Interview: Samuel West & Callum Woodhouse
Actors Samuel West and Callum Woodhouse play the bickering brothers of All Creatures Great and Small, Siegfried and Tristan Farnon. Together in a Season 2 interview with MASTERPIECE, they delve into the brothers’ relationship and backstories, share insights on character developments…and pull back the curtain on a couple of very messy animal encounters on set!
It seems like Tricki Woo has switched up who his favorite vet is this year and moved on from Uncle Herriot and Tristan to Siegfried. Samuel, how does it feel to be Tricki Woo’s favorite this season, and Callum, how did it feel to have Tricki move on? [Watch Tricki Woo Chooses…Who? to find out who the cast thinks Tricki likes best!]
Samuel West: Well, rather to my surprise! One of the pleasures of playing somebody who’s set in his ways is that you feel those tectonic plates shift slowly sometimes, and with quite a lot of cracking. Siegfried’s prejudiced against pets—he believes that dogs should be working dogs, and a Pekingese is in no sense a working dog. But he actually has moments of loneliness, and he understands that in Mrs. Pumphrey. She’s an extraordinarily able woman; she’s got a very nice big house; she’s got a lot of interests; and yet you are left no doubt about the importance of this animal companion to treat her loneliness now that she’s a widow. And Siegfried is a widower, and I think he gets the point.
Callum Woodhouse: Oh, it’s quite upsetting, I’ve got to be honest. [Laughs] The time between Seasons 1 and 2 is when we got our dog, Ralph. I’m all for Ralph now anyway, so it’s fine.
Were there any memorable moments or particular challenges that either of you faced with animals this season?
Callum Woodhouse: The calving at Dobson’s Farm [in Episode 4] was a funny one. There are regulations around filming with cows they can only be down for five minutes at a time, so we only have a five minute window to do the scene as many times as we can, and then the cow gets up and we set up for the next shot, unless we’ve not quite got it and we need to go again. So there was one five minute window at Dobson’s where the cow had been down for maybe a minute, and we had four minutes left. I was mid-line when I felt a warm jet just hit me in the neck and run down my chest and down my arm, and I realized that the cow had just peed all over me and we had to keep going for another four minutes. This isn’t something where you can be like, “Oh, I’ve been weed on. I don’t want to carry on!”
Samuel West: “I can’t work like this!”
Callum Woodhouse: Yeah, “I can’t work under these conditions!” The cow was down for another four minutes, and we ran the scene another couple of times. And then we got to five minutes, and they were like, “Okay. Get the cow up.” I went to stand up and I was like, “Thank God. I can change this top and I can dry down.” And literally as I stood up, the cow then pooed all over my hand. In one five-minute window, I had all things happen. And I stood up covered in pee and poo, and Dean, our animal handler, took one look at me and just went, “Woo!” Cheered. I’m sure he trained the cow to do it to me. And he had gotten his wish.
That brings to mind the story in Episode 2 where all three vets treat Merrick’s cow, whose stomach shoots out a bunch of muck. Was that similarly disgusting?
Callum Woodhouse: I was really lucky to avoid that. Sam and Nick, they had it in their eyes. And James Fleet [Colonel Merrick], I remember seeing him after the shot, just rinsing out his eyeballs with saline! Poor James Fleet, bless him, he’ll never want to come back. No, actually, even on the car ride back from that, he was like, “I can’t wait, hopefully they’ll get me back.” After a stomach exploded in his face! I think that’s one of the biggest compliments to the show.
Samuel West: They made it out of a sort of soup. It was very good, sort of a spinach and oat smoothie, and it was organic. They kept it cold so that it wouldn’t go rotten or ferment. Of course, had it come out of a cow, it would have been really warm and steaming. So [the soup mixture] wasn’t the problem so much as it was so cold that it was like being hit with jets of iced water, and then sort of having to smile about it. And we did it twice, didn’t we?
Callum Woodhouse:Â I came away very unscathed with that one. I think I had a few specs on my white coat.
One of Siegfried’s mottos is “semper progretiem” [“always progressing”], but he sometimes struggles with change. How is he evolving as a vet?
Samuel West: I think it’s always been important to him to be a good vet, partly because he likes people thinking he’s clever, and partly because, like a lot of professional people, the standards to which he holds himself are considerable, and he wants to be at the forefront of the practice. And the practice, in the 1930s, is changing quite fast: there are tranquilizers and antibiotics and hormones available, or at least just over the horizon, which are different from some of the very frustrating farmers’ and old wives’ tales cures that we’ve had to put up with for dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of years. But there’s a couple of points in the series where he emphasizes how modern he wants the practice to be, even though they don’t have an x-ray machine like the practice in Glasgow which James works with. And he has some quite old fashioned ideas about pets or animal companions.
How has his relationship with Tristan changed, as a vet and as a brother?
Samuel West: I think he secretly wants the practice to be successful and wants his brother to be part of that. In Season 2, Siegfried is learning to trust Tristan’s ability, overcoming his own prejudices about his younger brother—which are considerable—realizing that he doesn’t know him as well as he thought he did, and that he’s eventually enormously proud of him. But unfortunately, he’s done this terrible thing, lying about his exam results.
