopher Eccleston on TV and Daniel in the movies – and both Gina and I ended up getting into the movies as a result of it? It just gave us an awful lot of choices. We were very lucky to have that break at that time. I don’t think any of us knew what an impact it would have while we were making it.

You were also involved with the Dark Crystal TV series, which was such a special, beautiful, magical series. What was your reaction to the cancellation? Are you as upset as everyone who loved watching it that there won’t be any more of it?

STRONG: It is a shame because it was such a magical show. It was such a great attempt to create something that was completely different from anything that you see on television. It was a real family show. Kids were fascinated by it but adults could relate to the storylines. It’s a shame that it hasn’t gone for a second [season]. I’ve no idea why that is. My character, Ordon, died in the first [season], so I wouldn’t have been involved in the second [season] anyway. That often happens with me with the shows. If I’m earmarked to run to two or three films, I tend to get killed off in the first. If I’m lucky enough to survive, often they don’t get picked up. I take all of those things as they come. So, I wasn’t particularly upset for myself but it has a huge fan base and I was upset for those guys.

Temple is available at Spectrum on-demand.