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Jeremy Irvine On The Hardest Part About A Major ‘Treadstone’ Scene: His Nipples

By Lea Palmieri @littleleap
Published Oct. 22, 2019, 11:30 a.m. ET

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Jeremy Irvine isn’t feeling the pressure of starring in Treadstone, the new USA series set in the world of Jason Bourne because he’s not actually playing Jason Bourne. He stars as J. Randolph Bentley, an operative going through the program in 1970’s Berlin — until he becomes aware that he’s going to need some answers. “If you hadn’t seen a single Bourne film, the TV show will still make sense,” Irvine explained when he stopped by the Decider offices in New York City. And if you are a superfan of the Matt Damon films, “you’ll be able to pick up on the references and figure out where certain modern-day characters fit in with the Bourne story.” 

Irvine, who is best known for previous roles in Mama Mia! Here We Go Again and War Horse does an awesome job in the hour-long drama: and particularly with those fight scenes, which we asked him about in detail here. We also learned about the photography club he started on set, the accessories he had to fight to keep off his body, and what it’s actually like running from roof to roof — in your underwear, no less.

Do you like your character being in the ‘70s?

I had to fight, not to have a mustache. They were desperate for me to have facial hair. I wanted to have a bit of a scruffy beard because I’d been a prisoner for so long when you see me. And then they were like, ‘Great! And maybe we can try sideburns and a mustache!’ I was like, ‘No! No, no.’ So I got away with that. There was a lot of costume conversations where an enormous flared pair of trousers would come out, and I would say to our lovely costume designer, “I get it, but our audience isn’t from the ‘70s, so let’s just tone it [down].’ We want it to be definitely ‘70s themed, but not distracting. I wanted people to be looking at what was going on between the characters, not at their outrageous costumes. 

You can’t run in bell bottoms like that. 

No, no, no, fighting in platform shoes would have been a lot.

If you kick somebody with those, it would probably hurt more than a regular shoe though. 

Yeah, you’re probably right. But then you’d fall over and break your angle, so. 

How was it having to run around in your underwear in the first episode? 

Cold, very cold. And Budapest is freezing! A lot of stuff is done outside in Budapest or in this abandoned hospital that had no heating whatsoever. It was snowing outside and they had to CGI out the snow. I was saying earlier, the hardest thing about shooting the series was my nipples during that sequence. I think by the end of it I was trying to do anything I could, I think I was even wearing two pairs of underwear just to at least keep a small part of me warm. 

You were barefoot, too. That’s intense.  

Yeah, running across roofs. That was not easy. And we had quite a few injuries starting out, as well. A lot of stunt guys did. We were really pushing the envelope of what was possible to do, because all the fights were done for real in front of the camera, they weren’t CGI. It’s the sort of action that you haven’t seen on TV before. If you’re really pushing what’s possible, then occasionally it’s gonna go wrong. My stunt double ended up with some decent stitches in his forehead after the stunt double for Petra did punch him in one of the scenes. She broke her knuckles and he split his head open.

How are those scenes to learn? Are they really hard? It’s probably a lot of choreography. 

I got very quick at it by the end, but the way they taught it, they wanted us to learn the fight techniques for real. So you learn to actually hit the guys with pads on, and then you take the pads off and you learn how to make it look good for the camera. Every move in there is something that’s actually taught in martial arts or taught to special forces nowadays, so it’s all very much grounded in reality. We’re not doing Marvel, big CGI, green screen fight scenes, it’s all got to be really real and visceral. I think by the end, once I knew the basics, then it was good. But it was two months of training before we started shooting. 

And then once you started did you feel like, ‘Oh, I got this’?

I don’t know if I ever feel like, “Oh I got this,” because normally I wouldn’t watch the monitor, but with action scenes I do. I want to know that I’m getting the moves right. And I remember watching some playbacks of the fights and being like, ‘Yeah, that looks pretty awesome.’

Did you ever worry about making weird noises during the fights? 

That’s something I took from the Bourne films, actually. I do think with fighting that I’ve seen in movies that I haven’t liked, there’s always this grunting and it basically sounds like a porn film. If you shut your eyes you’re like, ‘Are they fighting or are they having aggressive sex? I can’t tell.’ It was something that I thought made the Bourne films really cool, that they take all the music out and it’s just the sound of the fight going on, it’s so raw, and it’s visceral, it’s realistic. I haven’t been in many real-life fights, but the last time I got in a bit of a fight in the subway in London a couple years ago, you’re not grunting. You’re just trying to get out of there as quickly as you can, aren’t you. 

Have you got in a fight since you’ve learned all these moves, though?

Well, I’d be useless in a fight now because I would pull the punch just before I hit them. I would go to hit them and I’d stop two inches in front of their nose, so I think it would just be weird. 

I’ll tell you what I did learn, though. I learned some cool disarms. All our guys who are military, ex-military guys taught us all how to disarm if somebody’s pointing a pistol at you, how to get it off, and there’s a really cool disarm you can do where you can get the gun off and then break their fingers at the same time, and then sort of hit them with the gun. I’m pretty sure I’d never risk it [though]. 

A lot of knife stuff we learned. Some really cool moves that they teach to, I think it was the Israeli special forces, there’s ways of disarming someone with a knife, so we learned all of that for real. I really enjoyed that stuff.  

Do you get to hang out with the other people in the cast even though you don’t really have scenes with them?

