This script has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.
When Skeldale House gets a call from the wealthy Beauvoir family requesting Captain Farnon to take a look at their sick horse Philbrick, both Captain Farnons spring into action.
CLIP
Charlotte: Captain Farnon?
Siegfried & Tristan: Morning.
Charlotte: That is impressive. You ask for one Captain Farnon, and they provide a spare.
Tristan: An administrative mix-up. It’s a family practice.
Charlotte: Two brothers – and two Captains then? Daddy told me to ask for Captain Farnon. Apparently he’s a marvel with horses.
It’s a matter of hotly contested debate between Siegfried and Tristan as to which Captain Farnon Mr. Beauvoir intended, but it does become clear which Captain Farnon his daughter Charlotte is interested in seeing again.
CLIP
Charlotte: There’s a soirée – tonight – up at Orley Castle. Might help you take your mind off things. That is to say – I was rather hoping we could enjoy it together. You don’t want to.
Tristan: No, no, I’d be delighted. Yes!
While Charlotte and Tristan’s courtship is doing well, Philbrick the horse is not. Siegfried and Tristan have yet to pinpoint his illness, and his latest turn causes some concern right before the string quartet’s performance at the soirée. But not to worry, a few more last minute tests show that Philbrick is suffering from a kidney infection, nothing a little antibiotic can’t clear up. Although it’s too late for Charlotte and Tristan to make the performance, they make the most of their situation and share a tender dance in the stables.
Today, we’re joined by actor Gaia Wise to discuss playing the down to earth Charlotte Beauvoir, and what the future holds for her and Tristan.
Jace Lacob: And this week we are joined by All Creatures Great and Small star Gaia Wise. Welcome, Gaia.
Gaia Wise: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited.
Jace Lacob: It is my pleasure. Your first appearance on All Creatures Great and Small is in Episode Three, which finds Charlotte Beauvoir asking for help from Captain Farnon for her riding horse Philbrick. What did you make of the character of Charlotte when you read for the role?
Gaia Wise: I loved her tenacity and her absolute, staunch character. She’s upper class, she’s from wealth and privilege, but she also, having that, went to the war. Because I think she has this absolute belief like she has with people and with animals to care for them. And the care that she has for her animals, and Philbrick especially, then bleeds itself into her relationship with Tristan in terms of the fact that I think that they both understand what it is. And she says in one of the episodes, “People who weren’t there can’t really understand, can they?” And when I read that, I thought that was so wonderful, because it’s not often you find that the female stories of especially World War I being written, and World War II being written about, and I felt very privileged to play her and to be able to bring this staunch, emotional, flawed, open character to the screen.
Jace Lacob: So tell me what the audition process was like for All Creatures. Did you have to do a chemistry read with Callum Woodhouse or anything of the sort?
Gaia Wise: It was about a year ago, I got the job. It was in January, I think, late January, early February. I was in Thailand, I went away for seven weeks with my partner. And we were on Koh Phi Phi in Thailand and there’s an 11 hour time difference. And I remember waking up to a voicemail from my agent where he went “pick up the phone, pick up the phone!”
And I remember I was on a long boat going from our hotel to… we were scuba diving because I’m a scuba diver, and we were doing a wreck diving course. And I had nobody to tell because no one was awake in London. So it was me and all of the other divers and our instructors and my boyfriend and I was like, I’ve got a job! And we’d recorded the audition in the jungle in Chiang Rai, which is in the north of Thailand. It’s a dream job in many, many ways, and I think getting the job in the way I did foreshadowed how wonderful it was going to be.
Jace Lacob: Were you familiar at all with All Creatures before being cast, the books or the television series?
Gaia Wise: Yes!
Jace Lacob: They were on your radar?
Gaia Wise: I’ve got the books on my shelf. I’m staring right now at my fireplace, which is surrounded by alphabetized books. And I have the Herriot book collection on my shelves. So I was very, very familiar. And I knew the old series, and I knew what the wicked actors got up to in the ‘70s. But I didn’t know any of the actors except Sam West, who plays Siegfried, worked with my mum in Carrington in the ‘90s, when he was in his early 20s, like I am. And that was a wonderful thing, was being on set with him and he would look at me sometimes and he would go, “oh, God, you look like your mother.” And that was really wonderful. So I was familiar with the books and I knew the old TV series, and I knew the new series as well. So I was very excited to be part of this new chapter.
