In Netflix sci-fi epic series 3 Body Problem, British actor Alex Sharp stars as Will Downing, a terminally-ill scientist who not only manages profound romantic heartbreak, but ultimately transcends the limits of human existence.
Plucked straight out of Julliard to play the lead character of Christopher Boone in the Marianne Elliott-directed stage production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Sharpe won a Tony for the role. He went on to star opposite Lily Collins in the film To the Bone, as activist Rennie Davis in The Trial of the Chicago 7 and with Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson in The Hustle, before playing opposite Bill Nighy in Living and with Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter in One Life, the 2023 film about British humanitarian Nicholas Winton, who rescued hundreds of Jewish children from occupied Poland.
3 Body Problem, from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss with Alexander Woo (True Blood), based on the novels by Liu Cixin, has recently been picked up by Netflix for new episodes to conclude the story. It follows the story of humanity’s first contact with an alien civilization and the battle to confront their impending threat to our world.
Here, Sharp explains how he leaned into the challenge of 3 Body Problem, inhabiting a man facing his untimely death in the midst of mind-melting otherworldy events, in a role that he says completely changed his life.
DEADLINE: You’re in LA right now, as a fellow Brit, what do you make of it?
I actually do like it. I think I used to really not like it and avoid it at all costs, but it’s grown on me. I think I just found it quite overwhelming at the beginning of my career, which was the first time I ever went there. I like the weather. I definitely have seasonal affective disorder, I think, so it’s quite nice to be in the sunshine. I just moved back to London five months ago. I was in Upstate New York, which is also very intense weather, but now I’m struggling a bit to be back there, and yeah, I might be coming out this way sooner than later, maybe.
DEADLINE: What was the process of coming to 3 Body Problem?
When I auditioned, it was sort of shrouded in high-profile Netflix projects mystery. But I was told, you’re not allowed to know anything. None of us know anything. But obviously, you can Google a little bit, knowing about the books. But even just in the two scenes that were the audition scenes, when dialogue is really cleverly and richly written and there’s no fat on the bone in terms of storytelling. You can gather quite a lot of information just from a couple of scenes. So, I was intrigued by the character, although I knew almost nothing. Little did I know the full journey that he went on at that point, what it was going to take to get there. But I was immediately intrigued.
DEADLINE: You’d been in the 2019 unaired prequel pilot of Game of Thrones. Given that, how was it to work with Game of Thrones creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff?
The Game of Thrones thing was kind of strange, because it was off the back of the show, but it was not really anything to do with David and Dan. They never really made reference to it. It never really came up. I think we might’ve briefly discussed pubs that we liked in Belfast, but outside of that, there wasn’t much.
I was playing an almost opposite character in that I was a bad guy in the Game of Thrones thing. So, it was a very, very different thing and they weren’t involved, but I don’t think the conversation went beyond, oh yeah, I really liked that pub.
DEADLINE: How did David and Dan and Alex explain your character of Will in 3 Body Problem to you?
They described the character to me and the character’s arc in Season 1 as the heart of the season. And I thought, oh, Jesus, no pressure. One of the things I was worried about with the character was, I mean, it’s beautifully written and this would have been completely on me, but not to make something like that too sentimental. I weirdly kept thinking about a Patrick Marber quote from that play, Closer. There’s a line in that where one of the characters describes a heart as, it’s not a pretty, sentimental shape, it looks like a human fist covered in blood. So, I tried to think about how to make him—because his story is so romantic and so heartbreaking—simply as human and relatable as possible. So that was my first instinct, to attempt that. But he’s really going through a very, very particular set of circumstances. And it wasn’t something I could relate to, really. As Alex just walking around the world, I’m not walking around totally at peace with my own mortality. That would be nice, but that’s not happening.
DEADLINE: Right. We’re not all zen and at complete peace philosophically.
No. It was about creatively trying to find, what are the ways in to get my own psychology as close to that as I possibly can? Which was really challenging and was probably the most challenging thing I’ve ever done on screen, but really rewarding. It sounds dramatic, but it did kind of completely change my life.
DEADLINE: How so?
Well, I think in Western civilization, we have a very cautious relationship to mortality. And even just the way we do funerals versus the way perhaps it’s done in the East or the Southeast. I’m thinking about specifically Varanasi in India. The first time I went there changed my life, changed my perception on death and on our relationship to death. And I just think Western society is behind on that in a multitude of ways. Not in the literal sense of how we have a funeral, how we deal with death, how we mourn, how we talk about grief, but also just in how we live as well, because I think obviously, they’re very connected.
It was very personal to me as well. I was losing someone at the same time, which I won’t go into, but it made me feel really, really uncomfortable. And I remember, when I first read the script, I felt annoyed and was walking around the house just putting stuff away very loudly, just thinking, well, maybe I won’t do this job. I got grumpy because it terrified me so much. I was trying to find an excuse to give myself to not do it.
But then when I decided to do it, it’s one of those jobs, I think for me, it was like, I either do it fully or it’s probably best not to do it. And so, I just tried to find all these different routes into it, which were absolutely perspective-altering in the end.
DEADLINE: Did you do specific research into end of life or people living with illness, or was it more just in your mind?
Ultimately, it was in my mind, but it was the way to shift, to help myself get there. Reading a lot of books on end-of-life care, reading books, autobiographies, articles, essays by people who have been terminally ill, and writing from that altered state of almost immense clarity, but also sadness, of course, as well. And then also, because the character had pancreatic cancer, and the number one symptom of that is weight loss. And the last thing that the world needs is another straight white male actor talking about how he lost weight for a part.
DEADLINE: But you did.
