I met Adam Rayner at the Television Critics Association press tour, which was earlier this year. So it was before I could see the pilot of the new summer drama “Tyrant.” Maybe I’ll see him again after a few more episodes air, but for now we learned about the new show from “Prisoners of War” creator Gideon Raff and Howard Gordon, the producer of the American adaptation, “Homeland.”
Rayner stars as the “Tyrant” so we got the inside scoop on his rise to power. Rayner seemed very international in person, sporting a British accent and speaking French to the network team.
CraveOnline: Tell us about your character on “Tyrant.”
Adam Rayner: So my character on “Tyrant” is a chap called Barry Al Fayeed and he is the second son of a fictional Middle Eastern dictator. But, he has grown up since he was young in America. He’s trained as a doctor. He’s married a beautiful American girl, had two kids, so he’s very much an American.
Is that Jennifer Finnigan playing your wife?
That’s Jennifer Finnigan, exactly. But through a series of events, he’s drawn back to this country very much against his will and has to get involved in the politics over there. Bit by bit, he gives into the temptation to get involved and acquire power and ultimately ends up finding his inner tyrant.
Is it a fictional country too?
Yeah, you can say it’s loosely based on Syria or Jordan or various places.
What can you tell us about the politics that suck him up?
Well, what happens is the father who’s been in charge for 30 years or so dies. The heir, the older son, has various difficulties with assuming the mantle immediately. He’s quite unstable. His decision-making, he needs help basically and as a more stable influence, I’m drawn into this.
We have to deal with all of the issues you would associate with unrest in a Middle Eastern country, be it the young secular revolutionaries demanding democracy or the Islamist movement, the disenfranchised women, all of that stuff. The army versus the regime versus the progressive elements, so hopefully the show will encompass all of those issues which are genuinely taking place in the Middle East.
And then Barry, my character, will be in the middle of that trying to draw all these strings together and show that even if you come with these western values, it’s not as easy as it looks. You can’t just go over there and say, “Hey guys, let’s have democracy.” It’s sadly more complex than that.
What is this country’s relationship with the rest of the world?
It’s a good question, but I suspect, because it’s been a stable and secular dictatorship, it’s probably done various deals, particularly with the United States, as we’ve seen a lot of these leaders which have now of course disappeared or are in the process of disappearing, all had quite strong alliances with the United States.
They were sort of marriages of convenience in order to maintain stability in the region and I would say this country probably has been following that model. Of course, that’s all about to be thrown into disarray with this father figure dying.
Have you had to map out your performance pretty far in advance to gauge how he evolves into this tyrant?
Only in the sense that I knew where it was going. I don’t know in what form or how long it’s going to take to get there but I knew that he was going to get there which meant doing something different at the beginning. So if you’re going to end up here, you don’t want to start here. You’ve got nowhere to go.
In that sense I wanted to show that this didn’t come naturally to the guy. At the beginning he’s a mild mannered, quietly spoken, very quite sweet, just ordinary American guy with two kids and a mortgage and all the rest of it. In terms of how he gets to the tyrant, I don’t know yet because I haven’t read the script but I knew that I had to start in a very different place.
How tyrannical do you think he’ll get in the first season?
Oh, I think he’s going to get pretty nasty. The first season, that’s a good question. I think it’s going to have to start coming out, maybe towards the final few episodes. I think he gets pretty nasty. We’ll see that harder side towards the end of the first season I believe.
Do you have a Middle Eastern background yourself?
No, in a word. I don’t.
I heard you speaking French before this interview. Are you British or French?
I’m actually half Brit and half American. I have a British father and an American mother, but as far as I’m aware, no Middle Eastern blood. But in the show I’ve got an English mother so before everyone starts going, “Oh my God, how can this guy be playing an arab,” he’s actually only half Arabic.
I was going to ask if you’re doing an accent, but are you just using your British voice?
No, I’m doing my American accent because this guy has grown up in the United States. So he has no accent other than the American one.
