Richard Armitage says new movie is "an unexpected Holocaust" story (2024)

Richard Armitage is a creative force across many art forms, from starring in some of the most binge-watched UK shows this year, like Red Eye and Netflix's Fool Me Once, to recently becoming a published author with his debut novel Geneva.

Now, the Leicester-born actor stars in The Boy in the Woods, which is based on the true story of Holocaust survivor Maxwell Smart. It follows an 11-year-old Jewish boy (played by newcomer Jett Klyne) who is forced to survive alone in a Polish forest after his family is sent to a concentration camp.

"The fact that he survived against all odds is the thing that makes your hair stand on end," Armitage says in an exclusive interview with Digital Spy.

The actor plays a farmer named Jasko, who offers refuge to Max until the fear of being discovered by the SS leads him to send the child to hide in the woods until the war is over. "For a year, he lived in that wood, living off berries. How can a young boy survive for an entire year in the wilderness? It blows my mind," Armitage adds.

To mark The Boy in the Woods' digital release, Digital Spy sat down with Richard Armitage to talk about his new role. He also spoke about his taste for psychological thrillers (particularly if they're written by Harlan Coben), his enthusiastic thoughts on the new Lord of the Rings movie, and his exciting plans behind the camera, including an adaptation of his debut novel Geneva.

Were you familiar with Maxwell Smart's story before joining The Boy in the Woods?

Richard Armitage: I only knew about it when the opportunity to take part in the film came along. It was like a dream for me, because you have the source material, which is Maxwell Smart's autobiography, and Rebecca [Snow] had made the most brilliant documentary called Cheating Hitler: Surviving the Holocaust, so there was so much to absorb. Not really having to go any further than that, I didn't need to look at any fictional material.

It's a well-trodden path, a Holocaust movie, but I felt this was more than that. This was a very personal account. It was great, I really immersed myself in it.

Did you get to talk to Max about your character, Jasko?

I still haven't met Max face-to-face, only over Zoom while I was on set. He is the most remarkable man, considering what he went through as a child. He's had this extraordinary life; he is 94 and still paints every day.

Max told Rebecca that they were never able to find the real-life Jasko. They found everybody else, and it's all in the documentary, they tracked everyone else down. But Jasko is the one person they never found.

Even if you didn't get to reach out to the real character, does your approach as an actor change when you take part in a movie that is based on a true story?

Definitely. It's very interesting because you try to do it for every character that you play – to be as truthful as possible. But when you're stepping into a set where you're representing people that really existed, and the person whose life you're describing is still alive, it's a different gravity that happens. You're much more responsible for not dramatising something, for not sensationalising it.

Sometimes filmmakers like to push the dramatic narrative and make it suspenseful, so they add all of this background music to heighten it. I don't think this film needed that, and Rebecca definitely didn't use music to manipulate, which I thought was great.

The story goes back to the Holocaust, almost 80 years ago, so why do you think this story might speak to today's audiences?

When I started my research and I was looking at the place where Jasko's farm was, back then it was Poland and then it has been in Ukraine. That border has shifted quite a few times over the years. At the time of filming, the war in Ukraine was kicking off, and I just thought, "Gosh, not much has really changed in terms of persecution and fighting over land". It resonated with me.

Effectively, Max was for a time a refugee in Jasko's house, but on a deeper level, he is fighting for survival, and I just think there are people out there today in this situation. It felt relevant.

How was working with Jett Klyne, who carries the weight of this movie on his little shoulders?

I love working with young actors, and I was really looking forward to meeting him. The first day I walked on set I could see that he was not couched, but prepared. So he had his lines, and he knew what he was going to say, so I saw it as my job to surprise him and make him laugh occasionally, or grab his attention when he wasn't acting.

There's a scene where we're kind of digging the garden, and I just started to throw the vegetables at him, and it kind of made him laugh. It's brilliant when you have a young actor, because their light goes on so quickly. They're very real and very immediate, and he was amazing. He's going to turn into an award-winning actor.

Working with young actors, do you feel they learn more from you or you learn more from them?

I think it's a bit of both, actually! I didn’t realise this, because he felt quite self-assured, and he had to be as the lead of this movie, but Rebecca told me he was very nervous about meeting me. And I just thought, "Well, I'm a bit nervous to meet him", because I want to get the best performance out of him. But it was really lovely. By the end of it, we really liked each other.

I'm getting the sense that it was a rather lovely filming process, despite the heavy story at hand. Even so, was there a particularly challenging scene for you?

One of the hard scenes was actually this scene where Jasko is butchering a pig. I know it was a moment that Rebecca was very nervous about, she was on the edge of cutting it from the script, and I said: "I think this is very important – there's a symbolism to this animal being gutted".