That was a significant part as well, just because I thought it would be really absurdly disrespectful not to make some kind of effort to represent the truth of that. And that tied into the emotional part of the journey as well, just going through that journey of losing weight. Because the character, he really loses everything. He loses his friend, he’s lost his career, he’s lost the girl that he loves.
It was interesting doing this project, because a lot of the time my pals were sort of on a harness flying through an alternate reality on a green screen.
DEADLINE: Yes, they’re flying around doing weird, crazy things in alternate realities.
Yeah. Or they’re seeing numbers and the sky’s blinking, and just really cool s–t, and very exciting stuff. I mean, my scenes were with one other person, and often alone. There’s nowhere to hide. Also, the character is already so stripped back. So, it was a really interesting exercise in simplicity. Because being on a set, you are always crippled out of the blue with blinding levels of self-doubt. That’s just part of being… I mean, I don’t know any actor who doesn’t experience that. And I think with a character that’s so still and so quiet, I really just had to go to the furthest lengths I could to just make everything very still and very protected. You have to protect yourself from the distractions. I think, it’s a huge part of set life, especially with a character like Will. It just felt like a very distinct, different track.
DEADLINE: How did you build those connections with your co-stars?
Well, different directors work in ways. Jeremy Podeswa likes to rehearse. He likes to kind of map things out physically, almost like blocking, but doesn’t rehearse the acting beats as much. So, you’re kind of pivoting with the different directors. But we had done so much work, and I always try and do this, develop as much of a relationship with my castmates as I possibly can, because it’s about trust. Especially scenes like those with Jovan [Adepo] and Jess [Hong], and the scene with John Bradley on the bench at the beginning. They’re really tough scenes and they’re really, really delicate scenes, and they’re very simple. They’re just two people sitting there, but they are, in terms of the human profundity scale… they really plummet downwards.
I think it’s so important, in my opinion—everyone works differently of course—just to have as much trust as is possible. So usually that’s gathered by just going out for gin and tonics quite a lot. But we talked about the characters and the scenes and stuff a lot.
DEADLINE: When you got into Julliard, you auditioned with a play you said was written by a little- known English playwright, but it was actually written by you. I love that you did that.
When you audition for Julliard, you have to have two Shakespeares and one contemporary monologue, and I could find about 48 Shakespeare monologues that I liked, but I couldn’t find one that I felt juxtaposed what I had in the Shakespeares that I was bringing. I did Hamlet and Macbeth, maybe? I think I prepared four, just because I was scared that they would be like, “We don’t like those,” and I would not have any options. And then, I had listened to a radio play about PTSD and characters in the Falklands War, and it just inspired me to create this character, and then it turned into a short play, and I just kept working on this one monologue in it. And as I was working on writing it, just out of interest, just for myself, with no idea of doing it as a play or anything, this monologue, I was saying it out loud a lot, and then it was just kind of convenient. But they say very strictly, “You’re not allowed to write your own material.”
DEADLINE: What name did you give this fictional playwright?
I can’t remember. I told the teachers [the truth] later, and they didn’t care at all.
DEADLINE: What it was like for you to come out of college and go straight into almost immediately winning a Tony for a Broadway play, and then boom, into multiple screen roles. What was that like to get shot out of that cannon?
Well, I was of course extremely surprised. This sounds cliché, but it really was like something that happens to someone else. So, I was obviously, very, very grateful to Marianne Elliott who put me in that play and completely trusted me with no prior evidence that I could lead a show. I still feel so deeply grateful to her. Actually, I need to email her. We’re still in touch.
It was also very intense and overwhelming, because it happened very quickly, and I think I was so focused. I was so terrified. And to get an opportunity like that on your first job ever is just beyond a dream. But then of course, my fear that I was going to mess it up somehow, because I was doing things quite differently to how it had been done in London, and a very specific idea of the character. And just that play, that character, it’s so labor-intensive. You are dripping with sweat 15 minutes in. He doesn’t leave the stage for two and a half hours. It’s so emotional, screaming and crying, and it was very intense.
And at the same time, I felt a couple steps behind on the journey of, suddenly people knew who I was. Which was wonderful. I mean, it’s a very, very first world problem for people to come up to you. It’s always wonderful and moving but I was just overwhelmed by it as well. And everything changed overnight, in the most incredible ways, but also in ways I didn’t really understand at the time.
There were two things that kind of kept me through that mayhem, which were, every night, no matter what happened, no matter how fancy a suit I had on, if I was at some gala thing or whatever was going on, I had to be at the theater at 6:30 and there were 1000 people who’d never seen the play before, and I had to find something new and give it everything I could for those 1000 people. And that meant a lot to me, constantly trying to improve it. I think I did it about 400 times.
DEADLINE: What’s up next for you and what’s your dream, in terms of what you want to do?
I’ve been saying I’m not a superstitious person, but then I clearly am, because I keep being superstitious about things, but there’s a part in a film with a very particular director, a very particular character, which I am completely obsessed with, but it’s on my mind constantly. It’s kind of gripped me, but I don’t want to jinx it yet. I don’t know if I have an all-time dream role, but I mean, in this chapter of my life, it’s my all-time dream role.
I don’t really know what I’m going to be obsessed with. That’s kind of the fun of it, is that I just don’t know. So, I read everything that is sent to me. I don’t care if it’s a lead or a really small supporting role, or if it’s blockbuster film or a tiny indie film. It really doesn’t matter, because it’s almost out of my control. When I read a certain character, because of where I’m at in my life or for some other magical, unknown reason, I’ll just get fixated on it, obsessed with it. I never really know what it is until I’ve seen it.
