What would you do for a Klondike bar? What would you do for a “Klondike” miniseries?
Actors, directors, crew — and even the lowly paid extras — found out the hard way what was entailed in the death-defying shoot for Discovery’s first scripted miniseries. They climbed the highest Canadian mountain peaks. They rode the wildest river rapids, endured crushing winter snow, blinding rain, mud-soaked boots and freezing 30-below temperatures to work 16 hours a day for a production schedule of 55 days.
“The actors were really freezing their asses off,” says executive producer and writer Paul Scheuring (“Prison Break” and “A Man Apart”), who wrote the three-night, six-hour miniseries about the mad rush for gold in the Yukon Territory from 1896 to 1899, based on Charlotte Gray’s 2010 book, “Gold Diggers: Striking It Rich in the Klondike.”
Discovery has a lot riding on “Klondike,” hoping to draw male as well as female viewers to the channel that has already struck pay dirt with such reality series as “Bering Sea Gold” and “Jungle Gold.”
“We are waiting with bated breath. There are a lot of dramas waiting in the wings,” says Dolores Gavin, Discovery’s executive vice president of production and development, at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, Calif., host to a television critics tour.
“Klondike” stars Richard Madden (formerly Robb Stark on “Game of Thrones”) as Bill Haskell and Abbie Cornish as Belinda Mulrooney, both real-life people from the era. For the screen, they have been transformed into star-crossed lovers. Cornish says, “There is a lot about our story that is created. I didn’t find anything in the text that says they had a relationship.”
The story begins as Haskell abandons his East Coast life after college graduation to seek his fortune in the rugged Canadian territory.
Cornish plays the richest woman in the Yukon’s Dawson City. Mulrooney moved from Ireland to the United States when she was 13, went to work at 16 and landed in Dawson with only a quarter in her pocket. Soon she owned the lumber mill, restaurant, bar and hotel.
Sitting in a small cottage at the Langham, Cornish, who is Australian, and Madden, who is Scottish, are at the end of a long day of interviews, so their brogues and accents are more pronounced. Unlike the dark-haired Mulrooney, Cornish’s hair is platinum blond, but the personal similarities between actor and character are striking. Madden, too, looks completely different from Haskell — gone are the beard and thick, wavy hair. And his style is much more light-hearted and self-mocking.
Why does he think that he, out of the dozens of actors who auditioned to play Haskell, got the role?
“I was the cheapest,” he says, with a laugh.
Actually, the casting process was more complicated. “I did all the auditions from the sitting room in my apartment in London. I set up a camcorder and did my auditions and e-mailed them. I got feedback notes and had to tape it again, but I disagreed with the notes and had to call a director [Simon Cellan Jones] I had never met and say, ‘This is rubbish.’ All he said was, ‘The people at the network need to see if you can do a good crying scene.’ It is the first job I’ve gotten without actually meeting a director or producer in the flesh.”
Madden has the most physicalchallenging role on “Klondike.”
In one scene, he had to lie on ice for hours, causing frostbite on his face and a serious bloody nose. In another, Haskell tries to rescue a friend who has fallen through a crack in the ice.
“I had nightmares for weeks about falling through a lake and freezing to death,” Madden says.
His most daring scene took him into the raging waters of the Alberta River.
“I had to fall out of a boat into freezing water,” he says. “The rapids take you down so quickly, you feel like you are in a washing machine getting pulled under. And it’s not like you can stop it. I would go up and down, up and down, and finally I came up for air. Then I had to do it all over again. I had to swim the rapids and then swim back again. Have you ever tried to swim backwards in rapids?”
To protect his life, a speedboat equipped with a long stick that Madden could grab onto if he felt he were drowning was at his side. After the fifth or six take, the scene had to be shut down.
“I was so cold, my mouth didn’t work,” he says. “I was saying something, but no one could make out the words. And I could not stop shaking.”
How did the rigors compare to shooting “Game of Thrones”?
“This was 10 times harder,” he says. “It was the hardest thing, physically and mentally, I have ever done in my life.”
All the actors, including Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard, were driven to the mini-series for reasons as different as the prospectors were drawn to the Yukon gold. “I was out of work . . . the landlord was going to kick me out,” Shepard says. What fascinated him about men risking their lives for instant wealth 100 years ago is what still fascinates him about the culture of greed today. “I see it as just another chunk of American insanity we carry around with us regardless if we’re involved in technology or trapping beaver.”
The project, and the hardships of making it, definitely had an impact on the lives of Madden and Cornish. As she sits back in a chair and puts her hand up to her mouth, displaying the latest in press-on fingernails, she admits she had to push herself hard to be smart, wise, ambitious, and yet nurturing to play Mulrooney. And that proved advantageous.
For Madden, the impact of his character may indeed be more long-lasting. “Bill had an amazing spirit and I took that away with me,” he says. “When everything is against you, when people do you wrong, to in turn be good, to not do bad back, that is inspiring. I’m not religious in any way, but if I’ve got even 10 percent of Bill Haskell in me, then I am very pleased with that.”
It’s time for Cornish and Madden to head to familiar territory — the Dawson City bar, which workers have reconstructed on the hotel’s back lawn. Every single thing that was on the set of “Klondike” — including the moose heads and the prostitutes — has been brought to Pasadena for a TV critics party. The main difference is that the cast, director and crew are now in Southern California, where the weather is 79 degrees and sunny.