Clips
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Rufus Sewell: playing Aurelio Zen
“There’s nothing really like Zen. In fact, the closest thing to it hasn’t been made for a very, very long time. There’s a kind of bounce to it that reminds me of stuff from the sixties.”
BBC Drama Faces: Rufus Sewell
“The stories are fantastic because they’re based on really great novels by Michael Dibdin.”
“The relief reading the books is that there’s a lot of humour and personally I’m trying to bring as much of that out as possible, for my own entertainment and hopefully for the entertainment of anyone watching!”
“When I left drama school, my fear was that I’d get pigeon holed into comic acting and I did so much to counter it that I got stuck in the opposite. For me, if I were to be at home in any kind of style it is more comedy than anything else. I thought this is an opportunity to do something that is real and believable but comic, but not comic in such a way that you step out of the reality and humanity of it. I just think Zen has a comic outlook, he has a mind that works that way and also it’s just so much fun.”
"He's plenty dishonest when he wants to be. He's sneaky, he can be underhand, he can pull strings, he can break rules but not in some cool way. He's just a bloke trying to get by. Beyond that, the great thing about Zen is that he just wants to get through the day and I like the possibility that the real motivation in a scene is that you want to get the crime solved because you're really thirsty." -
Caterina Murino: playing Tania Moretti
“I have to say that I was, and I am, a huge fan of Rufus Sewell and from the first time I met him, he was so nice, so humble and I felt there was some chemistry between him and me. I felt immediately why Tania has a relationship with him. It was so nice to feel it for the first time at the casting.”
Caterina Murino - Internet Movie Database
“The relationship between Rufus and I on set was always about teasing each other. It was like little kids at school - sometimes the director would have to say ‘stop, both of you! One in the corner and one in the other corner.’ There’s a lot of humour between us. We were always teasing each other and I think that was the best way to build up the relationship, especially with the relationship on screen.” -
Beautifully shot in Italy
"It's a perfect mixture of all the things that I would love to see in the cinema – corruption, love, elegance and humour. Everything mixed in perfect doses." Caterina Murino
Zen: locations, cast and crew - Internet Movie Database -
Executive producer Andy Harries on the long journey to adapt the novels for the screen:
"I do think that Michael Dibdin would have been very pleased with the choice of Rufus Sewell as the detective."
Read Andy's post at the BBC TV blog
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