David Tennant Talks Good Omens "Crowley Is A Great Character"



David Tennant has been chatting to Collider about his forthcoming role in Good Omens,  the six-part TV adaptation of the comic apocalyptic novel by Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett. The series has been written by Neil Gaiman and stars David Tennant as Crowley, 'Hell's most approachable demon', and Michael Sheen as his counterpart, the fussy angel and rare book dealer Aziraphale.

Talking about his role in the series he said: "Crowley is a great character. He’s a demon, and they’re averting the apocalypse. We get to see them throughout all of human history. There were so many things that were just gonna be fun to get involved with. Just to be a part of this story that people love so much and that means so much to people – this novel has such a following – it can be intimidating because you don’t want to break it, disappoint people, or let people down, but it felt like the team was robust enough to make it something worth doing."

He also spoke about teaming up with Michael Sheen who will play the angel Aziraphale:
"Well, it’s a bit of a double act. They are yin and yang, really. I enjoyed playing almost every scene with Michael. He’s someone I’ve known for years. We never really acted together, but I knew him and I knew his work, and I knew that it was gonna be fun, and indeed it was. He’s great to bounce off. He’s never not engaged, in any moment of a scene, and it makes you better to have someone to play with who’s that present and skillful."

He went on to reveal why he got involved:
"Obviously, a Neil Gaiman story, in itself, is appealing. The fact that Neil Gaiman was so involved, as the showrunner and he’s written all the scripts, and I knew that Michael Sheen was involved, and Douglas Mackinnon, a director I knew of old, was directing, and just the sweep and scope of the story and the resources that we had to make the story with, just felt like this was a project that was going to be very exciting, and I wanted to be a part of it.
Neil was very present and very involved, but also hugely creative. He’s lived with this novel for so many years. It was such a formative experience for him, as a writer, writing with Terry Pratchett. And with Terry Pratchett no longer being with us, Neil has become the caretaker for the memory of Terry. I think he would acknowledge that, himself. So, he’d be entirely forgiven for being rather proprietorial about the whole thing and about wanting things done in a very prescriptive way. And whilst he had a very clear, very strong, and very persuasive view of the material, which was fantastic to have access to, he was also interested in what people brought to it. He was genuinely interested in the collaborative art of making it from a novel into something else. He actually couldn’t have been better, from that point of view, just having his skills available to us, all the time, and to have a conversation about these characters and about the show, as it developed. The whole thing was a wonderful experience."

Good Omens is wrapped filming earlier this year and is now in post production. It is a co-production by the comedy team at BBC Studios, the BBC’s commercial production arm, Narrativia and The Blank Corporation, in association with BBC Worldwide for Amazon Prime Video and BBC Two. The series will launch globally on Prime Video in over 200 countries and territories in 2019 including in the UK, where it will also air on BBC Two at a later date. BBC Worldwide will distribute rights for Good Omens internationally, after the series premiere on Prime Video.

You can read the rest of David's interview on Collider here.

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