“What makes you happier? Is knowing the truth going to make you happier, or is living with a happy illusion the way to go? Which is the right choice?”

That, according to actor Jared Harris, is the question that lies at the heart of Reawakening, the Virginia Gilbert-directed film which is making its digital debut this week. The story of a husband and wife whose teenage daughter went missing a decade ago, only to have her – seemingly – reappear in their lives one day, Reawakening is part mystery, part heartbreaking what-if? tale, and part acting tour de force for Harris, who plays John, the dad of the family, Erin Doherty (Adolescence), who co-stars as the daughter Clare, and Juliet Stevenson, who plays the mother Mary.

I jumped on a Zoom call with Harris this week to talk about Reawakening, what’s going on with his sprawling Apple TV sci-fi series Foundation, his time on Mad Men, and the career-altering advice he once received from none other than Danny DeVito…

Reawakening: Is She Who She Says She Is?

The thing about the return of Clare in Reawakening is that what should be an incredibly happy occasion is nothing but. You see, Harris’ character John doesn’t believe that this 24-year-old woman is actually the same person who disappeared 10 years earlier.

“Is she who she says she is?” says Harris. “Why do the parents have such a different reaction to her? One of them immediately welcomes her, and then the other one doesn't think that it's her. The ironic thing is the one who's not convinced is the person who never stopped looking for her. You would expect that he would be the one who would go, ‘Oh, she's home!’ And then the mother would go, ‘Hang on.’ But it's the opposite way to that.”

Indeed, in the scene where John first finds that Clare, or someone claiming to be Clare, has returned home, he has a panic attack and then literally runs from the house and down the street, banging his hands against his head. It’s a fight or flight reaction.

“He'd imagined this moment and he'd thought there'd be this incredibly powerful connection that would occur between them,” says Harris of that scene. “She'd come running into his arms, and he'd say, ‘I never stopped looking for you sweetheart.’ ‘Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’ … And it doesn't happen. He looks at her and he doesn't feel that instant pulse of recognition.”

And yet somehow his wife Mary is accepting this person, this apparent stranger, into their home with open arms.

“‘Am I nuts?’” is what John is thinking according to Harris. “He's actually been gaslit, and I think that what he doesn't understand is, why don't I feel that it's her? What's wrong with me? Because my bellwether is Mary, and Mary knows that it's her, so what's wrong with me?”

As for whether or not this Clare really is the Clare who disappeared 10 years ago, well, you’ll have to watch the movie to find that out. But again, the movie is as much about that as it is what the arrival of this person at John and Mary’s doorstep means for the rest of their lives. The film is called Reawakening, after all.

“Mary says, ‘This has made me happy. Why pull it apart?’” explains Harris. “There was this terrible emptiness in our life, and then this thing has come and it’s filled in this gaping hole. Just accept it as a gift. What does it matter?’”

Foundation and Finding the Humanity in a Sci-Fi Epic

One of the aspects of Reawakening that appealed to Harris was the smaller-scale story and more intimate production as compared to the huge undertaking that is Foundation, which is based on the classic books by Isaac Asimov and in which he stars as Hari Seldon, the inventor of “psychohistory,” a sort of math that allows Hari to predict the future. The actor was in the last week of filming Season 3 of the epic series when the script for Reawakening arrived. The original lead actor had dropped out due to pandemic delays, which meant Harris only had 10 days prep time before shooting.

“[It was] a relief,” says the actor of switching gears for Reawakening. “Because the thing you are always fighting with on something that's on the scale of Foundation… the sci-fi world with these big ideas and everything, is you are arguing with the showrunners – and arguing in the most positive and collaborative sense – for the human element, because there's an obsession with plot. Because they've got so many storylines that are spinning, and they're all trying to bring them to the same crescendo at the right time at the end of the season.”

Harris also points out that not only is Foundation meant to take place over the course of a thousand years – each season has seen a time-jump so far – but there have been four versions of Hari to date, thanks to his tendency to reincarnate as a holographic version of himself: “The original version of Hari. There's the Hari that exists in the Vault. There's the Hari that was on [the ship] the Raven. And that version of Hari gets his body back.

“My way of solving those things with [the showrunners] is to make it as humanly accessible as possible. It's very difficult with a character like Hari Seldon, who isn't real. He doesn't physically exist in the same sense that we are aware of that. What you are always doing is saying, ‘Yeah, but he couldn't do that,’ or, ‘He couldn't know that. What can he know? What can't he know? What can he do? What can't he do?’”

