The Big Picture

Jared Harris drew inspiration from Greek myths and classical Greek civilization as a foundation for storytelling, shaping his approach to the character in Foundation. The damaged psyche of Hari Seldon, trapped in limbo for 130 years, informs his actions throughout the season and his psyche never fully recovers. While Hari becomes a figure worshipped by others, he understands the dangers of being worshiped and aims to guide the development of religion in order to shape the society he needs to face future challenges.

This interview was conducted before the ongoing SAG-AFTRA & WGA strikes. Apple TV+’s Foundation, the streamer’s science fiction gem of a show, just wrapped up its second season in explosive fashion that may just been predicted by the enigmatic Hari Seldon. Played by the singular Jared Harris, he has been through quite a lot having gone from being seemingly very dead to a driving force of this season. To dive into all this, we spoke with Harris about science fiction, false prophets, and the corruptive nature of power.

COLLIDER: So much of this story is about establishing the Foundation as a repository of knowledge and the power that that holds. In that line of thinking, is there a science fiction story, a series, a film, a novel that has been foundational to you personally?

JARED HARRIS: The things that resonated with me when I was younger were the Greek myths. I read all of them. I read Homer’s The Odyssey. I’m fascinated by that. I studied classical Greek civilization, and so I was fascinated by that and fascinated by all those wonderful stories, so I would say that would be my foundation for storytelling.

When we first meet your character in the season, it almost feels like you’re trapped in some sort of Sisyphean crisis. What was your first entry point to this story? David [S. Goyer] told me that in the first season, he told you that your second season would have a lot more of this character. What was the approach that you took, especially to capturing real madness in Hari’s eyes when we first meet him again?

HARRIS: No, that wasn’t in any of our conversations, that particular aspect of the journey. Although I think in the original script, there was the idea that you discovered him in that world for, like, one page or something. But that experience of being trapped in that limbo, if you like, for 130 years would have had such a damaging effect on his psyche that I wanted to explore it, and Alex [Graves] wanted to explore it. So David very kindly let us improvise for an entire day in a black box, and we sort of explored the different states that he might be in. What happened to him carries through the entire season, and to some extent, his psyche never fully recovers from what happened.

It informs everything he does after that. I talked with David, also, about the question of false prophets and Hari being this kind of deity of a figure in this story that all of the other characters are kind of in his orbit and trusted him as being potentially their salvation. When it comes to that question, what were the conversations that you were having with David about having this character still be someone you want to follow but also beginning to see the cracks forming here and there?

HARRIS: That’s the idea that it’s a dangerous thing to be worshiped, and that version of the character probably starts to enjoy it, which is not a good thing, but he understood that it was a necessary phase. It was going to inevitably happen that the society that’s on Terminus is going to create some sort of a religion. It’s inevitable that that will happen and that he wanted to be able to guide the course of that religion, if you like, because he needs them to make an exit point from that religion so that they can evolve into the society he needs them to be in so that they can face the challenges that are coming their way.

Image via Apple TV+

Yeah, absolutely. There’s also this question, and [Isaac] Asimov thought about it as well, of science versus faith and maybe them not being so different, that there are commonalities in terms of you having to trust in someone’s predictions, in psychohistory and the mathematical predictions. Were there any figures that you were drawing from for Hari, or did you go back to Asimov’s original text?

HARRIS: I’ve read all of his books, and then I went and studied the obviously great scientific minds. I mean, a genius mind of any kind is worth exploring when you’re dealing with something like this because their level of understanding, how they view the world, how they process information is on a completely different level to the way somebody like myself would. So, you need to understand what that is. There’s an awareness that they do have a superior intellect, and I think that, again, inevitably, that leads to an arrogance in the character. If you go and you read about [J. Robert] Oppenheimer, that movie is about to come out, people would describe him as being, obviously, incredibly intelligent and very charming, but also incredibly condescending if he encountered people who weren’t at the level that he was at, in terms of his intellectual ability.

I think you have the line where “all power corrupts,” and that seems to be something that has happened here as well.

HARRIS: Well, yeah, and that’s inevitable, and maybe something that he didn’t anticipate.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. Great questions.

All episodes of Foundation are now streaming on Apple TV+.