Sean Pertwee has become well known in recent years for his stint as Alfred in American television series, Gotham. Way before that though, he was Sergeant Wells in Neil Marshall’s directorial debut, Dog Soldiers. The film has recently been restored, and a sparkly 4K version has arrived. As Wells, Pertwee is the perfect mix of no-nonsense leader, joker, and father figure to the men that he commands. He’s an infectiously likeable character, and one that really goes through it, literally spilling his guts in his attempt to survive a werewolf ambush.
Pertwee clearly enjoyed working on the project and has collaborated with Marshall on several films since, including his most recent film, The Reckoning, which screens at Arrow Video FrightFest in the near future. After speaking with Neil Marshall, it was clear that Sean would have some good stories to tell about his time on Dog Soldiers, and he did not disappoint when we spoke with him. Here’s what he had to say.
Neil mentioned that you actually got involved with Dog Soldiers really early on, even before the project was financed. What was it about the project that made you so determined to make it?
Neil, basically. I went to meet Neil at Noel Gay, which was a production company, and the producer, Chris Figg, was working there and he called me in. I was working quite a lot at the time and I’d heard about the script initially from Jason Isaacs weirdly enough. He said, “you gotta read this. I’m not around, but I think this has really got something.”
When I first read the script, I didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t in the mindset of the squaddie lingo, which apparently is one of the huge plus points. We were getting letters from day one from guys that were serving; Neil nailed the language of those characters. I hadn’t had any military experience per-se, only pretending to be soldiers, but he had some. So the dialogue was extraordinary. Really fast-paced and on point. I wasn’t sure whether it was aliens invading or what was going on when I was initially reading the script. Of course when I finished it, I knew it was about werewolves.
But I went in to meet Neil and Keith Bell, his producer, and I instantaneously got on with him. I thought that he really had something. I’d seen his short that he’s done about these guys drinking in the pub. It was all done through just sound effects, and I just thought that he was a really interesting guy. He knew exactly what he wanted, which is something that you tend to look out for. Even if you don’t necessarily like it, if someone has a vision, I find that very appealing. Of which he had in spades. I went to meet him and liked him so much and said, “please use my name if it helps in any way, shape or form to create finance for the movie. But do consider me,” then a few years down the line I got a phone call saying, “we’re on!” And off we went to the sunny climes of Luxenberg, which doubled superbly for the highlands of Scotland. So yeah, I was involved from the early stage and it really was down to Neil, to his personality, and the fact of how passionate he was and how observant he was.
You’ve since worked with Neil a few times, what is it about him that makes him such a good collaborator?
I get him. We speak the same language. I know when something is working for him. I think that he knows how to push you in a certain direction. He’s a quiet director, but you know when he moves on, he’s happy. There isn’t that kind of back-patting situation that you often get on film sets. I have nothing but trust in him. I know when we’ve done something and he decides to move the camera or move on, I know we’ve got it. We don’t need to go over it and dissect what we’ve done. He has such a strong vision of what he wants to achieve, you just have to trust him. So that’s what it was. I’ve always admired that and I thought there’s an element in it where, when I tell the big story about Eddie Oswald, who gets blown up and his tattoo survives, I thought, ‘that’s never going to make the final cut. It’s just six minutes of dialogue’. I thought in my experience that it will never make it to celluloid, and it did. So he knows, he really does know. It’s that element of just trusting him. Whenever I’m with him, I worked with him recently, I know when he’s happy. That’s why whenever he asks me to do something, I usually just leap at it.
And he gives you some pretty epic deaths.
Yeah. I mean, thank you very much Neil. There was one that you didn’t see actually. There was one in [The] Descent. I went to Descent [being filmed], I was doing A Bear’s Tail, and something else. I was doing two other jobs and I really wanted to do this. He said, ‘look you’re the only male character in it. All the protagonists are female’, which I thought was a great departure from Dog Soldiers, which was mainly all men apart from Emma [Cleasby]. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but he said, “but he dies”. He said it was only a day’s worth of shooting and I was to play someone’s husband who gets a scaffold pole through his eye. Even then, he gives me a good death.
The big one though is being eaten alive by cannibals in Doomsday…
Yeah, that was just outrageous. I was in neoprene and they strapped me up. We shot in South Africa and we literally had – and it was an extraordinary experience – we had a thousand extras. We really did have a thousand extra as cannibals and they forgot that they had sort of put me on this rig over this massive BBQ gas ring burner. They all broke for tea in the middle of the night because we shot all night for two nights. They left me over these gas rings with all these extras smoking, standing around. I was like, “can you put that fucking thing out!” It was really alarming being hung over this bloody gas burner. Then of course they barbequed a pig and pulled it apart. It still turns my stomach that one. Thanks Neil.
Speaking of stomachs, or more precisely guts, that’s the thing everyone remembers from Dog Soldiers.
