Tim Robbins: “I’ve always found it a lot of fun to play characters that are not like me”

Tim Robbins has spent a lot of his life advocating for social justice, free expression, and the cussed concept that individuals ought to query whoever occurs to be holding the keys. Naturally, Silo forged him as Bernard Holland, the man guarding the keys, hiding the reality, and ensuring anybody asking too many questions winds up outdoors with a rag of their hand.

It’s the form of contradiction Robbins enjoys. “I’ve always found it a lot of fun to play characters that are not like me,” he says. “What it does is it forces you to accept the humanity of someone who you disagree with.”

That has been no small project with Bernard. For two seasons of the Apple TV+ dystopian drama, the pinnacle of IT offered himself because the calm, bureaucratic face of repression. He manipulated residents, buried proof, and maintained order inside an underground society of 10,000 individuals who had been taught that curiosity was someplace between a personality defect and a demise want.

Robbins, nevertheless, doesn’t see understanding Bernard as the identical factor as excusing him. “We’re living in such a fractionalized world of division,” he says. “What I’m constantly forced to do is find the humanity in someone who I don’t agree with. That’s a good thing. That’s a healthy thing.”

“It doesn’t change your view. It just makes you more open. It makes you accept the fact that people that aren’t like you also have hearts, also have love, also have mothers that they love. It makes you less judgmental and more open to conversations with people that might differ from you.”

Season 3 offers Robbins significantly extra humanity to seek out. When viewers final noticed Bernard, he was trapped inside an incinerator with Juliette Nichols as flames erupted round them. He returns alive, although “alive” could also be performing some beneficiant work. Bernard is badly burned, barely in a position to converse, and stripped of the authority that when made him one of many silo’s most feared males.

The bodily harm is simply the start. “He’s been lied to. He’s been used,” Robbins says. “His entire worldview is shattered. Everything he thought was true turned out to be false.”

For a person who constructed his identification round possessing forbidden data, discovering that he was merely one other piece on the board is a very merciless little bit of justice. Bernard spent years controlling individuals with rigorously rationed info. Now he should confront the chance that his personal certainty was manufactured for him. “He is shattered not only physically from the injuries he sustained at the end of season two, but he’s shattered psychically,” Robbins says. “He is not a whole person.”

That collapse opens the door to one thing resembling redemption, though Silo is much too suspicious of tidy solutions handy Bernard a halo and name the matter settled. He nonetheless has to resolve what to do with the wreckage. “People that go through a profound experience like that, there’s a couple different paths you can take,” Robbins says. “You can take one of anger and bitterness and withdrawal. Or you can use that anger to make amends for what you did and come to a new understanding of what the truth is, and fight for that and fight for justice.”

For Robbins, that reversal gave Bernard’s story a brand new cost. “That’s a beautiful trajectory to have as a character,” he says.

Bernard’s transformation might be heard earlier than it may be absolutely seen. His burned, faltering voice makes even a easy greeting to Juliette carry the load of betrayal, ache, and a person who has lastly run out of orders to provide. Robbins approached it as an harm that prolonged nicely past the seen scars.

“Doing a little research and studying about what it is to be burned, it’s not just the outside that’s burned. It’s the inside as well,” he says. “I figured he had to have had some kind of severe damage inside of his larynx and throat.”

The end result required him to rebuild the character nearly from scratch. “It was basically just finding a new Bernard physically, orally, and psychically,” Robbins says. “Who is this new person?”

Three seasons right into a collection, many actors are requested to protect no matter made their character work within the first place. Robbins was handed the alternative problem. Bernard’s physique, beliefs, and place inside the silo have all been torn aside. The man who as soon as enforced the official model of actuality should now resolve whether or not he can survive with out it.

“What a gift as an actor to say, here in the third season, this is a different person,” Robbins says. “This is a person that’s been transformed by his experience, by his betrayal, and now has to embrace life enough to make amends for his sins.”

Bernard spent two seasons defending the silo from the reality. His actual punishment could also be dwelling lengthy sufficient to find what the reality expects from him.

Watch the total interview above after which try the trailer beneath.