Read what the star of Mr. Selfridge has to say about the
PBS drama set in 1909 England.
On March 31, MASTERPIECE on PBS debuted Mr. Selfridge, introducing the world to the man who dressed London’s Edwardian era and turned its sensibilities upside down.
As the founder of Selfridges department store, Harry Gordon Selfridge was a larger-than-life figure. He was a visionary whose own sense of grandeur inspired his times and broke Londoners out of their strict mold. A showman at heart, he vowed to “make shopping sexy” by dressing it up with extravagance. But he was also a complex character whose vices and troubles matched the grand scale of his vision.
When producers needed an actor to bring the megawatt personality to life, there was only one person for the job: Jeremy Piven. We caught up with Jeremy in an exclusive interview to go inside the show, and inside the mind, of Mr. Selfridge.
Who was Harry Gordon Selfridge?
Harry Gordon Selfridge was kind of a maverick entrepreneur. The story takes place in 1909 and he basically travels from Chicago to London to start the largest retail shopping store in the world. He transforms the retail business in the UK, and here we are 100 years later and the store is still thriving, and was voted the best store in the world last year.
So it must be doing something right.
He’s a really colorful character who I was kind of fascinated by. He was incredibly driven and was a trailblazer. He was the guy that came up with the phrase‚ “The customer is always right.” He was the first guy to have these big sales, bargain basement sales. No one had ever done those before. He treated customers like guests. And they hadn’t been doing that in the UK.
But he was also a bit of a slave to some of his demons. He was a risk junkie. He loved to gamble and had affairs. They were all pretty well documented. So we jump into all that stuff. He was a very colorful character that I’ve had a real blast playing.
He almost seems like a P.T. Barnum of shopping and fashion with a grand flair for self-promotion?
JP:He dared to dream really big. He was a huge fan of P. T. Barnum. And that is the way I play him. A little bit larger than life. As an actor, it’s a feast because his highs are incredibly high and his lows are brutal, because he has two personas and one is the one that he shows his workers and the customers and the world and the other is the one behind closed doors where he has his doubts and his fears. So as an actor to inhabit a guy who has those dualities has been really rewarding to me.
I was a little worried at first. I was like, oh, no. I love the guy and his energy and everything about it, but you’ve got to take a chance. Am I being too big? I don’t know. I’m going to die trying. I’m going to die on my shield. This is who the guy was. And yeah, he loved to put on a show.
It’s been said that he revolutionized the shopping experience. How so?
He transformed shopping and the retail world and commerce and all of that. He made it sexy. At the time, it was thought very uncouth to sell any kind of beauty products. They were only worn by prostitutes. He was the guy who...to this day, when you walk into any store, you see products right there. You see all the women’s products and everything. Right when you walk in. He was the first person to introduce that.
What were the innovations he introduced?
He came up with the idea of these enormous windows that we see today, everywhere. He wanted to depict a play in each one of these windows. Each window tells a different story. The windows and the store itself were his theater. He loved artists and thought of himself as one. He loved it. Every day he was there at 9am. No matter what. And he was the first man-made celebrity of his time. He believed heavily in advertising. Everyone knew about his store and about him. And you could go there and there he was, in the flesh. He always created some sort of event.
When Blériot did the first flight across the English Channel into the UK, [Selfridge] convinced him to put the plane on display in his store. And that’s just one of the many examples of how he created these events that people could come and see, this incredible plane for instance, this groundbreaking machine.
And they could see this for free and also shop. So he was way ahead of his time and was certainly really incredibly fun to play.
He seems like a complex character. For instance empowering women on one hand, but having
numerous affairs on the other. How do you
inhabit that psychology?
