Of Wolves and Men

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This role has been a challenge as you’re normally given a character and you explore who they are and how the story changes them. With this one, they go into such an extreme situation right at the beginning that they’re always in a nightmarish and extremist situation. So you don’t get to know Matilda as she might be on a day-to-day or casual basis. Barstensvol met buitengewone, vermakelijke en baanbrekende verhalen en personages: geïnspireerd door gisteren, vandaag geleefd, zet de toon voor morgen. HISTORY leeft!

One of the things I really love about this project is that on paper it might sound like just another crime thriller, but what Megan has done so brilliantly is introduce an interesting genre where she combines crime, thriller, horror and even comedy. When I say comedy, it's not like you've got these characters trying to be funny. Rather, she puts characters in situations you wouldn’t expect to find them and that’s where the humour lies. You’re laughing at the absurd circumstances the characters find themselves in and that’s unique. The team behind the show are also what make it unique, not just Hartswood Films and APC Studios but also our brilliant directors, the way it will be edited and the look of the show. Another draw to this project would be filming in Wales, it’s been a joy and I really adore the crews. They have been so supportive and allow me to do my best work especially when I’m doing some crazy scenes.We are dealing with a different kind of death from the one men know. When the wolf "asks" for the life of another animal he is responding to something in that animal that says, "My life is strong. It is worth asking for." A moose may be biologically constrained to die because he is old or injured, but the choice is there. The death is not tragic. It has dignity." The thing I found most interesting about this, for better or worse, was its relevance to modern genre fic tropes. I saw in werewolf stories the missing piece that explained what the Sith are in Star Wars, and by extension, what villains and mooks in comic books and fantasy are in general. They are the legacy of the embattled Christian worldview. Christians in 1100s Europe didn't, couldn't, see wolves as just animals going about their lives as God made them, and much less could they see the poor and afflicted as people. The Sith, villains in general, are incarnations of evil, servants of the Devil, because they are stories about good conquering evil: reenacting the central drama of our culture is their ultimate raison d'etre.

Although one wonders if the Navajo or Hopi were farming at the same time did they viewed the plants as holy.The section on the Middle Ages was a little disappointing, in that Lopez (not a medievalist) seems to buy into popular ideas that they were a uniquely depressing, oppressive, and ignorant time, caught between the lights of Rome and the modern era. He may be right about how medieval culture in general viewed the wolf, but I am less confident that he really understands the context of the time. Still, he wrote this in 1978, when his view was more standard, I believe, and frankly medievalists are still fighting against that perception. The section of the book certainly isn’t bad: there’s a lot of good research into medieval bestiaries and other texts, and overall Lopez’s conclusions about the medieval view of wolves do help me understand the attitudes of later eras, since they are so closely linked. We are ethnocentric, which is to say we view other ethnicities in the world in limiting ways, chiefly in terms of how we see things, and we are of course also human-centric: I can see how some people here see more immediately obvious meaning to this song, as you can with most songs, such as drugs, alcohol etc etc yada yada

I think audiences will be hooked on WOLF because you just can't see where it's coming from or where it's going. That is, for me, the definition of a great thriller. With some, you can quite often see perhaps who's being set up, who will turn out to be the killer or the wrongdoer. But here, you really can't tell. It is extremely thrilling. We have never worked together before but we just hit it off and it's been great considering when you see them on screen they don't really like each other. Well, Honey doesn’t really like Molina at all. It’s been a real joy to play around and just explore these scenes. We had a bit of freedom to switch things up a little bit so there's been times when it's been unpredictable and instinctive and we both kind of just go along with it.

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Molina is a bit of a hapless criminal - he’s not the brightest, but he has some great ideas. He’s part of a double act with Honey, played by the brilliant Sacha Dhawan, who take the Anchor-Ferrers family hostage, although he’s probably not the ideal person for this job. in the wolf we have not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined.” It is a violent expression of a terrible assumption: that men have the right to kill other creatures not for what they do but for what we fear they may do…Killing wolves has to do with fear based on superstitions. It has to do with “duty”. It has to do with proving manhood. PG 140

Ultimately I think this book is a plea to humanity to accept that wolves (and other critters I assume), that while they could be a personal threat do have a place in the world, and if we make room for them our existence is immeasurably improved. But he is honest enough to note just saying wolves have a place doesn’t explain it all, HOWEVER if we accept we don’t know everything and accept mystery as well as wolves we will again be immeasurably improved.Today, the killing continues. Problem humans are using dynamite to blow up predator dens, and shooting them from planes and helicopters. They stake out dogs in heat, and then beat to death the wolves that mount them. Why? Why? Why? The broad stories he uses are Native American and more recent Eskimo view of wolves, Western folklore’s influence on our modern approach to wolves and some actual scientific information about wolves.