The Iris Affair - Tom Hollander (Cameron Beck) Q+A

Cameron Beck gets more than he bargained for when he recruits the mysterious Iris Nixon on a code-breaking mission.

Gifted in finding the right people for the job, Cameron is eager to find out the truth behind Charlie Big Potatoes – a supercomputer that could have a massive effect on the world at large.

But under pressure from dangerous men, and with no way of accessing the computer’s secrets, Cameron needs to track down Iris fast when she suddenly disappears.

Cameron Beck is an enthusiast. The story of The Iris Affair is a sort of struggle for the soul of a computer. Iris [Niamh Algar] believes the computer to be a force for ill. Cameron, who raised the money for the computer to be built, believes it to be a force for good. The plot is her trying to kill it and him trying to keep it alive by getting back the activation sequence that she has stolen.

Within that, there's more: does Cameron hate Iris or does he actually love her? And there's this debate going on throughout it about what's the moral status of this enormously powerful thing which is capable, as Cameron says, of solving climate change, curing cancer and solving poverty. Or, as Iris says, of being used for weaponry, stealing secrets and the creation of false information.

So it's a very contemporary debate turned into a sort of Wacky Races, structured thriller in which you would say that I'm Dick Dastardly and she's Lady Penelope. Except that I'm not Dick Dastardly because Neil Cross, who's a very, very lovely collaborator, was happy to let me be a bit more sympathetic than that. You start to feel for Cameron's point of view, and then there's another villain created. So then there's someone else bearing down on Cameron, and he's the proper villain.

Well, there’s the fight for the soul of the computer but what’s really motivating Cameron is he’s in fear for his own life. He's a rich man that’s over-borrowed, so effectively he actually doesn't have anything, even though he has a helicopter. Dark forces called ‘The Money’ own everything now, and he's going to be killed if Iris doesn't bring the activation sequence back and if he can't get the computer going again.

He's not a bad guy. He wants good outcomes. He believes in “Charlie Big Potatoes”’ [the quantum computer] good outcomes — as I said, he thinks “Charlie Big Potatoes” is capable of curing climate change. Cameron had a revelatory experience when he was young where he saw God. What motivated him to want to create this quantum computer is that fundamentally it's a creative entity — it's a super being that you can worship. Not suggesting that there's a religion in this or anything, but that at some level Cameron believes in “Charlie Big Potatoes” in the way that people believe in gods. It literally is a higher power. It can think faster, it's more capable, it can do anything. It makes Chat GPT look like a geriatric with a Zimmer frame.

What I am definitely interested in these days is playing characters that are relatable. I don't want to play villains particularly at the moment. I mean, I shouldn't make a statement like that in a press pack. It's a silly thing to say. But it's interesting to play characters who are relatable. To whom the audience can. I am definitely interested in the grey of things, as that seems to reflect my experience of the world and the life that I've had. I feel with Neil in that respect there was a meeting of minds.

Well Neil [Cross] is a nerd and has researched all this stuff deeply, but I know that it's all theoretically possible. A very quick Google search will reveal physicists and academics talking about quantum computers and nanoparticles and topographical computing systems… which is why I found the script extremely difficult to learn!

Niamh and I are playing people who are much cleverer than we are, and every so often the wheels come off when we can't say the lines! Because we don't — we can't — we just don't know what we're talking about. I would go, ‘Shit. I'm just going to be so busted…’ We just ended up laughing at each other.

The crux is I've employed her initially. A lot of the story happens before the series starts. Jensen [Lind, Kristofer Hivju], the genius scientist who built “Charlie Big Potatoes”, Jensen's gone catatonic. The computer's gone to sleep. I need to get the computer to start again. I need someone clever enough to decode Jensen’s encrypted activation sequence, which he has in his diary, but which no one understands except Jensen. So I need a brilliant code breaker.

In order to find someone I set an online trail, an online competition. Because it's so difficult, anyone that can solve it online will be sufficiently clever to solve the activation sequence, much in the way that they found Bletchley Park people in the Second World War. And so that produces this woman, Iris. She is quite a character. She seems to be in some way rather detached from the world and is not interested in material things but she's absolutely brilliant at solving puzzles.

I will say that I think Cameron is a bit in love with her. Whether she's in love with him is hard to say because her emotions are not really available to her. Until it's too late.

I mean, she's a bit lost, Joy. She's an orphan, so she's a seeker of love and safety in this very unsafe world. She believes in Cameron as this avuncular figure, and through Joy we see Cameron expressing his vulnerability and his sadness at his own life. So it's an interesting relationship. There's a very funny generational difference that’s shown through Cameron not knowing any of the music she's into and her being shruggy about stuff that he loves. She's a teenager, so it's a father, uncle, niece, daughter sort of vibe. But she's very clever, and so she's challenging him the whole time and as she discovers that the world has been misruled by adults. That is also a very contemporary theme: the younger generation despising the rest of us and seeing no leadership or anything worth aspiring to. So she's an interesting character, and another example of how this is a show where there are several different protagonists in a way by the end. Joy's journey is quite as interesting as mine or Iris's.

It's quite wacky, but it's very bold and it's very high concept. And it's very exciting and it's very glamorous and it's very hooky in the way that a thriller needs to be. You know, at the end of each episode you’re thinking, ‘Oh my god, what's going to happen next?’ There are lots of reversals and clever plot twists and fast cars but there’s also all of the moral grey areas.

I will say this: Neil [Cross], is incredibly good at grey. There's a wonderful speech in it that I have about Neil Armstrong, that the suit that Neil Armstrong wore could only be made because of a Nazi scientist who subjected people to pressure tests and freezing temperature tests that killed them. So no worst, no best-ness. That duality is going all the way through it. Neil was a big fan of Rev and Neil himself almost was ordained at some point. So he as a person is fascinated by the duality of what it is to be a human being — of how the dark and the light are always intertwined.