Entertainment

Prison break

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For the role of Daniel Holden, a man released from solitary confinement after 19 years for a crime he may or may not have committed, in “Rectify,” the new Sundance Channel drama premiering tomorrow night at 10, Canadian/Australian actor Aden Young faced the ultimate challenge: portraying a man returning to what seems like an alien world, and as such, remaining compelling while playing an often passive character.

For Young, the first key was accuracy, and he fell back on one particular memory to help create Daniel’s demeanor.

“Once, I met a guy in Australia who had come straight from prison and was sitting in a pub, and I felt like an ant running around him,” says Young. “The speed I was living in was so alien to him. He had all the time in the world, whereas I had things to do, rushing around. It always struck me that if I ever play a prisoner, I must remember this clue: that time is very different. They bring out of that place a very different approach to communication.”

The six-episode “Rectify” shows Daniel interacting with the world around him and vice versa. Its point of view shifts from the protagonist and his family to the people who put him away as well as former acquaintances who also may have been involved in the murder.

The show evolved from the fascination of creator Ray McKinnon, an actor who has played both Reverend Smith on “Deadwood,” and Lincoln Potter on “Sons of Anarchy,” with how the use of DNA evidence has uncovered so many wrongful prosecutions.

“He saw interviews with guys who got let off after being on death row for years,” says executive producer Mark Johnson. “Where the interviewer asked, ‘What are you gonna do now?’ And the guys said, ‘I’m gonna have a steak and a beer, and kiss my mother.’ And Ray said, ‘What happens the next day?’ He just spun it from there.”

Johnson calls Daniel “a cross between Chauncey Gardiner [from the film ‘Being There’] and Forrest Gump.”

“I keep calling Daniel a man-child,” says Johnson. “It would be easy to see him as simple, but he’s not simple at all. He’s just been denied so much information over the past 19 years that he asks the questions of a child.”

To the producers’ surprise, an extensive nationwide search failed to uncover the right actor for the part. The situation grew so desperate that McKinnon was concerned that the show might not go into production.

Then Young was working in Thailand at the time, but managed tsent in a video.

Young, who co-starred as Ejlert Lovborg with Cate Blanchett in BAM’s 2006 production of “Hedda Gabler,” flew to New York from Thailand after work on a Friday to meet the producers for two hours, then was back in Thailand for work by Monday morning. But even with the actor in a jet-lagged, sleep-deprived state, the creators knew they had their star.

“With Chauncey Gardiner, Peter Sellers was fantastic at playing a boring character who is absolutely compelling,” says Johnson. “That’s what we found in Aden. He’s absolutely captivating.”

Once cast, Young pored over literature about people who’d been released from prison, learning all he could about how two decades of confinement would affect someone.

“Life is lived in this 8-by-6 box for 20 years, 23 hours a day, and the one hour you get out, you’re shackled. You can probably only reach 8 to 10 inches at most,” says Young. “Suddenly, when all that is taken away and the whole world opens up to you, I think it becomes almost a paralyzing event. So I looked at that as a clue to how to physicalize Daniel.”

Young’s development of Daniel continued to where he made a major character decision just minutes before shooting began. Initially decked out in long hair and a beard, Young remembered that some prisons don’t allow hair longer than 3 inches. So with 10 minutes until the filming of the show’s very first scene, where Daniel emerges from prison, he told the producers that he needed the hairstylist to give him a prison cut — a three-minute haircut.

The producers relented, and Young appeared in the shot with short hair as the actors playing his family, there to react to his release, registered their shock at his new look in character and on-screen.

Young and the show’s creators hope that in telling this modern tale of justice, reinvention, an ever-changing world and a family trying to regroup, they have created a show that will be fascinating in both the perspectives it shares, and the drama that gets us there.

“It’s a story about a man who returns to a town where half the population [hates] him and the other half believes he’s innocent, and the family that has given him up for dead in many respects,” says Young. “In all that, there’s terrific television.”

Rectify

Monday, 10 p.m., Sundance