It was very graphic. You see all of the inners falling out into the basin on the floor, which I think was a bit too much. It was difficult because it was well-handled, but it was real. I'm glad she kept it in. I think it is quite impactful, and that morning was incredible, with this sort of frost and the mist lifting off the ground. It was very beautiful.

Wait, so the pig was real?

It was a real pig! But it did not go to waste. It was butchered, cleaned, kept and used for meat. But, yes, it was a real pig.

You've recently mentioned you would like to move away from acting to take on more roles behind the camera. Is that still true, and what made you decide that?

I mean, I say that, but then I miss performing when I haven't done it for a while. I'd like to do both, to be honest. I've just finished my second book, and I'm producing three or four television shows. Hopefully, one of them will move forward. I have to be in them in order to get them off the ground.

I'm just thinking long-term, when I'm in my 70s I don't know if I can still be doing this. But I love being part of the creative arts, I really do, I love being a storyteller, so I'm always hunting or inventing new stories to tell.

You mentioned you've finished your second book as an author – your first one, Geneva, was only published last October and is already being adapted to the screen. What's the status of the adaptation?

We are slowly making moves to adapt Geneva into a probably a four- or six-part television show. That's in development right now. It's not the reason I wrote it, but it does lend itself to a television experience. So, yeah, that was an unexpected new direction that I hadn't had planned.

What would be your role in this adaptation?

I would be producing. I wouldn't be directing or writing it, but I would be acting in it and guiding the narrative. At the moment, we're talking to other writers to see what their interpretation is.

Does it feel weird to be handling this material, which you wrote yourself?

It's nerve-wracking because I fluctuate between thinking it's a work of absolute genius and it's incredibly poor. I kind of move between the two, and I'm desperate for it to be interpreted by a more experienced writer and turn into something better.

Geneva is a psychological thriller, which is a genre that you've been working a lot in recently as an actor. What is it about this genre that you really enjoy and get repeatedly drawn to?

It's interesting, because it started out as a crime thriller, but my métier is more psychology. And actually, my second book is much more of a psychological thriller. I think it's because I'm always fascinated, and really early on in my career, I was really curious about characters that are in conflict.

I've played quite a lot of dark characters. I think Hannibal was one of the darkest characters I've ever played, a serial killer, but trying to find the empathy inside somebody that's so mentally disturbed – I look for that in all of the characters.

In The Boy in the Woods, the character of Jasko, he's a good man, he takes in Max, but ultimately he has to send him out into the woods because his own family's life is at risk. That dilemma is a psychological torture. I really enjoy looking for that.

Has Harlan Coben inspired you, too?

Definitely. When I was writing Geneva, I was just in the middle of shooting Stay Close, which is the second Harlan Coben that I've done. So all of the twists and the turns and the hooks that he writes at the end of chapters, and his ability to take that from book to screen and create end-of-episode hooks that compel you to watch the next one…

There's a rhythm and an energy in his writing that I try to apply to my own, and it's something I get very excited about. And I know, the proof is in the pudding in terms of the audiences. I think audiences love to be still there at 4am saying: "I can't go to bed, I just have to watch another one".

These shows, from Stay Close to Fool Me Once, have blown up and hooked audiences on Netflix. Do people recognise you for these roles rather than the iconic works you've done in the past?

Yes, and it's interesting. I can always tell when something is on TV, because you do get a little bit more of people going, "Oh! Oh!" in the supermarket. At the moment Red Eye is on ITV, and you do get a lot of people stopping for a second and saying, "I've just seen you on an airplane".

My most famous work was The Hobbit, but I was completely covered in prosthetics. It was a really useful disguise, and not a lot of people recognise me for that!

Talking about Lord of the Rings, there's a new movie in the works focused on Gollum and with Andy Serkis directing. What are your thoughts on that?

I got very excited. I love Peter Jackson's universe. Andy Serkis directed second-unit in some of The Hobbit films, and he is a brilliant director, and just the loveliest man as well. I'm really excited they're all collaborating. I'm a little bit jealous.

Would you ever go back to the franchise if you could?

I would go in a heartbeat! The fact that he's going to go over to New Zealand and work with Peter again. That is a dream. I would kill to do that for a second time.

Going back to The Boy in the Woods, how are you expecting audiences to receive the movie?

I think it's an unexpected Holocaust movie. Like I said, it's a well-trodden path, and we've got sweeping epics like The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Schindler's List and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. I think they're often framed in quite an epic way. Then you got The Zone of Interest, which Jonathan Glazer did this year, which was a sort of antithesis to that.

The Boy in the Woods takes its own lane really, it feels like a very simple art movie. It has a balance of terror and joy, and there's something magical about Max's resilience. I think audiences will sit down thinking they're going to be manipulated, but they will actually be deeply moved.

The Boy in the Woods is out now on digital platforms in the UK.