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| Juliet
Aubrey talks about her role in major new ITV scifi series
Primeval.
JULIET PLAYS HELEN CUTTER
“She swapped her marriage for a Permian package tour”
BAFTA award winning Juliet Aubrey is talking about her latest on screen incarnation as the mysterious Helen Cutter, whose disappearance has remained unexplained for eight years. However as her husband, Professor Nick Cutter becomes embroiled in a series of creature sightings in the Forest of Dean (the location where Helen was last seen) it becomes increasingly clear that the events are more than a series of random coincidences and are indelibly connected. And what’s more, Helen may not be quite as lost as her husband believed her to be:
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“Helen Cutter may have been lost to Nick, but she certainly knew exactly where she was going. She just didn’t want to share that knowledge with her husband. At least at the time of her disappearance she didn’t. She swapped her marriage for a Permian package tour”
It would take a certain kind of person to give up all the safety and security of their lives in order to step into the past and straight into the path of certain danger. How would Aubrey describe Helen, who does just that?
“Helen is a very clinical sort of a person and, as such forms no lasting emotional attachments to anyone. Even Nick. She’s ruthless in her quest for more knowledge and will stop at nothing to acquire it. If learning the truth about evolution means leaving behind her old life and her husband, then so be it.”
She goes on:
“Helen is very fit and strong and fast. She’s had to live on her instincts in pretty much every era that you could imagine, prehistoric onwards. Because she’s had to live on her own instincts she’s a real survivor. She’s naturally developed heightened senses of hearing, vision, touch, smell and because she’s lived such an extreme existence for so long she has become totally detached from anything she knew before.
Helen has no time for the modern world as she feels that she’s moved beyond that. In her view, humans have had all their instincts dulled by urban living and have become a bit numb. She believes that we aren’t the end of the evolutionary tree but simply another branch of it, and that, like the dinosaurs, human kind will be replaced one day. Because of this, she doesn’t feel that they are worth saving. She’s pretty harsh.”
Given that Helen has left her husband to grieve for her, it’s obvious that she is ruthlessly self serving with little disregard for others. So if she finds the present so distasteful, what are the motives behind her reappearance after eight years?
“She’s a cold hearted bitch and no mistake, but her actions are very ambiguous and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Helen is an enigma and her real purpose within the story is meant to be a secret so I can’t say too much. As a viewer you’re certainly not meant to like her, but you’re also not meant to know which side she’s really on.”
Helen really is the mystery of Primeval, and Juliet is more than happy to maintain the secrecy surrounding her character. Even when she is pressed for just a little more information, Aubrey remains good naturedly tight lipped, steadfastly refusing to give too much away, saying only:
“One thing’s for sure, she enjoys messing things up a bit and just nips back every now and again just because she can. However she sees her husband hanging out with people who she believes are not really of the same calibre as him and really doesn’t like it. She’s not interested in living in the present, but there is a reason why she comes back, and maybe Nick’s that reason. Maybe he isn’t. As we move through the story it becomes clear what that reason is, but it’s not until the very last moment and I’m certainly not going to say!”
As it’s clear the actress isn’t giving much else away in terms of her character’s storyline, the conversation moves on to the nature of the programme itself and the type of roles she has traditionally played up until now:
“It’s a completely different kind of show. I’ve never done this type of television before where you can’t swear and aren’t allowed to take your clothes off! It’s great to play someone who isn’t tortured and hard-edged like the sort of stuff I usually do. It’s very liberating to play someone who is very action based and wild and feral. It’s lovely to play something that you don’t end up taking home with you. I’d take the dinosaurs home with me – to give to my babies, they love dinosaurs.”
As Aubrey mentions herself, Helen Cutter is an extremely physical role as she spends much of her time running from the path of a rampaging Gorgonopsid. So did she have to do much training to get in shape?
“Yes I did. I’m pretty active anyway and do quite a lot of yoga, but I really upped that for the show so I could get myself really strong. I wanted people to really believe that she was fit enough and fast enough to survive. Helen is a great runner, she’s really fast, and lets face it, she’d have to be! I did a lot of work on tone-building to ensure that I looked in good enough shape to be able to handle myself in a fight, and that I would have the pace to out run a dinosaur! It was great to have the excuse to get up in the morning and do that, and keep really fit and go running.”
Given that Juliet spent most of her time racing around the Primeval set at high speed the potential for injury was high as the actress soon found out:
“It was always good that there was always someone there to catch me on set, because you are running so very fast – and there’s no way of stopping! But there was one time I didn’t stop and ended up rupturing a tendon in my knee. I ripped the whole middle of it running away from a dinosaur and jumping into a commercial waste bin in the middle of the night. Now there’s a sentence you don’t hear very often…I joke, but it was bloody painful.
My knee swelled up to about three times the size and I couldn’t really walk. But I did loads of physio. I never really believed in physiotherapy before, but I can tell you, I do now!”
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