Iain Glen has said he was astonished when reading the script for the second series of The Rig as he pondered how producers would film the scenes.
The actor, 63, plays Magnus MacMillan in the hit Amazon Prime show. The newest series sees the cast thrust into the perilous Arctic Circle, and become embroiled in more conspiracies and corporate conflicts,
The series is the first Amazon Original to be filmed completely in Scotland, and much of series two was filmed at FirstStage Studios in Leith.
Chatting exclusively with Screen Time and other media, Glen confessed, “I think the challenge is reading it on the paper and thinking, ‘How on Earth are we going to pull this off? This looks just impossible’,” reports the Express. “But you bring all the magic of film to bear with an amazing cast and crew.”
Glen also touched on his return to FirstStage Studios in Edinburgh, noting the pride in the first series being Prime Video’s inaugural fully Scottish-filmed streaming endeavour: “It’s just fantastic that we’re producing this in Scotland,” he noted. “But it’s just one of those where you read it on the paper and you think ‘I just don’t know how we’re going to do it’ and then you start getting into it and everything starts to land.
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“You feel, as an actor, what you’ve just got to concentrate on is relationships and trying to get the story down as much as possible. Make the most of it then let them create the magic around you in certain scenes.
“But it’s story-led, it’s character stuff, however weird and wonderful the worlds we inhabit, it’s still about the people, I think.”
The second instalment of The Rig was also a huge departure from the first as the six episodes followed multiple groups of characters in different locations. Following the destruction of the tsunami, medic Cat Braithwaite (Rochenda Sandall) and agitator Lars Hutton (Owen Teale) dealt with the aftermath in Edinburgh.
Season two continued the perilous investigation in the Arctic Circle
(Image: PRIME VIDEO)
“Myself and Owen, we really missed everybody to be honest,” Sandall confessed. “We had a lot of fun doing it but the team that we built in such a suffocating environment with The Rig season one… we missed it. We missed being with everybody.
“But obviously we know that it’s such an important part of the story to tell, seeing the aftermath of the disaster and what it does to the average man rather than just concentrating on heroes and saying, ‘Yeah, they’re alright. Let’s move on to the next bit of the story’.
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“You get to really see the utter destruction that the wave has caused off the back of things that have happened in series one. But we missed everybody, of course we did. There was a little bit of crossover, but not enough for our liking!”
Glen playfully spilled the beans about his fellow actor: “Owen Teale is irrepressible, so he will stay an extra day and arrive an extra day early and want to inveigle everyone into rocking and rolling into the early hours of the morning.
“But I’m a true professional, so I never got drawn into it,” he quipped.
The Rig season 2 is available to stream on Prime Video.