The danger with Hari is that he can wind up being the guy who “knows everything.” But for Harris, that’s boring.

“That's just not interesting. There's nothing to add,” he says. “You end up just being superior and then proven wrong all the time. What's the point? And then also the character's somewhat redundant because once they gave [Lou Llobell’s character] Gaal a superpower, what does it matter if you've got a mathematical structure like Cambridge Analytica that can predict the events of people? This person's got a superpower. You don't need it. It's always been a struggle to try and find the relevance of the character and the humanity of the character.”

David S. Goyer (who has written for everything from the Blade trilogy to the Dark Knight films to some Call of Duty games) was the showrunner on Foundation until stepping back prior to Season 3’s production. Not surprisingly, the circumstances of his departure and to what degree he was involved in Season 3 has remained fairly opaque, and Harris says the same was true for he and his castmates. That said, Ian Goldberg and David Kob will be co-showrunners starting with Season 4, and Harris has already had a positive experience with the new team.

“David Kob, who took over the creative side of it once Goyer left, he is a wonderful person,” says the actor. “You can have really good chats with him. He'll tell you why something isn't going to work. He says, ‘No, we can't do that,’ and he'll give you an X, Y, and Z rather than... Often what happens is no one wants to say no to anybody in Hollywood. They go, ‘Oh, yeah, that's a great idea,’ and it just never happens. You know why it didn't happen. But he's a good person, and he'll tell you why. And then you go, ‘OK, well let's think of something else. Let's think of a different solution to that problem because the problem still exists. But what if we solve it this way? What if we solve it that way?’ It's a proper dialogue and a proper collaboration.”

Harris relates a specific back and forth he had with the producers regarding an idea that was floating around involving the return of the Lethe Syndrome which Hari had been revealed to be suffering from in Season 1.

“Bill Bost, who took over as the producing showrunner, he trusted David and occasionally would jump in with things,” says Harris. “I said, ‘It's an interesting idea, but if that's what we're going to play, this five-page scene that you've written for us, it's going to take 25 minutes because I've got to keep forgetting what's going on.’ Bill Bost went, ‘Yeah, you know what? Let's just leave. Let's just push that to the side.’ That was a bit of bullshit that he told Gaal just to get her to shut up and get her to agree with him in Episode 7 of Season 1. It wasn't real.”

Danny DeVito’s Career-Changing Warning

“Good luck kid, because you're going to need it.”

That’s what Danny DeVito told Harris years ago during an audition session. He was talking about Harris’ career prospects, but not in a mean way – if anything, DeVito was admiring the actor’s chameleon-like ability to disappear into a role. But it was also meant as a warning for Harris.

“I went, ‘What are you talking about? What do you mean?’” laughs Harris. “He goes, ‘You really need me to explain this to you? You're so different in everything you do.’ I say, ‘Isn't that the idea?’ He goes, ‘A successful actor is a recognizable actor. You are trying to start from scratch every single time you appear in a role. You have to hope that one day it will catch up with you.”

Harris had been working as a professional actor since the late 1980s, but he hadn’t broken through in a major way at the time of the meeting with DeVito.

“I'd done a lot of independent movies, and largely because I grew up watching the movies of the ’70s,” he recalls. “I foolishly thought that I could have a career like that without recognizing that that world had moved on.”

DeVito’s words apparently had an effect on him, however. 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which Harris had a part, proved to be an important project for the actor. Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner saw it and that led to Harris’ landing the role of Lane Pryce in Season 3 of the AMC show, which was already a huge critical hit. Lane started off as a stuffy interloper at Sterling Cooper from the other side of the pond, until he wasn’t anymore and became one of the most tragic figures in the series’ entire run.

“[it was] not seen by a lot of people, but seen by everybody in the business,” says Harris of Mad Men. “Its cultural significance can't be overstated. It changed the way men looked, the way men dressed... They actually dressed like adults for the first time, and it revived cocktail culture in the United States. The idea of glamour for men and women.”

That led to getting the role of the villainous Professor Moriarty in the Robert Downey, Jr. sequel Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, a memorable turn as King George VI in Season 1 of Netflix’s The Crown, and then 2019's Chernobyl, for which he won a British Academy Television Award in the lead role of Valery Legasov.

All of which leads to the question. Was DeVito right?

“Has it caught up with me?” laughs Harris. “Is that what you're saying? Has it caught up with me? I hope so. I hope so. I'm still childishly attached to the idea of being different in everything.”