Jace Lacob: So you mentioned Sam, who yes, was in Howards End in Carrington. Did he offer you any advice ahead of time before that first day on set?
Gaia Wise: No, I think it was more, what Sam and what Callum and Nick and Anna and all of them offered me was a complete openness and I felt very held as a young actor and understood. And there’s such a feeling of community and of family in this particular filming space and with all the people. And it’s always hard if you come on to a set in Season Six when it’s a new character and people love the old characters. And I find it hard to not look at the Instagram stories that are like, well, Tristan can’t be with Charlotte because Charlotte is, you know, upper class and blah. And I’m like, no, please, I really want to stay around! But it’s the will of the people. What Sam and what he gave me and the advice he just said was to have fun, basically.
Jace Lacob: I mean, can we just say they are the loveliest cast? An incredible cast of people.
Gaia Wise: You have no idea! And Patricia, Dame Pat Hodge, I hadn’t met her before, but she knows my family very well. And she came and found me in my trailer and I walked out of my trailer and she was just so wonderful and lovely. And you think, she’s such a force in life and on screen, that I think I felt a little bit like, oh, God, that’s Patricia Hodge! And she was just the loveliest. And what’s wonderful is that after two days, three days, four days, you just become part of the family.
Jace Lacob: That’s so nice. So, I want to talk about her first appearance, Charlotte. She very initially seems like a well-heeled debutante with very few troubles. But we quickly learn, as you say, she served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service in Sicily, a fact that quickly bonds her with Tristan. And while they come from different worlds, that shared experience of the horror of war links them in an almost existential way. Has returning to regular life been as difficult for Charlotte as it has been for Tristan?
Gaia Wise: I think it has in a different way. I think Tristan has been on the front lines and Charlotte was in Sicily looking after animals. I think she witnessed firsthand, but also with a degree of separation, whereas Tristan’s was very, very much on the front line. But I think what she sees in him and what he sees in her is an absolute understanding of the pointlessness of the loss and of the fighting. But also, she couldn’t have done what she did without him, and he couldn’t have done what he did without her. She’s experiencing the aftermath of all of the fighting and the trauma and the struggles, both with animals and people.
And that’s why she bonds so hard to Philbrick. Because all of the horses who served this country, they were all shot because it was not feasible, or there wasn’t the money to bring them over. And she would not let that happen. So for her, I think the idea of her being from money, what I loved most about her was that you meet her from money because she saved her horse from being shot. It’s not a sort of debutante character. It’s very, very much a character based in humanity and love.
Jace Lacob: Philbrick is this beautiful black maremmano horse. He is her pride and joy. And as you say, she trained him up after he was abandoned by an Italian army unit in Sicily. How does his background, from supply horse to riding horse act as an inversion of her own — born to wealth but serving on a battlefield? Do they mirror each other in some way as sort of opposites?
Gaia Wise: They do, they’re both survivors in many ways. And he’s not a riding horse. I think the whole point of her bringing him over is that he can then live out his life in luxury. And the horse who played Philbrick was called Liverpool, and he was 17 years old, and I loved him so much. And he was docile, but also feisty. And that’s kind of what I feel with Philbrick. It’s cliche to say, but I think that Charlotte and Philbrick saved each other. She went away to find purpose and probably to annoy her father, the wonderful Jonathan Hyde, but also to feel like she knows that she’s worthy and intelligent and fierce.
And in the society she was brought up into where the assumption would be she would marry into that. And she says, “I abandoned him on the altar”, basically. She feels like she can offer more and do more. And I think she’s seen Philbrick offer everything and do everything, and she just wanted to give him a comfortable, wonderful life because she knows she can. So there’s a dichotomy there as well of her wanting to find freedom and adventure and then finding an animal that she falls in love with, and wanting to offer him safety and security. And the two don’t necessarily intertwine.
