Michael Hirst

Travis Fimmel as Ragnar Lothbrok on History's Vikings

History

Travis Fimmel as Ragnar Lothbrok and Alex Andersen as Ivar the Boneless on History's Vikings

History

Kathryn Winnick as Lagertha on History's Vikings

History
Fill 1
Fill 1
November 30, 2016
Online Originals

The Real Thing

For Michael Hirst, writer, producer, and showrunner of History's Vikings, it has to be authentic.

Melissa Byers

Michael Hirst likes to keep things real.

The creator, writer, producer and showrunner of History Channel’s Vikings  (and Showtime’s The Tudors before that) says that he always preferred to read about reality.

“I’ve never really liked fantasy myself. Even when I was a kid, I didn’t particularly like reading fantasy. Fantasy can be enormously entertaining, but because you can say anything, anything can happen, it doesn’t obey any laws of physics or human nature or anything, it is, almost by definition, meaningless.

"What I like is this idea that I write about real things and real people. I’m trying to be authentic. We try to keep it as real as possible.”

Vikings, in its fourth season, is based on the history of Viking farmer turned warrior king Ragnar Lothbrok, his family, and the spread of Viking culture in the 8th century. Hirst has written every episode himself, 66 the last time he counted.

How does one do that?

“Well, I try not to think about it too much. I’d slump in despair,” Hirst says.

The real story is somewhat more complex, however.

“I’d worked in films for a long time, and wrote a little bit, and it was after Elizabeth (the 1998 film that Hirst wrote) that my TV career essentially developed.

“Around 2000, 2001 or something, a very trusting young American producer came to see me and said would I be interested in writing a sort of soap opera about the Tudors, a series about the Tudors. I didn’t really know whether, a) if I could do it, or b) if I was interested, because I didn’t know at what level I was supposed to be writing.

“So I said, give me some idea what you like and what you might want me to do. Give me different shows, so I can just see what you’re talking about.

“So he did. He sent me lots of shows. But actually, they were all episodes of The West Wing. And what I realized, what he was trying to say was, yeah, you have to be entertaining, you have to be engaging, you have to engage us with the characters, but you can take on serious issues. TV can do that.

“So I plunged straight into Tudors, not knowing how to do this at all, how I would fare writing a sustained narrative, but I’ve liked it very much.

“Also, I’ve had no experience at anything else. I’ve never been in a writers’ rom or had anything to do with TV. And it was great fun.

“So, basically, I found I could do it.  And so, because I could do it, I just went on doing it.”

When Vikings came along, he knew he would work in the same way.

“The reason I wanted to see if I could do it myself, was that in the American model, a showrunner needs a lot of different skills to run a room, and some of those skills are psychiatric.

“I’m a writer, and I know what I’m like, and I can only imagine what a roomload of writers is like. So I think that I would be spending a lot of time on other issues and not doing what I really want to do, which is write about my Viking pals and get on with the pagan gods and things.”

Not that it’s always easy.

“When we moved from a 10-episode season to a 20-episode season, that was distinctly challenging, because there are occasions when I have 10 live scripts, and I’m dealing with three different directors simultaneously.

"This season we’ve taken the show out to Morocco and to Iceland. So, I am rewriting constantly, daily, as well as in the push ahead to the end of the show. But it’s an exhilarating ride.”

Along that ride, Hirst has changed the general perception of Vikings and their culture.  “I’ll tell you a little story about how it started, because one of the whole issues concerned with Vikings was that what everyone thinks they know about the Vikings is wrong.

“The cliché is that Vikings are horrid and brutal and loud, ignorant, iron age people constantly on the offensive against the other. In having read something about real Vikings and real Viking history and for example, the way they treated women as equals, there were things that people didn’t know.

“So one of the first things I said was we have to cast Ragnar as an introvert, a quiet, introverted Viking. He’s not going to shout very much. He may not even say very much.

“So, people are looking at me, especially the Americans are looking at me like, ‘OK, Michael.’

“I said, well, look, I don’t think of Scandinavians as loud and shouty. They’re very thoughtful, deep people, I think, and so are Vikings.”

Because of this very different take on Vikings, the casting process was particularly challenging.

“People were suggesting actors, and we were watching lots of their tapes, and all of them, all the guys would put on a big, bushy beard, and they would shout at the camera. ‘I’m a Viking!’ And they all tried to sound Scandinavian or something. It was hilarious.”

After going through many, many actor auditions, even going so far as to choose an actor to play Ragnar, Hirst asked his wife to watch the actor they’d chosen to get her opinion. It wasn’t positive.  “She said, ‘I couldn’t watch this guy. I’m not interested. His face isn’t interesting enough. There’s something inauthentic. He’s too much of an actor. As a woman, I don’t feel anything towards him.‘”

So, Hirst called the other producers and made his case to wait for the right actor. Fortunately, he showed up soon after.