In my household, when somebody lies, we try and separate the deed from the lie, rather than saying that all lying is wrong. And Siegfried does it with the best of intentions, but it comes back and bites him on the bum. He spends much of the series trying to work out how to break the news, and when he does break it, he doesn’t break it at all well…and also, he can never really admit that he’s wrong. There was a very interesting parallel for me on a personal level, because if James is the child that Siegfried wishes he’d had, then Tristan is the child that Siegfried wishes he hadn’t had. And many times when I was having trouble with my own children during lockdown, I realized that I was trying to be controlling and pedagogical with them in very much the way that Siegfried was with Tristan. Whereas the thing that comes back to me as a parent is that parenthood is gardening, not carpentry. You can’t knock bits off somebody to make them the person you want them to be—you have to let them grow into who they are. And that’s not something Siegfried is very good at, but he gets better.
Callum, do you have a favorite moment from Season 2 that Siegfried and Tristan share?
Callum Woodhouse: There’s a couple for me. One—and actually, I remember thinking when we filmed it, that it was a really nice moment, but it sort of slipped my mind. But then I remember watching the episode—it was Episode 5, at the end of the cricket match, and someone had put a screenshot of the two frames up on Twitter. It was when me and James come back to sit, to take our shin pads off, and Sam, you put your hand on my shoulder and then there’s just a little moment, and then he moves off. I think that’s just a really nice one.
Samuel West: It’s a delight to play with Callum. When we were cast, we thought, we’re good brothers, but Cal is so impossibly young for one so talented, and I’m enormously old, and we had to work out why there was this 19-year gap between us. We made it 19 years, which we could just about make believable. All of that backstory has begun to feed into the series. We made a kind of timeline, only in our heads really, about how old our parents were and how much I had to look after you when you were young, and how I didn’t really like that very much. It’s all unspoken, but it feels real. And I think that’s really helped, I must say.
Callum Woodhouse: One of the things we agreed upon, like the ages we were when we lost our dad, was that it was at an age where you tried to fill in as Tristan’s father. You could have had the best intentions in the world, but you’re never going to fill in for someone else’s dad, really, in a proper way like that. So Tristan ended up losing a brother and a father. And that’s the basis for this slightly strained relationship.
Samuel West: I think when I see you having fun at college and also having sex at college, all I presume on my money, it reminds me that Siegfried was a bit of a good boy. He went into the family business—it’s implied specifically in Episode 5 that his father took him around when he was nine—and his father was quite strict, so Siegfried wanted to impress him by being good at his job. He studied hard, and perhaps veterinary college wasn’t quite as much fun as Tristan is having, which is doubly annoying, really, because not only has he seen his very talented brother do it the way he’d want to do it now that their dad is gone, but also it turns out that he had this relationship with their dad that Siegfried didn’t really have, through cricket. Obviously, Tristan was just more fun to be with.
What was it like to experience the revelation that their father used to go and see Tristan play cricket?
Callum Woodhouse: I’m sure those types of details are somewhere out there, but you can never fully know where the writers plan on taking it. So to read that in the script, having another little morsel you find out about, like “Oh, right, he used to do that with his dad”—those types of things are always just so valuable.
Samuel West: Well, it’s always weird, isn’t it, when people know something about somebody that you thought you knew, that you didn’t know—it feels slightly violating. And at the same time, it’s also delightful that Tristan had that relationship with our dad. I was doing something very different at the time. I was much older, I was practicing, I was nearly married, and so I didn’t probably see as much of my dad. I had other things to do. And the fact that he was having a relationship with Tristan I never really had, I don’t know, it’s quite painful.
And also, it was really interesting that as we said it, it came into being. When you get to play people for more than one season, you realize that you’re sort of writing their lives. We’ve been lucky enough to play them for two seasons, now coming up for three seasons next year, and it feels like we are sort of creating their back stories as we go. And as long as we can agree on them and they’re fun to play, that’s really exciting.
As the brothers make progress in their relationship, can we hope that Tristan and Siegfried find common ground as vets, as well?
Samuel West: There’s quite a lot of blood under the bridge. In Season 2, I say that veterinary science is a calling, just after I say that perhaps he hasn’t got it, because I think that I’ve got it. I think Siegfried could never have been anything other than a vet, and I suppose I think that Tristan could have been almost anything else, and maybe he does too. But actually, what his behavior around the practice teaches Siegfried is that he does have that calling if he wants it, and he has lots of other things, besides. To Siegfried’s annoyance, I think Tristan is probably a more naturally talented vet than Siegfried is. Like a lot of younger people, it just comes more easily to them. And that’s really annoying. [Laughs]
Callum Woodhouse: I think Tristan has really got the emotional intelligence completely nailed down. He just understands people. The budgie storyline [where Tristan replaces Mrs. Tompkin’s dead bird with a live one] is obviously a really funny storyline, and I don’t know if maybe this is a bad thing to say—and it says a lot about me—but I really agree with what Tristan does. He keeps a woman in her older years really happy, rather than being honest about what happened. Sam, it’s what you said earlier, about separating the line from the deed: the deed on that is he wants to keep someone happy.