Jace Lacob: It’s very clear she cares deeply for him, and I love the fact she plays classical music to calm him.
CLIP
Tristan: Well, I never. He’s a classical music fan.
Charlotte: I hope it soothes him. When I feel fraught, a spot of Elgar works miracles.
Jace Lacob: You can take the girl out of Britain, but I guess you can’t quite take Britain out of the girl.
Gaia Wise: Elgar’s Cello Concerto is my favorite piece of music ever written.
Jace Lacob: Did you feel this was somehow kismet?
Gaia Wise: I think it felt that way. If you haven’t listened to it, and I urge your listeners to, Elgar’s cello concerto is one of the most beautiful things. And he always said, when I die, think of me in this music drifting across the moors. So I didn’t feel like I had to do very much work to get into Charlotte. I felt very different backgrounds, different upbringing, but I did feel very much like we were quite soulfully intertwined.
Jace Lacob: I love that. She would have stayed in Sicily, I think, had it not been for malaria.
CLIP
Charlotte: Gosh, Philbrick, all those months dodging the Luftwaffe, and it’s now that you get poorly.
Tristan: Sorry, Philbrick was at war?
Charlotte: In Sicily. I was in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. And he was abandoned by an Italian army unit, so we took him for our supply lines. Such a dear boy – I retrained him as a riding horse.
Tristan: I was in Sicily.
Charlotte: I’d still be serving if those Italian mosquitoes hadn’t done for me.
Tristan: Malaria? Dreadful business.
Jace Lacob: Does she see the malaria as a lucky escape, her sort of blighty to get back to England, or is a failure of sorts, even one that’s out of her control?
Gaia Wise: No, I mean, if you think of the next lines that she has with Tristan where she says, it’s so odd, isn’t it? Along the lines of when you’re there, you don’t want to be there. And when you’re home, you want to be there. And weirdly, I attributed that, or I felt it was a little bit like Nanny McPhee, if you need me but do not want me, I have to stay. If you want me, but do not need me, I would have to go. It’s, I think, like that. You never quite know when you’re in an intensely emotional and physically demanding situation, how much you will miss it when you come back to mundane life. And that’s, I think, where she and Tristan really bond.
I think that she probably felt that she would have wanted to have stayed. And if she could have stayed, I believe that that would have been her thing. But she, at least in my head, when I was creating the character, she ran herself into the ground being the best nurse, being the best practitioner that she possibly could in a wholly foreign environment. So, the fact that she didn’t die is a miracle. And I’m very, very glad she didn’t, because I love her.
Jace Lacob: We also wouldn’t be having this conversation if she had.
Gaia Wise: Exactly, exactly! Or else I would have died in Sicily!
Jace Lacob: Off screen, off screen.
Gaia Wise: Yes, off screen, yes.
Jace Lacob: That passage you’re talking about, it. It. She says,
CLIP
Charlotte: Isn’t it strange? Back in Sicily – the dust, the flies, the sun roasting you in your tent. All I could think about was England. Now that I’m here…
Tristan: Yes.
Charlotte: Just takes some adjustment, I suppose.
Tristan: Afternoon.
Jace Lacob: The two of them do seem to exist somewhere between Italy and England. They’re sort of pulled by invisible strings.
Gaia Wise: They exist in an interim and a middle ground that neither one of them understands because neither one of them has… Tristan’s got PTSD, Charlotte probably does as well, but in a very different way. But they exist in this sort of weird field of not being anchored one way or the other. And they’re always trying to find the anchor.
Jace Lacob: I mean, how can you move forward into the future if you can’t let go of the past? And I feel like they are both treading water when they meet at this first time, and they can’t really move out of this strange limbo that they’re both in. Is that the thing that draws her to Tristan, this shared feeling, this common experience? Or is it something else, something more ephemeral?
