Note: This article discusses the plot and the ending of “A House of Dynamite” and contains spoilers
In “A House of Dynamite,” Kathryn Bigelow’s thriller about an impending nuclear attack in the United States, Jared Harris finishes a phone call and then stares out a window in his office. We can see the muscles in his cheek tighten as he absorbs the weight of the catastrophe that will destroy a major city within the next 10 minutes.
It is an enthralling closeup. Harris’s character, the recently widowed US Secretary of Defense Reid Baker, is processing the sudden fact that his estranged daughter will perish in the attack.
“All of my work is about trying to get into the inner soul of this person,” the veteran actor (“Chernobyl,” “Mad Men,” “The Terror”) tells TheWrap about that dramatic moment in the film. “Then when the camera is on me, I just hope that something worthwhile happens. And that the audience can see my eyes, read my thoughts, and feel what I’m going through.”
As with the other cast members in Bigelow’s ensemble film, Harris is onscreen for a compressed amount of time. The story replays the same 20 minutes from three different angles, as we also follow a White House Situation Room manager (Rebecca Ferguson), a Strategic Command general (Tracy Letts) and the president (Idris Elba), among others.
But significantly, in a movie about mass nuclear annihilation, Harris’s Secretary Baker is the only character who does not survive until the end of the film.
Bigelow deliberately stops the story before the bomb’s devastation; she also never reveals the origin of the nuke. But as Secretary Baker is walking on a rooftop to board a helicopter, he pivots and disappears off the ledge of the building – a startling, split-second tragedy that Bigelow films from a distance, intensifying the unstoppable force of the moment.
The actor, whose characters have taken their own lives in several recent roles (see below) initially wanted to perform the jump stunt himself.
“Kathryn wouldn’t let me do it,” he said. “And I understood. I think she always knew, intuitively, how she wanted to see it in the film. And she knew it wasn’t necessary because the camera would be far away.”
Harris, 64, who also stars as a different distraught father in the film “Reawakening” (Nov. 18), explained his approach to the character and describes the Bruce Springsteen lyric that was a direct influence on his most poignant moment in the movie.
You have played several suicides among your recent roles: Lane Pryce in “Mad Men,” Valery Legasov in “Chernobyl.”
Hari Seldon in “Foundation” too, yeah. There have been a few. I’m gonna say that it’s just a coincidence.
But it must cause you to examine what drove each man to that point?
Well, Legasov was making a statement. It was his way of provoking and making a protest. And his radiation poisoning was so severe that he was dying soon anyway. Lane Pryce did it as an act of revenge. He wanted to make life really uncomfortable for his colleagues, because they’d sort of abandoned him.
What about Secretary Baker in this film?
He didn’t want to live in a world where he’d lost his wife and his daughter. The idea of that was just too distressing. My particular storyline is the most explicit, thematically, about the idea that these are just individual human beings who are put in the position to make choices that will affect millions of lives.
I talked with Kathryn (Bigelow) about why is it that his daughter is putting up this wall to him and we went through various different scenarios. At the end of the day, I think he needs help. And his daughter is processing her own grief. She can’t help him right now. But he’s hopeful she someday can and then losing her leads him to step off that roof.
You only have a minute or two of screen time to convey Baker’s thought process. Is there a point at which he decides?
It’s on his last turn up the staircase to the roof, before he comes to the door. The president is asking for his advice and he hangs up the phone. Because he hears that they’ve got to the point where they’re deciding to respond to the attack, and he knows what that means.
It means the doomsday scenario?
Right. And the story is designed in a way that it gets closer to the hot seat with each section, so that in section three we’re with the president. And my character is asked for advice by the president. He is the only person who is actually allowed to offer an opinion. And he screws up. He doesn’t help him. He can’t face it. Again, he’s a human being that’s been put in this situation.
It’s chilling that in the film’s second section we hear an offscreen reaction to Baker’s death.
Yeah, we just hear that some kerfuffle has happened, someone is screaming “Oh, my God.” But we don’t know what’s going on.
Kaitlyn Dever (“The Last of Us,” “Dopesick”) has a very small role as your daughter, who you speak to on the phone. Did you get a chance to meet her?
I was actually in the house with her, tucked around a corner and doing my side of the phone call when we filmed that scene.
Oh you were?
Yeah, I was filming my office scenes on a soundstage in New Jersey and the scene with Kaitlyn was done nearby. And it was important for Kathryn and for Kaitlyn and for me. It wasn’t some sort of courtesy. The actors physically being there should always be the norm.
In that scene, your tone goes from frantic to gentle in just a few seconds.
Once she answers the phone and she’s in Chicago, all hope is lost. So then what can he say? She tells him that she’s met somebody, so he thinks, “Well, she’s met someone she’s going to spend the rest of her life with, but she just doesn’t know that the rest of her life is going to be 10 minutes.”
He lets it go there. And then when she says that she’s walking to work with her boyfriend, I say, “Good, that’s good.” I took that line from Bruce Springsteen.
Oh interesting. How so?
First, I have to say that I met Bruce Springsteen the other night! I couldn’t speak, just squeaks came out of my mouth. My eyes were tearing up and everything.
But, yeah, I took something from his live album of “The River,” when he’s talking about his tough relationship with his father. And his father keeps saying to him, “I can’t wait till the Army gets you, they’re gonna make a man out of you.”
And then Bruce gets called up to go for his Army physical and when he comes home, his father says, “Where have you been?” He says, “the Army didn’t take me.” And his father goes, “That’s good.” So I said the same line with Springsteen on my mind.
“A House of Dynamite” is streaming on Netflix now