“And then, a day later, or two days later, a self-tape from Travis Fimmel landed on my desk.

“And here he is, in his kitchen in the Australian outback, not trying to put on a Scandinavian accent, and doing such a low-key performance with huge pauses between lines. And it was mesmerizing. You just had to look at him.

“As soon as he looked in the camera, he didn’t need to say anything. You were just drawn to him, to his eyes. The director and I were watching this, and we looked at each other and we said, maybe, maybe we’ve found him. So, we called Travis in, and yeah, we’d found him. “

Casting Ragnar’s first wife, Lagertha, was equally daunting.

“The only actresses that I was being shows were these beautiful young women, and I said, ‘But Lagertha has killed most of the guys at a funeral, she’s massacred children. So, I’m not convinced. I won’t believe this.’

“And then someone mentioned a Canadian actress who’d been on the fringes [Kathryn Winnick]. She actually got into TV because she was working teaching people stunts. She’s a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. “

So, they called Winnick in to read and to test with Fimmel.  “Whenever she has to do anything physical on the screen, if she had to fight and things, she was incredible. You really, totally believed it, because it was true and real.

“And that’s the main thing I want. We can teach her other things, she can learn other things, but as long as she is grounded and physical and a shield maiden, that’s what we’ve got to show. So, that was interesting.”

Once casting was complete, the production was faced with bringing the 8th century world of the Vikings to life. Until the most recent season, most of the shooting took place in Ireland.

“We do 95% of all our shooting in Ireland. We have a new studio there. We have the advantage of amazing landscape and many different amazing landscapes around the studio.

“It’s on the edge of the sea, of course, beautiful rivers and forests and mountains and it is, actually, quite near Dublin, which was a Viking town, so that feels authentic, as well.

“What we did initially, we sent a crew out to Norway, and they did some wild shooting of snowy mountain tops, which we don’t have very much in Ireland, the fjords and waterfalls and things, and we added those to the Irish mountains and the Irish lakes.

“So, when you see Kattegat, the basic Kattegat town, onscreen, it’s supplemented by Norwegian vis-effects.

“The only time we’ve actually gone elsewhere was last season, season 3, or was it 4A, I can never remember – after 66 episodes, it’s hard for me to remember – we sent Alexander [Ludwig], Bjorn, to Canada because we needed the real snow for fighting bears.  So we did that in Canada. “

As the Viking world expands, however, more travel is in the offing.  Hirst says, “But, really, we can’t get away with that forever, and this season, we have to go to Iceland, and we have to go to the Mediterranean. We have to follow the Vikings.

“Because the landscapes and the colors and the sky – it’s completely different. I know you think that in the West of Ireland, in Cork, it’s just like Iceland, but believe me, it isn’t!”

Sometimes, Hirst’s authenticity also offers other challenges, “But what’s fantastic for me, and one of the things that keeps me excited and stimulated is that I do set production a lot of challenges. I guess I set myself challenges too.

“For example, I read that if the Vikings were blocked from going upstream at the river - they would always of course attack places from a river, from their boats - the defenders might block the river. They were quite capable of hauling their ships onto land, partially dismantling them, and carrying them over the mountains.

“And I thought, ‘God, this is cool. I wish I could show this.’ So, I wrote these crazy scenes about them hauling a boat up a cliff face and through a forest and everything.

“Then I took it to the production and I said, Look, I know we can’t do this but it would be cool if we could, and maybe we can approximate it.

“About three months later, I had the extreme pleasure of walking up into the Irish mountains and seeing before my own eyes a Viking boat being hauled up a cliff face.

“Not only that, although there was a contemporary and very large crane on top of the cliff stabilizing everything, the actual hauling was done by our guys and our extras. And the block and tackle and the pulleys and things they were using were based on authentic Viking designs.”

That authenticity is something that means a great deal to Hirst. “One of the things that makes me enormously proud is how real the show is. All our actors fight, ride, row, and they like doing it, of course, but we do as little vis-effects as we can get away with because we just love being authentic and real. I like that.”

The final challenge for Hirst, and for Vikings, is to keep going long enough to get to Hirst’s ultimate goal for the show, “I really, really want us to get to America. That is to say for the Vikings to get to America, North America.

“Actually, when I first pitched the show to History, that’s what I said, half in jest, because I knew that would take a long time and a lot of cost.

“But if we go on again with shooting season five now, if we can get to six, and I don’t see why we couldn’t, then my dream might come true.“


 
 

Browser Requirements
The TelevisionAcademy.com sites look and perform best when using a modern browser.

We suggest you use the latest version of any of these browsers:

Chrome
Firefox
Safari


Visiting the site with Internet Explorer or other browsers may not provide the best viewing experience.

Close Window