Litvinenko star David Tennant explains his unrecognisable transformation
David Tennant has opened up about his huge physical transformation for the titular role in Litvinenko.
The Doctor Who star plays the real-life Russian dissident in ITVX's new drama, focusing on his poisoning in 2006 and his wife Marina's (Margarita Levieva) tireless efforts to persuade the British authorities to acknowledge the role of the Russian State in his death.
For the role, the drama recreates the iconic photograph of Alexander Litvinenko on his deathbed in hospital, Tennant revealing the process involved a lot of people.
"That was quite a technical process, in a way, because it was about lots of people," he said (via Radio Times). "The art department, the make-up department, the costume department, the lighting department, all trying to get their side of this image correct and me trying to, quite technically, recreate that in the first instance.
"That involved a lot of very skilled people," he continued, revealing the make up, prosthetics and costume team looked at photographs to work out the hospital gown and how it was arranged.
"If you can get that image right, you allow the audience into the detail of the story, I hope," Tennant said, adding that the transformation took "several hours" and had "a number of stages".
"When we got that image and I saw it on a laptop screen, for a second you couldn't quite tell if you were looking at the original or what we had just done," he continued.
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"That was the moment you thought: 'This feels like an effort worth making. If we can get this right and remind people of that image from 2006, then that will, hopefully, give us a great starting point to make this story as impactful as it needs to be.'"
Speaking further about the powerful image, Tennant noted: "The veracity of that is very important. That image of him. When people hear his name, that’s the image that comes into most of our minds. Of that wasting body in a hospital bed. We had to get that right.
"Whether other characters look like their real life versions doesn't really influence the telling of the story. But that image of Alexander Litvinenko that bounced around the world, that attracted the world's attention, is so vivid and is iconic – if that is an appropriate term to use for something that is about a real human tragedy."
Litvinenko launches December 15 on ITVX.
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