Thewest.com.au has a interview with Hannah. She talks about Primeval and dinosaurs and modern romance.
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What is it about dinosaurs? For a species that was wiped out 65 million years ago, they have found an enduring popularity in that most modern of mediums — television.
And box watchers are about to get a new lot of prehistoric beasts to battle.
From the folk who brought us Walking with Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Park comes Primeval, a high-tech, big-budget, six-part drama somewhat like the Power Rangers meets Jurassic Park.
It’s modernday England and Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) is going about his daily business as a university palaeontologist. His gruff manner and sexy dark-horse persona is explained by the disappearance of his wife eight years ago while on a research trip in the Forest Dean.
A serious scientist, Cutter doesn’t think much of it when hapless student Connor Temple brings him a copy of a tabloid newspaper with a hazy picture of a mysterious beast. Dismissing it as a hoax, his attitude changes when he discovers the picture was taken in the Forest Dean.
Is it another Loch Ness monster? Or something more sinister? Cutter goes to investigate and discovers a porthole into another time, millions of years ago, allowing dinosaurs to cross over into the modern day.
This, of course, is quite a discovery, and raises questions such as: did Cutter’s wife disappear into dinosaur land (probably); is England at risk of being overrun with prehistoric beasts? (they’re not taking any chances); and will Claudia (Lucy Brown), the spunky public servant sent by the Government to keep the whole thing under wraps, and Cutter hook up? (let’s hope so).
Joining Cutter and Claudia are good-looking research assistant Stephen Hart (James Murray), who doesn’t seem to do much other than stand around and chisel his jaw, Conn0r (Andrew Lee Potts), the geeky student who alerted Cutter to the newspaper story, and zoologist and reptile expert Abby Maitland, played by former S Club 7 popette Hannah Spearritt, who discovered the porthole when attempting to release what she thinks is a lizard back into the forest (hint: that isn’t a lizard).
Spearritt said response to the show in Britain had been fantastic, and agreed the ancient beasts seem to have an enduing popularity.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get away from that, the fantasy of dinosaurs will always be around,” says Spearritt.
For much of the series she is running, jumping, screaming and generally trying to get away from dinosaurs, not a problem for the ultra-fit former dancer.
“I love being involved in a physical show because it just adds a bit more to the day and just changes things up a bit — you have to be on your toes.”
The dinosaurs in Primeval are impressive. Using the latest technology, the actors have a natural interaction with the computeranimated animals, and scenes such as the one where a T.rex (or at least something as scary looking) is stalking the corridor of a primary school are believable.
“The guys that did our CGI (computer-generated imagery) basically came to the set and they put little red lights around our environment and added the creatures later,” Spearritt says.
“What we had in front of us was not much, we had a guy who held up this stick with coloured stripes on it with a ball on the end and we would get told to look at various points on the stick or the ball.
“He would then take on the sound of the animal he was interpreting, and body shape and would run towards us and we would run away all frightened.”
But audiences don’t keep tuning in just for special effects. Primeval’s biggest danger could have been scripts and human characters that failed to be as impressive as the computer-generated ones.
A strong dose of romance has been written in, and with a stellar cast of actors (including Ben Miller of Worst Week of My Life), there is hope they can sell us both the sci-fi and the smoochiness.
“There are a few romances, that’s the nice thing about Primeval. I think that there are strong sort of relationships beginning to form,” says Spearritt.
“You probably won’t see that in episode one because they are just setting up the characters and there is a lot to set in, but if you stick with the series and watch more episodes there are lovely little relationships which are developing.”