Well that’s where the immortal line “sausages” comes from. They actually used sausage skin and detritus rather, to stick into these sausage skins that doubled rather neatly as my guts, and they went off. I had all my guts and they had to devise this way because my stomach was hanging out for about a week. So they devised a way of cupping my innards into this gaffer taped vessel thing, and so I walked around with my guts, walking round for about a week before they went off. Then they had to reinvent them and make them out of silicon or something ridiculous like that.
I know someone that has a hernia and we joke that if it gets too much worse we’ll just lob the superglue on it.
That’s where I think Neil got all that sort of stuff from. It was used for trauma victims in the Vietnam war. So all that is for real, the fact that they did use superglue to stick people back together again. But that scene was really interesting because Kev[in McKidd] did actually break my nose when I asked him to knock me out. He went to knock me out and I was driving him mad, and he went to hit me and he caught me on the end of my nose, and I showered all the props guys with claret. I thought it was the fake blood, but actually it was all me.
Wells is the leader of the group, Neil mentioned that he felt that translated off screen as well, you guys were like a little unit. How did you guys work on getting that sense of camaraderie?
There’s nothing more terrifying than starting a film, especially which was as intense a shoot as that. I think we shot it in five weeks. The first day up, we sort of did a small bond before, but we didn’t really know each other. I knew Kevin McKidd, but he was shooting something else, so I was with the rest of the boys, Darren [Morfitt] and everyone, and we were training with this guy from the French foreign legion. We did a bit of rolling around in the mud, which always helps to bond.
Then on our first day, the day after Kev arrived, the very first sequence when we jump off the helicopter and everything like that, when we first began our exercise, we shot in one go. He [Neil] wanted to shoot the whole scene in one take, depending on what shot it was. It’s like a twelve page scene. So you know it certainly clears the sinuses when on your first day you have twelve pages of dialogue, because you don’t want to be the one to slip up. There’s a tremendous sense of trust after we’d achieved that. We went out and got monumentally beered up that evening, and that was it. We were a crew.
That’s the amazing thing about the way that Neil shot it. The camaraderie in it I think is so palpable, and we shot it chronologically, which is every actor’s dream. Because when people die there was no cannon fodder, there was no…I can point at almost any movie and say, “he’s gonna die first, she’s going to die second, blah, blah, blah.” Here you actually have a real sense of loss when my boys start to go. Because it was a relatively low budget movie, people were whisked off set the minute their character passed away. So there was this real hole left by these people that were flown back to England the minute their demise came up, they were off. So there’s a real sense of loss.
It ended up being Kevin on his own in a cellar. He rang me and said it was the weirdest thing. I’d gone, I’d died, I got blown up – spoiler – but if you haven’t seen it now, it’s too late really, but Kevin was on his own. He said, “it’s the weirdest thing, me being on my own, with no one here. None of the guys with me.” It was an emotional thing to finish, and I was obsessed with it because we really did become so close, because we really did do the jump. Like I said, doing things chronologically, the impetus is absolutely magnified. The sense of urgency, the sense of loss. I’m sorry, but I know that the film is what it is, but I think that that really adds to it. I think people genuinely feel that the audience genuinely feels a sense of loss, and there’s a real sense of care with all of our characters to one another, because there was.
As much as they’re fighting werewolves it really does capture that feel of the military, and in a weird way, would make for a great watch for anyone interested in enlisting as it truly gets across how close these units get.
It does. The most flattering letters I’ve ever received really were from our armed forces. The wonderful men and women from our armed forces that were stationed all over the world, in Iraq and everywhere like that, using it as a way to lift their spirits. Some of them would watch it on loop. We got letters from the Black Watch, when they still existed, saying they used to watch it. So we were doing something right, which means an awful lot to us, that we got that element right. That constant taking the piss out of each other. That constant joking. That real sense of camaraderie.
It doesn’t matter who they are [fighting], they could be alien Nazis, but the fact is it doesn’t matter that they’re werewolves. They’re just shoulder-to-shoulder, they back each other up, they die for each other. I think that is one of the reasons why Dog Soldiers as a film is successful, because people would like to feel like that, like someone has your back.
You mentioned you’ve worked with Neil again, that film is The Reckoning, which screens at FrightFest soon. What can you share about your character?
He’s the Witchfinder General. He’s a zealot, he’s a puritanical nightmare. He’s not a particularly nice person. When he arrives, all Hell breaks loose, pardon the pun. It was a really interesting piece to do and to research. I find that whole period fascinating and looking into what happened in that period was extraordinary. The viciousness and insanity and paranoia of it all. I haven’t seen it properly yet so I’m looking forward to seeing it.
Even though it’s set in the medieval times, and was filmed a year ago, it has some uncanny parallels to today. It’s set during the plague, there’s witch hunts happening, which are in some respect happening right now in the world.
Absolutely. I mean, we didn’t know that of course. My friend Cory Michael Smith who’s in Utopia, the same thing happened with him. The parallels are just terrifying. Life imitating art, or art imitating life, I don’t know, but it should be really interesting.
The 4K restoration version of Dog Soldiers is out now on digital.
