Rome: The last hurrah

SINGAPORE — It’s a sad, sad day when an upright man turns merciless killer, bent on destroying, not just his enemy, but himself. Sadder still when he becomes a shadow of his old self, going where the wind blows, never mind if it blows towards damnation.

Such is the lot of those who lose their loved ones in one violent blow the way plebeian soldier Lucius Vorenus did in the second season of HBO’s Rome (premieres Monday, May 7, 11 p.m.).

From straight-as-an-arrow guy, who turns into a relentless avenger, claiming the life of the man who took his family away from him, forever.

Sounds like one of those usual vengeance stories?  Not quite. It was shot in the place where the action was supposed to have taken place: Rome. HBO, which produced the series, forked out a whopping $100-M for the production. Five acres of backlot and six soundstages at the legendary Cinecitta studios made up the set — the largest in the world.

Shooting stretched two-and-a-half years, with cast and crew working 14 hours a day, five days a week.

It’s no walk in the park, even for the most seasoned of actors. 

And Kevin McKidd, the Scottish actor who plays Vorenus in the new series, is no exception. At the newly-renovated HBO studios where he talked to members of the press from the Philippines, Malaysia and Taiwan, McKidd minced no words about the agony and the ecstasy that went into the production of Season Two.

"You get picked up at 5:30 a.m., rehearse the scene at 7:30 a.m. and start shooting at 8:30 a.m.," he relates.

"If it’s an interior set," he continues, "you shoot until somebody collapses."Everything turns into a litmus test of patience and endurance. At times, McKidd says, the scene is so intense,  migraine and exhaustion attack him at the end of the day. 

Shooting a breakdown scene would have been just fine for someone as seasoned as McKidd, whose film credits include Transpotting, Hannibal Rising with Gong Li and others.

But when you shoot a big battle scene while astride a horse and you’re soaking wet from all that jostling and fighting, you will need the patience of Job. That’s what McKidd went through and that’s what makes him say, "The tough scenes made me stronger.  Nothing can faze me now in my career."

Those galloping horses, sword brandishing and breakdown scenes have done a wonderful job on his character. So instead of looking at how Rome exhausted him, McKidd would rather think of the bright side: How it strengthened him, blew him away at the sight of dedicated craftsmen who brook  no mediocrity.

The dedication is seen in the painstaking attention to details — the costumes, the sandals, the brassware used in every scene. "It’s good for me as an actor to grow, to work and be in front of the camera for that long, with these amazing directors (a different one per episode), skilled craftsmen," McKidd gushes.

It’s something that, in other words, he will gladly put in his resumé. And, if excellence begets more respect for an acclaimed actor like him, that’s what McKidd says he got all over again in the series.

"The industry seems to respect what we did in the show. It always helps," he relates.

To think the 33-year-old actor almost lost the chance of playing the lead in the series when it was offered him some four years ago. Back then, his work on independent cinema in Europe was doing well.  He didn’t see the need for a US TV series like Rome, not when HBO was not available in his native London. "I was really ignorant," he admits in hindsight. "We didn’t have the channel. I turned it down."

But his agent wouldn’t hear anything of it. He knew Rome was too good a project to pass up. So he called Bruno Heller, writer of the series.  Both doubted the wisdom of McKidd’s decision.  That did it.  McKidd was convinced to change his mind.

He has no regrets. "I’m so glad I did the show. Now, I realize that it will be seen worldwide.  Since the TV series was aired in the US, it’s been easier for me to get into rooms I haven’t been to and meet people I can never meet," McKidd says.

Among the new people he has met are the different directors HBO has tapped for Season Two.

Others would have frowned on this strategy of getting different people to handle the episodes.  Not HBO. 

The different directors have infused fresh insights one can’t see in previous or succeeding episodes.

The Season Two directors agreed on one thing though: They’ve got to give this last hurrah all the punch they can give. It’s much like the performer who gives his farewell show everything he’s got because it’s well, the grand finale no less. When HBO declared there are to be no more episodes after Season Two, everybody decided to move faster.Heller, according to McKidd, put three seasons worth of storylines into one powerful, absorbing Season Two. All the angst, the passion, the grit came out in one fell swoop. McKidd, the father of two, aged seven and five, came out disturbed and guilt-stricken in one scene where Vorenus finds his children abused and exploited. The squalor, the abject conditions were too much.

McKidd thought of his two children by wife Jane and he couldn’t help but turn emotional.

"It was a trying episode," he admits.

Now that shooting for Rome is over, McKidd looks forward to many other things. He wants to do the film version of Macbeth. He wants to sit on the director’s chair.  But never does he want to be a celebrity. In fact, the loss of visibility that came with his noninclusion in the Transpotting posters did not bother him one bit. The anonymity it gave him turned out to be a plus.

He stepped into various roles an actor typecast in one type of character can’t.

In that sense, McKidd and Vorenus are worlds apart. Vorenus thrives in misery; McKidd doesn’t. Vorenus lived a turbulent life; McKidd prefers things calm and trouble-free.

Shy McKidd would rather join wife Jane in a quiet session of pottery, which we, the writers, and the HBO staff had under the amiable Chuan Siang Boon, than engage in a cruel game of one-upmanship.That he played a character far removed from who he is in real life is a tribute, not just to McKidd’s talent, but his Rome directors’ ability to bring out the best in him.