Alfie Allen has the goodgrace to roar with laughter when I put it to him, as matily as possible, that he has an old face. I’m fingers crossed he hasn’t got actor’s vanity at 36.
‘Keith, mate, you’re not the first person to tell me that. I’ll take it.’ Allen’s old face is certainly put to perfect use as Jock Lewes, one third of the unholy trinity at the centre of SAS Rogue Heroes, the rumbustious account of the birth of the Special Air Service during World War II that burst on to our screens on Sunday.
Allen stars alongside Connor Swindells and Jack O’Connell and his intense Jock is wired like a human hand grenade, calling to mind classic war movie characters embodied by the likes of Alec Guinness and John Mills.
‘I was watching Tobruk for this [a 1967 film about British special forces] and had those kinds of characters in mind. But my first thought was to give Jock an Australian accent, because he’d adventured all over the place but that’s where he spent most time. He’d been in Germany in the lead up to Kristallnacht too.
‘But in the end we went with an English accent – we just didn’t want to lean into the stiff-upper-lip stereotype too much. It was about making Jock as real as possible.’
Reality is a bit of a curveball when it comes to SAS Rogue Heroes, created by Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight, based on Ben Macintyre’s book of the same name. The rocking soundtrack, AC/DC mixed with The Clash, is a bridge between past and present, while the cheeky title sequence nods to the notion that the moments that seem most unbelievable are ‘mostly true’.
But the tale’s roots, a trio of military mavericks banding together in the north African desert, are not in dispute.
Allen had a blast making it, sandstorms and scary creatures in the night notwithstanding. There’s an action sequence when the camera catches Allen’s eyes lighting up like a kid on firework night. ‘It was definitely fun, getting to be part of stuff blowing up and all the training.
‘But what I really got out of it was the chance to connect with a real character – Jock was the real disciplinarian of the group but what you see, when he’s writing his love letters, is his inner character coming through.’
What wasn’t quite so much fun was the heat, which touched 53C during filming, and some certain set visitors in Morocco. ‘We got our share of creatures out in the desert,’ Allen says. ‘There was one night when there was a snake in the toilet that had to be dealt with pretty sharpish. And the sand! The sand got everywhere!’’
You’d have thought spending eight seasons as Theon Greyjoy on Game Of Thrones would have toughened him up but Allen says prep for the fighting in SAS Rogue Heroes took him to the next level.
‘I’d done a bit of fighting stuff before but this was something else,’ he says. ‘I was trained by a guy called Julian Spencer and he’d put me in these really tough situations against the biggest guy in the group and just scream, “go harder!”’
There’s a refreshing lack of moral ambiguity about SAS Rogue Heroes, a thrill ride where the division between good and bad is clearly delineated. Bubbling under the action sequences is a sense of nostalgia for a Britain united by a single cause. ‘There’s a sense that people want that,’ says Allen. ‘There’s also a yearning for an ending to so much PC-ness on our telly.’
And what did the modern SAS guys, on hand with the training, make of it all? ‘They were delighted and they were the main people that I wanted to please.’
SAS Rogue Heroes continues BBC1 on Sunday at 9pm. Box set on BBC iPlayer.
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