The actor spoke candidly with Yahoo about his experience making the Netflix series, which explores a father's struggle after his son goes missing.
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00:00 Vincent is quite a flawed character, he can be quite selfish, he can be quite egotistical,
00:03 but Eric does help him change over the course of the story.
00:06 So I wondered, how did you find playing both characters,
00:10 and also was the experience of voicing him the same as,
00:13 or similar to your experience voicing Smaug, for example?
00:17 No, very, very different. Very different.
00:19 That was an entire character, but this is an extension of the same person.
00:23 This is sort of a psychic split, an id, a devil of danger.
00:29 That's him knocking stuff over.
00:31 People, that's not me.
00:33 You know, it's very unusual to get to play against a version of yourself,
00:38 albeit a seven foot tall walk around white and purple and blue puppet monster.
00:42 So it was also the opportunity to work with an amazing puppeteer,
00:46 and that whole world is just absolutely captivating,
00:49 and always has been since I was very young,
00:51 and now as a father watching my children get utterly,
00:54 and all of us, the child in all of us get utterly bewitched by this animation of the inanimate.
01:01 It read on the page as a challenge,
01:03 as something extraordinary that I'd never seen or read before,
01:06 as a way to examine a character going through what Vincent goes through.
01:12 And in the playing it was just a joy.
01:15 A lot of humour, a lot of lightness as well as the dark,
01:18 and some mechanical things,
01:21 but it was the technical aspect of what Ollie was having to cope with inside that suit,
01:26 with this vision mask that shows two or three points of view of the actual scene.
01:31 He's not seeing as we see, he will see as the camera sees.
01:34 I mean, I kind of, people say, "What moved you most about the drama?"
01:38 Actually putting that on in one of the last days filming in New York,
01:41 and just I cried after it was put on, I said,
01:44 "I can't believe this is how you've done what you've done."
01:46 It's truly extraordinary, and to get to do a bit of that as well,
01:49 the kind of puppeteering in the show, within the show, is great fun.
01:52 I'm not sure I'm answering your question at all, but the voicing,
01:56 yeah, within the limits of that, you know, he's analogue, he's still part of Vincent,
02:00 he isn't an extraordinary thing with vocoder or effects,
02:03 or he's not a 400-year-old fire-breathing serpent of Hobbit fame.
02:08 He's something that we recognise from the worlds of the Henson puppets that we've grown up with.
02:14 So, yeah, it was important to authenticate him,
02:17 but give him a dialect that was different from Vincent's,
02:20 and a sort of gruffer, rough-around-the-edges honesty,
02:24 so that the humour, the ribaldry, the vice, the terrorising, the nannying,
02:30 all the kind of functions he operates with in the show could be coloured by that voice.
02:36 So, yeah, I tried.
02:37 It's hard when you're going, you know, to get all that expression in,
02:41 and that was a struggle sometimes, but it was a fun one.
02:43 [BLANK_AUDIO]