He loves to empower women. At the time it was very uncouth to go out and shop in public. If you had money, you sent for your dressmaker. But you didn’t go out and shop. So he made it an event. And a real meeting place. He loved for women to come and be whoever they wanted to be. And encouraged it. And at the same time, although he loved his wife and his children very much, he couldn’t help himself. He was a guy who went out at night and found his comfort in taking risks at the gambling table and, as you’ll see, had some affairs. The way it’s written, and I was asked that same question even by our director, how are you going to play this guy so that the audience doesn’t turn on you? And I think even being asked that question is interesting to me.
I asked myself the same question when I played Ari Gold. I would read the scripts and go, oh, my God. This is the part where the audience turns on me. They are two very different characters. One is a guy, Ari Gold, who rules with an iron fist and through intimidation and who is incredibly reactive. And Harry is someone who in public continuously figures out a way to inspire and not intimidate and to take the high road. And so he has this incredible light and positive energy. He is this incredible ray of sunshine.
And he has this other side. So what’s interesting about him is he actually inspires his workers and they really want to go to battle for him. And you get to see that. It’s up to me as an actor to figure out a way to lead the charge. To move them in some way. And if I don’t do that then the series doesn’t work. I love the opportunity to live or die by certain elements like that.
The Edwardian period seems to be having a resurgence these days, from television to fashion.
What are your thoughts on that?
I think we’ve become fascinated by that time period. This takes place in 1909, which is a few years before Downton Abbey, for instance, which has become so popular. I think for a lot of great reasons. I think we’re all fascinated by a simpler time. When you couldn’t hide behind technology. You couldn’t text someone, email them, Skype them. You had to confront them face-to-face. These are the times that we’re depicting. What you wore is how you were showing yourself to the world and it meant a lot. So we get to dive into that. No one does it better than the Brits in terms of costume dramas. I’m just incredibly lucky. I would love to tell you that I was smart enough for it to be premeditated. When the reality is, that I was lucky enough for them to think that I had something to bring to this character and they came to me. And as I read what Andrew Davies had planned for the series and the arc of the first season and beyond I was completely blown away.
What can we expect from the rest of the series?
You have to understand that in the States they write a pilot and then the rest is the great unknown. And you have to take that leap. With this, they all put the work in, and I can see where the character goes and where the season goes and all these incredible characters that surround Harry in the store. It’s about so much more than the store and commerce and how it affected the culture. It’s about all the people’s lives that he affected.
So after the pilot you get to see how everyone’s lives are intertwined and how they are affected, and it’s just the most incredible ensemble cast I’ve ever seen, and I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. I’m really blown away. Any one of them could easily take the lead of this at any moment. There isn’t a weak link.
And you’ll see, as the episodes go on, it gets more and more intricate and heavy and dramatic and wonderful, and you get to know all these characters, and then it just starts to really sing and take flight. Pilots are difficult because you have to establish the entire world and yet give it pace and energy and make it entertaining. I think that they’ve achieved that.
How closely do you adhere to the script
or how much latitude does the director give
you to really improvise?
On this show I stick very close to the script. It’s your job. Listen, I’m an improvisational actor. I grew up at the Piven Theatre and then at Second City, where you’re improvising all the time. My first job out of college was to get in a van and travel around the states to improvise in all of them, and it was so fun. So that’s part of my background. So I feel like I’m very capable of doing that. But in this particular case, these writers have worked incredibly hard to get that voice right and the time right. So I just kind of jump in and it’s my honor to make it all hopefully sound completely improvisational.
I feel like there is momentum so that the words can live and that you can do your best job. There really aren’t any excuses. You can’t sit in a room with people and go, oh, we didn’t have enough time in that scene, you know what I mean? There are no asterisks, there are no disclaimers. So you’ve got to figure out a way.
And that’s what is kind of the fun of it, I really believe. It’s like a puzzle. How are you going to figure out a way, when there are times when you feel like, wow, I don’t know how to get it to the place we need to get it to here. You’ve got to figure out how to crack that. And it’s been really fun. Like I said, the actors are so incredibly equipped and specific that playing off of them is just a treat. So they raise my level, really.