'I didn't want the career my family had in mind for me'

‘Mad Men’ actor Jared Harris speaks to Louis Chilton about taking on Hamlet’ for the RSC, reinventing himself in the US, and the extreme’ response to his theatrical comeback

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"God damn it," mutters Jared Harris, expelling a large, weary sigh. The face of the actor known for playing Mad Men's genteel Lane Pryce has just materialised on a video call, and seems, for a brief moment, to be in character. How would Lane Pryce react if he was confronted with sound issues on a Zoom call? I think I've just found out. Harris furrows his brow. "This does sometimes happen..." he says, slowly and augustly, "... with Chrome."

A few minutes of methodical problem-solving later, voila - we have sound. Harris, dressed in a deep red quarter-zip jumper, settles down. We're speaking over Zoom because Harris is in Stratford, ahead of a new production of Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He's playing Claudius, fratricidal king of Denmark, alongside Nancy Carroll (Gertrude), Luke Thallon (Hamlet) and Nia Towle (Ophelia). Other than this, information is scant; Harris has been told to keep details of the "highconcept" staging nebulous.

"Listen, I was trained on Mad Men," he says, "so you know I'm well able to handle all sorts of attempts to dig information out of me. Do your best." There's something quite bullish about Harris - a thespian swagger that he only occasionally affords his characters.

Whether it's Mad Men's starchy, ill-fated Lane, Chernobyl's whistleblowing Soviet scientist Valery Legasov, or Francis Crozier, the saturnine sea-captain of The Terror, Harris has excelled at finding different nuances to play within insular, intelligent men. In other projects, he's been able to summon entirely different traits - as the angry, bewildered tradesman in Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women (2016), or as an ailing and contradictory George VI in Netflix's The Crown.