‘Chernobyl’ Creator Craig Mazin and Star Jared Harris Explain The Secrets Behind Their “Horror Story”

The most horrifying show on television doesn’t have to do with dragons or Munchausen by proxy; it has to do with one of the most shocking disasters in modern history. HBO’s Chernobyl is a grim, unflinching look at the nuclear power disaster that threatened to destroy all of Soviet Ukraine and the world in the late ’80s. Decider had the chance to speak to this devastating miniseries’ creator Craig Mazin, and its star Jared Harris about what went into finding the humanity underneath a painful story of government oversight and corruption.

“Chernobyl was many things. It was a horror story and it was a political thriller and it was a love story,” Mazin said about how he started to write this miniseries. “I never really thought of them as genres. The truth is I just wanted to tell the truth about what happened. And the truth about what happened was it operated on levels. There was the truth in the Kremlin and there was the truth in the hospital room between a husband and wife and there’s the truth inside of a reactor that’s falling apart.”

Most of the miniseries follows the men and women who risked exposure and their own lives to control the disaster, and save as many injured and dying people as possible. Though many of these people were originally told that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was a tar fire on a roof, throughout the first night it became clear to them exactly what was happening. “These people behaved in ways that are just mind-boggling to me and they did it to save their brothers and sisters,” Mazin said. “I think we owe it to them to know the pain that they went through for us. It’s a terrible thing and we never wanted to cross the line into exploitation.”

To that point, Mazin was committed to showing the full horrors of this disaster. Yet even when showing the most injured victims, it was important that the series never glorified its gore. Likewise, though all parts of the miniseries are based on real life accounts, Mazin was careful about what testimonies he chose to fictionalize.

“If we had the choice between different accounts — and god knows there were many — and one account was more dramatic than the other, we went for the less dramatic and exciting one,” Mazin explained.

The showrunner was also consciously transparent about which elements of the disaster were changed to fit the HBO miniseries. For example, in the series Jared Harris plays Valery Legasov, the Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. Legasov was one of the few government officers who insisted the Ukrainian people shouldn’t be lied to about the severity of this disaster. Because of his proximity to the nuclear site, Legasov knew he only had a few more years to live. As his final act of rebellion, he recorded everything he knew the Ukrainian government was hiding before ending his own life.

“I don’t think it undermines our show to say ‘By the way, in the very opening scene with Valery Legasov [preparing to end his life], he’s alone in his apartment. Well, the real Valery Legasov had a wife and children. We chose not to portray them,'” Mazin said. “It shows people that the changes we made weren’t to sensationalize or advance drama, heighten anything.”

To that end each episode of the five-episode miniseries has an accompanying podcast explaining which parts of the series were true and which parts were changed for narrative effect. “I wanted to be accountable to people. I think it’s very important in a show about truth that we don’t fall into the same [narrative] trap,” Mazin said.

This is also the first project Mazin has ever worked on starring all of his first choice actors. When Mazin was writing Chernobyl, he had Harris, Stellan Skarsgård, and Emily Watson in mind to play the three main roles. To Mazin’s shock, all eagerly said yes.

“They sent me the script, the first four episodes … to see if I was interested,” Harris said. “You can tell really quickly when you read something, within 20 pages, whether it’s got you or not and it was a page turner. I loved it and it was easy to say ‘Yes, please.'”

Harris’ take on Legasov is complicated. Ultimately he’s a man who’s just trying to do his job, but the danger and the severity of the Chernobyl disaster puts him in the position of becoming something he’s not. “He’s the reluctant hero. I don’t think heroism comes naturally to him, which is what interests me about the character, that it was a more active choice. Rather than it being someone who is instinctually self-sacrificial, it’s somebody who is painfully aware of the situation he’s in and the sacrifice that you’re about to make, constantly,” Harris said. “It’s hard to imagine yourself not existing anymore whilst you still exist. It still constantly an active choice that he has to make. I thought that was a more interesting choice, a more dramatic choice.”

Harris spent a lot of time researching role of Legasov. He looked over scientific journals, photographic records, videos, documentaries, and a couple of books, including one Harris found to be the most affecting: The Voices of Chernobyl. Though the actor found a lot of information about the disaster at large, he found comparatively little about Legasov specifically.

“As you get into the later parts of the story, they threaten to erase him from history and they pretty successfully did it,” Harris said. “If you go online and you try to dig into him, there’s not a lot of stuff there. Even a lot of the historical studies that have been done it, he’s hardly mentioned in those books. So they did a good job of erasing him.”

Harris also partially drew on his own memories of the Chernobyl disaster for the role. “There was warnings. They were tracking the cloud, the weather services were tracking this radioactive cloud as it was working its way over,” Harris said. “What they didn’t tell you was that it was spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere for four months. The part they kept from me, the really shocking aspects.” Even when Harris and the rest of the Chernobyl crew were filming in the Ukraine, they were given warnings to not drink the milk, a lingering danger from the disaster.

When Mazin was first pitching the series to HBO, he toyed with the idea of casting Ukrainian or Eastern European actors. However because HBO and the UK Sky Atlantic agreed to create the miniseries, they went with predominantly English actors. “This is one of those practical considerations where, essentially, if we said ‘Listen, we’re committed to making this with Eastern European actors’ well, it would’ve meant finding a director that already there’s a bit of a language barrier and then my budget probably would’ve been reduced quite significantly,” Mazin explained. “My personal feeling is that the language issue drops away pretty quickly. It always does for me, at least.”

Mazin also talked about the possible future of Chernobyl as a show. Though Chernobyl was always intended to be a miniseries, there are options to turn it into an anthology. “If I came to HBO and said ‘I want to do another season of Chernobyl, except it’s gonna be about another terrible tragedy,’ whether it’s Bhopal or Fukushima or something like that, I would imagine they at least would give me polite interest,” Mazin said. However if he were to create another season of Chernobyl, Mazin feels certain it wouldn’t be about another disaster but rather an aspect of Soviet life. “The disaster is not what drew me to Chernobyl. It’s the specifics of Chernobyl.”

“Chernobyl can’t happen unless the absolute worst of human instinct and human behavior takes place, in a systematic, repressive, long-standing way,” Mazin explained. “When Chernobyl explodes, it’s the result of a uniquely Soviet kind of breakdown. But only the Soviet people could’ve fixed it. To fix it was such a remarkable, daunting, terrifying and dangerous task and I was just so moved by the spirit of those people.”

“I also began to see really clear links between what I thought was a uniquely Soviet problem and the way we operate here now and the way things are going in the United Kingdom,” Mazin added. “Turns out it’s not that unique. We have the same predilection to fall for a good story.”

New episodes of Chernobyl premiere on HBO Mondays at 9/8c

Watch Chernobyl on HBO Go and HBO NOW