Kind of, but not really. When I was working, they were off, and when they were working, I was filming. I hung out a lot with Brian J. Smith and Omar Metwally. It was kind of like shooting my own little thing and then when I get to watch it, it’s cool getting to see what everyone else is up to. But we worked with a lot of crews. The ambitiousness of this project was something I’ve never seen before. I’ve been very lucky to work with some big-budget movies, and never something with the resources that this has. We’re shooting four different crews across the world, one entire unit just for the action. A crew will be shooting in Taiwan, and another crew will be shooting in Budapest, where I was, so it was just enormous. It really was like shooting ten feature films. 

Tell me a little bit of the TV magic because I loved when you flip the table in the lab, was that fake?  

I have a video on my phone of how close the table came to the stunt woman’s head. It was a seriously heavy metal table. We were watching playback and all going ‘This is crazy.’ The corner of that table missed her head like that. That was all real. A lot of it was real. Obviously there’s bits like jumping off buildings and your stunt double comes in and has wires on to do that, but they’re still jumping off a building and the guys have to catch him. 

Does it feel cool to run across a roof?

It feels very cool because it was fucking freezing. That stuff was fun, running around, jumping from rooftops is cool. For me, the bit I actually enjoyed the most was probably the psychological thriller aspect of it. There are some really cool scenes where it’s just you and another actor, and you have to create all of the excitement of one of those big action fight scenes, and create all that tension and drama with just you two across the table. They’re actually the ones that, for the actor, I think is sometimes the most fun. Not as badass but, you know, still fun.     

I have to speak different languages in this, I have to speak Hungarian. It’s ridiculous, Hungarian sounds like no other language in the world. There’s just no way I’m learning it. So I basically learn the sounds and then just say them all really angrily and intensely and just be like, ‘Did that work?’ [Laughs] 

When you would do a cool stunt would you want to post it right away to Instagram? 

Yeah, a little bit. I don’t want to give away the storyline, but yeah, I love taking photos. Everyone’s always going on about downsides of like, ‘Oh, everyone’s now got their iPhones’ and stuff, well I think it’s brilliant! I don’t have to keep a diary because I take photos every now and again. A couple of photos a day, and I’ve got this amazing visual diary of your life without sitting there and writing something really pretentious and self-indulgent in a book that you’ll lose one day. So I love taking photos around set. Me, Brian, and my stunt double (James Harris), all bought cameras out there and had a WhatsApp group called The Budapest Photography Club. We were all taking arty black and white photos while on set. It’s great, because everything is lit on set as well, so if you’re getting into photography, it’s a cool place to do it. So I always had my camera on my chair and tried to take arty photos and look at them a few days later and just be like ‘What a load of shit’ [laughs]. 

Did you become pretty close with your stunt double?

I did, really close, we’re really good friends now. Of everyone on the set, that’s who I spend the most time with because we had a lot of stuff to do together. You’re always slightly offended when production won’t let you do something, usually it comes down to insurance. But on this, I have to say, we were given pretty free rein. I love doing adrenaline stuff, bungee jumps, skydives, and all that sort of stuff, and there were a couple of things that I was like, ‘Man, this is a lot.’ The director for all the action stuff (Buster Reeves) was a stunt man himself, and every cool famous action sequence, he was probably the stunt guy in (including Jason Bourne, Mission: Impossible III, The Dark Knight, and Game of Thrones]. Buster would be like, ‘Okay Jeremy, we’re gonna need you to jump off this fifteen-foot wall!’ There was one time when I had to be like, ‘Buster, I’ll totally do it, but I’m doing it once. Let’s get this right the first time because I think we’re pushing our luck here.’

The elevator scene in the second episode is really cool too.  

Yeah! That was my favorite fight, it was great.  

How was filming that? 

It was a mockup elevator, so it was in a studio box, but it was small, it was cramped. We put the work in on that. That was something that we learned all the bits for real and normally these action sequences take days, and [that sequence] was all done basically there for real, live in front of the camera. We shot that in a couple of hours, that was quick.

What else is coming up this season you’re excited for people to see?

This is gonna sound weird, but my favorite sequence to shoot was in episode six where I take acid. It’s pretty wild. He takes acid as a way of trying to remember what he’s been through, and it’s pretty cool. I haven’t seen it yet, but that was one of my favorite sequences to shoot, it was really trippy and arty. We’ll see how much made the cut. It might all be gone, I don’t know, but shooting it was pretty cool.

Maybe you actually took acid and just imagined shooting it. 

Yeah, well, obviously I try to do my character research. 

You’re very good at shaking in the first episode, I believed your character really needed a nap. 

By coincidence, the week before I found out I was going to do this job, I’d signed up to do this thing for charity with the Special Forces in the UK, which is like our version of the Navy Seals. We have something called the SAS and it was for charity to go through a ten-day program which is like a mockup of their selection process. So like, Hell Week, for the Seals, we go through that, in Chile, in the mountains. But a big part of that was resistance to interrogation, so they keep you awake for two days, don’t give you any food, and then they put you through this: you go on the run and then the Chilean Special Forces captured us, then we get bag over the head, plastic cuffed, all that sort of stuff. For about, fucking hell, it feels like days and days and days, they do sensory deprivation, so they put these noise-canceling headphones over your head, black hood over your head, so you can’t see, you can’t hear. You’re put in stress positions and they just play babies screaming in your ears for like twelve, fourteen hours. Then they’ll whip your hood off and there will be dogs in your face or spraying you with cold water, and you’re constantly kept in this really trippy, weird state. It’s exactly the technique they use, it’s called ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,’ which I think is now very much illegal, but still happens, no doubt. So I went and did that, and with that stuff I lasted about seven or eight hours before I lost my mind and needed to get out of it, but it was pretty good research, so I had a lot to draw on for that sequence. I’m sure you can find it on YouTube somewhere. 

Treadstone airs Tuesday at 10pm ET/PT on USA. 

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