If you’ve turned on a television in the last five years, odds are Harriet Walter has been there waiting for you, lurking in a corner with a razor-edged line delivery or the kind of gaze that can flatten even the most overconfident CEO’s son. She’s Lady Caroline on Succession, mother of the Roy clan, the one person capable of making Shiv cry and Logan squirm. She’s Deborah in Ted Lasso, the British matriarch who can cut through that show’s relentless optimism with a single look. And on Apple TV+’s Silo, she’s Walker, the hermit mechanic who hasn’t left her underground workshop in twenty-five years.
Walter laughs when asked how you even act that. “You cannot act time,” she says. “I can indicate it, but I can’t actually live through 25 years of that. It’s impossible to portray, and it’s impossible for the audience to imagine. But of course it’s going to make her odd. So I tried to be a little odd.”
Odd is putting it lightly. Walker is grouchy, suspicious, but desperate to be useful. A recluse who doesn’t want anyone near her but also craves connection. A woman sealed off from daylight so long she’s practically translucent. “She’s angry with people but needs them,” Walter says. “She loves them and trusts some people really a lot and other people not at all.” In short: she’s the neighbor you’d rather not talk to, but the one who actually knows how to fix your generator when it goes down.
For Walter, the production design did half the heavy lifting. “It felt like being in a submarine,” she explains. “If you open the hatch, the whole ocean would come in on you. That’s what it felt like. And it looked so convincing—even though there were bits of green screen, for the most part it was there in reality. That was very, very helpful.”
The claustrophobia shaped everything. “I had to multiply the layer we were filming on by hundreds and say, ‘That’s all above your head, crushing down on you,’” she says. “You’re in this tiny little cell and you don’t dare open the doors.” Which is why Walker comes across less like a stock sci-fi mechanic and more like someone slightly warped by decades of self-imposed exile. Even Walter’s voice shifted. “It was deeper and rougher in my head,” she admits. “But when I heard it back, it sounded almost childish. And I thought, well, maybe that’s right. She’s a bit arrested in her development. Everyone in the silo is a bit odd.”
That oddness is partly what makes Walter’s current run of TV characters so disorienting. One minute she’s the aristocratic mother in Succession, flicking away her children’s trauma like lint on a cashmere coat. The next, she’s on Ted Lasso delivering withering maternal barbs while Jason Sudeikis tries to beam his way through her disdain. And now she’s in a dystopian future, speaking in that peculiar Walker voice about turbines and toxic air. “I try not to revisit stuff,” Walter says. “I want to explore different heads. Supposing they all came into one room together and had dinner—Lady Caroline would not talk to Walker. She’d say, ‘Go and wash your hands, dear.’”
She enjoys the thought experiment but insists the separation is survival. “That’s what motivates me,” she says. “To go into new territory. I don’t want to sound like me. I want to sound like someone else. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Of course, fans want to know what actors know—how much of the ending they’ve been told, whether they’re in on the secrets. Walter laughs at that, too. “In a perfect world, I would want to know where the story is ending,” she says. “That’s what I’m used to in theater. You know Hamlet ends up dead. It’s kind of important in some ways to be in charge of the story.” But television doesn’t work that way. “The pressures of writing mean people are interweaving with what they’re saying in today’s cut and imagining something else tomorrow. For an actor, I just say: on a need-to-know basis. Tell me what my character knows. That’s enough.”
She draws the line at murder mysteries where even the killer is kept in the dark. “If I was acting the murderer and they suddenly said, ‘Actually, you did it,’ I’d be furious,” she says. “I would have played the whole thing differently if I’d known.”
Walter watches the shows when they air like everyone else, even Succession, where she knew the big twist of Logan Roy’s death but hadn’t been on set to see it. “It’s the show that keeps giving,” she says. “Even though I knew what happens, I didn’t actually see it. I wasn’t in the room. So it was still a surprise.” She likens it to football. “You don’t want to tell people the score until they’ve watched the game.”
That logic extends to Silo, where the mystery is the whole point. “Even knowing how it ends doesn’t mean much, because I haven’t read the books,” she admits. “So it’s still a mystery to me. It’s like a complete story unto itself.” She also appreciates the genre’s built-in philosophy. “It allows us to write about the present in a way we can’t when we’re in the middle of it,” she says. “Maybe we’re all living a lie. Maybe we’re all believing something out there is scary. It’s not a million miles away from medieval times when everyone believed they’d go to hell if they did something wrong. It’s a way of controlling people. And we still have lots of models that echo that now. The best we can do is ask: Why am I being told this? Who’s telling me? Whose interest is it in for me to believe it?”
That’s about as close as Walter gets to optimism, though she offers a practical solution. “Go out and roll in the grass and look at the sky,” she says. “Turn the TV off and have a good day in the sun.”
Still, the TV keeps calling. She’s worked with seemingly everyone. But the name that still turns heads is Roger Daltrey. Yes, Walter co-starred with The Who’s frontman in a 1999 fantasy miniseries called The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns. “He was so sweet,” she says. “We were working all day in very hot sun with stupid costumes, and he’d suddenly say, ‘I’ve got a gig tonight.’ He’d hop in a helicopter, go to Leeds, do a gig, and then come back the next day to film. He was so good-natured. I couldn’t believe it was Roger Daltrey I was dealing with.”
She even has a photo stash from that shoot, back in the days when actors could take pictures on set without worrying about the internet. “One of them is Kieran Culkin,” she says, amused. “He was playing an elf or a leprechaun. I have a picture of him lying back on a grassy bank looking cheeky. So I worked with Roger Daltrey and Kieran Culkin in the same fantasy movie about leprechauns. Try topping that.”
Which makes perfect sense: in Harriet Walter’s career, the strangest combinations always seem to end up in the same room. She makes them convincing not by “acting time” or knowing the ending, but by being odd enough, human enough, to make us believe.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
