David Tennant on The Hack: “A Story That Needs Telling”

When David Tennant signed on to play investigative journalist Nick Davies in ITV’s new drama The Hack, it was more than just another role. For him, the story of the phone hacking scandal is one that still resonates deeply today.

“Lewis Arnold got in touch. That’s always a good starting point. I’d never worked with the writer Jack Thorne before but was a huge admirer of everything he has done. I knew he always chose the right things to write about. And then wrote about them brilliantly. Then I read the script and thought, ‘This is a story I lived through, I remember it happening, I had a glancing personal experience with it myself.’ It felt like one of the stories of our age.”

Tennant sees The Hack as not only revisiting a shocking chapter of recent history but also holding up a mirror to the present.

“It’s about a fascinating set of circumstances in themselves. But it’s also about where we are at as a society. It uncovers a very particular story that was unique, extraordinary, appalling and revealing. Also at this moment in time our world is all about information and who has it. Truth and power. It’s all of those things. And my part of the story is about an extraordinary individual. Nick Davies is a fascinating, brilliant, unusual man.”

Although he had his own brush with phone hacking, Tennant says his interest in the story went deeper than personal experience.

“I think I would have taken it anyway. My experience was not one of the inciting incidents for our story. I have an understanding of it. But really more objectively my experience was of someone who was watching it all unpick and unfold before I had any personal involvement. It was already out there and something I was fascinated, appalled, shocked, intrigued by long before I realised I was actually involved.”

To bring authenticity to his performance, Tennant spent time with Davies in person.

“Before filming began I went down to his place in Sussex and we hung out. Nick was exactly as I imagined he was going to be. He was open and articulate. An exciting person to meet. It was great to get to visit him in his den, as it were, and get a sense of what motivates him, who he is and the kind of person he is.”

That meeting confirmed Tennant’s sense of Davies as both complex and courageous.

“The story we tell is that he is not an uncomplicated individual. But he’s someone who did something very heroic. I think he is the hero of this tale.”

“That’s certainly the line that Jack Thorne is drawing. And I think it’s very persuasive. Nick has been very open about his difficult childhood and complicated relationship with his mother. Indeed he was free in talking about that when I met him. So, yes. A man who has tasted injustice at a young age being motivated to chase it down throughout his life seems very plausible. It certainly seems to make sense as I understand who Nick Davies is and why he does what he does.”

Davies’s relentless pursuit of the truth left a strong impression on Tennant.

“The tenacity that Nick showed over so many years. We talk to this in the drama. Then having written the pieces he had done, he tried to leave it be. But the very story itself and, indeed, the very perpetrators of the story kept drawing him back in. He couldn’t leave it alone. He wasn’t allowed to leave it alone because circumstances wouldn’t let him.”

“There’s something rather Greek about that. That Nick was forced to keep fighting and that Goliath never really imagined that David would load his slingshot quite as successfully as he did.”

One turning point in the scandal stands out above all others.

“That moment when there was an understanding that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked is really what changed everything. Without that, it would have been a more attritional fight. That was the thing that changed the course of public opinion significantly. Because it really brought home the abuse of power. It suddenly felt personal. Readers of the newspapers and the public could understand that. In a way that, yes, we can feel sympathy for a movie star who has been a victim of phone hacking. But it doesn’t quite hit home in the way that people understood the gross invasion at that point.”

The series also explores Davies’s professional relationships, particularly with then-editor Alan Rusbridger.

“Jack created that relationship in the way he wrote the two characters. But it’s absolutely based on the reality of the relationship between Nick Davies and Alan Rusbridger. Seeing them together, they have a shorthand, a familiarity with each other. And they have a deference to each other which is quite moving, actually. They can see how they bring the best out in each other. That was something that was captured in the scripts.”

“Having Toby Jones to play opposite made that very easy. Because Toby has got such humanity. And at the same time is someone that I look up to professionally. So to get to know Toby and to find him such a delightful human being and to be able to reflect that within the relationship in the drama, that certainly could have been a lot more difficult than it ended up being. Toby is a wonderful, twinkly, warm presence. And he is very good at what he does. It’s a real pleasure to have that to bounce off.”

For Tennant, The Hack ultimately raises questions about truth, power, and how information shapes society.

“It is a story with wider implications. Because it is about power. It’s about who holds the power and how you can abuse that power. The power of communication and information. When we are told one thing when actually the opposite might be true. There’s so much in there. In a world that is increasingly run by information. Where facts are upstaged by someone’s version of the sub-truth. And where that has more power, potentially.”

“Our view of people or, indeed, groups of people are perniciously influenced by the way ‘facts’ are transmitted to us and it is cheapening society. Even the most learned media observer is probably being hoodwinked by some of this. We’re all being told things that may not quite be true on a daily basis and our opinions are being formed. It means that people can be ‘othered’. People can be diminished. That prejudices can be enforced in ways that we don’t even understand are happening to us. And I’m afraid to say I think certain newspapers have been desperately guilty of that. Sometimes for commercial reasons. Sometimes for reasons of their own survival. But that’s not an excuse. You can’t put yourself forward as a teller of truths unless you are willing to die by that. The internet makes that more difficult because it’s unpoliced. How do we know what a fact is anymore? Especially if the gold standard of truth telling has been eroded to the point where it means nothing anymore. The idea that if a lie is repeated enough it becomes a fact. That’s terrifying. That’s the end of society as we understand it.”

The drama uses direct-to-camera moments to guide viewers through its dense material.

“We did it pretty much as Jack wrote it. But we had license within that. To play with when a look down the lens of the camera was helpful and when it might be breaking a moment. It’s a wonderful device. A fantastic way of letting the audience in to what are, at times, quite dense arguments. Quite complicated bits of storytelling. And Nick just allows you in by turning to the camera and explaining things. By holding the audience’s hand where necessary. Being careful not to overuse that because there’s a danger it can puncture the reality of the moment and reduce the stakes.”

He was equally thrilled to share the screen with Robert Carlyle.

“We’d never met before this which is weird as we are both from the homeland. But I’d always, of course, admired him and was hugely excited when he signed up because it just brought that character immediately to life.”

“Robert is such a great bit of casting for Dave Cook. You follow every moment of Dave Cook’s emotional journey. Robert is very good at doing a great deal with very little. He’s got a wonderful intensity to him. As the series goes on we do have a fair few scenes together. But I wish we’d had more to do. He was such a great actor to work with. There was so much going on behind his eyes. It was a real treat.”

That sense of quality extended across the cast.

“When you sign up for a job and realise some extraordinary actors are coming in to do sometimes a day, sometimes two days, sometimes a scene or a couple of scenes, you realise you’re in something that is a bit of quality. That those scripts are connecting with everyone whose in-box they ping into. And while I never really doubted that, you appreciate that it is getting the seal of approval from other very august members of your profession.”

“It felt like Jack’s work was being recognised by everyone who read the script. People who should be leading a series on their own would come in and play roles with relatively little screen time. It so matters that it was played by someone like them. They make so many moments sing. We had a Rolls Royce of a cast. It was a pleasure to be a part of that.”

Looking at the bigger picture, Tennant believes the scandal was initially ignored because it was simply inconvenient.

“I suppose the obvious answer is, it was inconvenient. And while they were gambling on the idea that the public wouldn’t really care if Hugh Grant and Sienna Miller were feeling hard done by, once it became Milly Dowler they realised the game was up and they had to start reporting the story. I suppose they were just hoping it would go away. I don’t know. When you see it in the drama it does look like there was an industry closing their eyes and turning away. That may have been accidental. Who knows?”

But for him, the heart of the story is the people whose lives were devastated.

“The Sienna Miller scene is very telling. Because it shows the human cost. Just because you’re a movie star it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be allowed some sort of decent expectation of privacy.”

“And because people didn’t understand back then that it was possible that somebody could be listening in on your private messages…why should we think that might have been happening? It’s terrible. The paranoia that fuelled and the desperation to find out who was leaking information to the press…the personal relationships that were destroyed by that. It’s that sort of heartlessness and callousness.”

“I think until it happens to you it’s hard to appreciate how devastating that can be. How appalling at the lack of your own agency within the privacy of your own thoughts. It almost feels like some sort of surreal theft of your internal self. It took a while for people to really understand the devastation of that.”

And he insists the questions raised remain urgent.

“Of course there is. There is an assumption in certain circles that all of the costs of this have just been flushed away. That none of it really matters.”

As for what he hopes The Hack will achieve?

“I hope we made something that will tell the story that needs telling.”