Gaia Wise: I think it’s a combination. I think they’re both lost and wandering souls in different capacities. So I think them finding one another is so important. And I think their connection draws them together, and their understanding of the world and life in that way. But I also think that it would be daft not to say that there is a level of just attraction there, which I love, which is just two people who are suddenly thrust back into normality and they find one another and they find another person who completely understands, or at least can empathise more than the rest of the community with their experience, Tristan looking at Charlotte. And so I think there’s a level of just base connection, physical and emotional, and then also very much the fact that they’ve both been in a war zone in different capacities, but still in a war zone. And I loved that connection between them both.
MIDROLL
Jace Lacob: And we’re back with actor Gaia Wise. “People who weren’t there can’t really understand, can they?” you said that earlier. How has that sense changed her worldview or her outlook on life? Has it made her realize just how precious life is, both hers, Philbrick’s, Tristan’s, the average person she encounters?
Gaia Wise: Absolutely. And it’s also what she says about the Prime ministers changing. And she says, “Well, he won’t win, will he?” Because I think she’s got an understanding of how far humanity can sink and how awful human beings can be to one another. I think that she is disillusioned with the ideas she’s been brought up with, and the politics and the and everything. But she has faith and hope and I think she really believes in the goodness of humans. Animals have good in them, there’s no exterior motives or ulterior motives, it’s humans that you need to be worried about. And she still has the faith that there are really good people in this world.
Jace Lacob: It is the fear of gossip that propelled Charlotte to Italy. She says,
CLIP
Charlotte: Daddy said I’d evaded the altar for long enough – so he set up a marriage. Well, I rather jilted the poor chap – just knew I could never love him. Cue an enormous brouhaha, and me hatching a plan – entirely selfishly – to disappear where there’d be no gossip.
Jace Lacob: I mean, how does that sentiment capture Charlotte’s anxieties, but also her practicalities that she’s just so matter of fact about this?
Gaia Wise: I genuinely think that Charlotte has anxieties far beyond what I would have. I think she’s incredibly practical and intuitive and listens to her emotions far more than I do as a person. Like, I feel like I could and I should learn a lot from her because to get to the altar or to get to the day of a wedding and go, “Nope”, is wonderful madness, wonderful insanity. Because I think she completely understands that she’s got not a higher calling, but a higher calling for herself that doesn’t involve being a debutante, as I said before, and marrying when you’re young into a posh family.
And God bless her dad because he let her go. And that’s that wonderful scene with Jonathan where he says, I nearly lost her. And I said, well, you didn’t nearly lose me. And he went, well, I could have. And you think it was rare, and I’m not sure if it’s based in truth, but it would be lovely if it were. There’s a father of such high class and high society, looked at a completely wonderfully mad daughter who did not want to conform and who wanted to stay on her own trajectory wherever it took her, and him letting her go, realizing she might have gone to her death is, I think, a wonderful character arc and a wonderful storyline.
Jace Lacob: If you love someone, you have to let them go, regardless of the risk, knowing that hopefully they will come back and she does come back to him, more or less in one piece. More or less. She believes the British class system is on the way out, but it’s not gone yet. And despite her being so down to earth, Tris doesn’t fit into the world that Charlotte moves through so effortlessly. Is it a sign of her privilege that she can make a comment about the class system without fully experiencing that social stratification?
Gaia Wise: I think that she’s a very different form of the upper class woman because of what she’s gone through. I think she talks on it with Tris especially because they have a common understanding that they’ve both been in a fraught environment where class meant nothing. It’s different with her father, and he has to learn along the way to, I suppose, reconsider his morals and his way of acting with others. I think that Charlotte is only upper class by way of birth. I don’t think that mentally, emotionally or psychologically, she really retains any of her upbringing in that way. Physically she does, and she puts it on and has to maintain a facade, I suppose. But only exteriorly, I think.
Jace Lacob: I think she’s found the warrior beneath the debutante, that beneath that facade is who she really is. I love the scene where Charlotte kisses Tristan rather unexpectedly before they dance in the stables to the music on the gramophone. There is an instant chemistry in that scene between you and Callum. What is Cal like as a scene partner?
Gaia Wise: He’s one of the loveliest, most wonderful men I’ve ever met. Honest, open, emotionally available, and it gives such a raw, beautiful performance. He’s got this completely unabashed ability to be both guarded and emotional that I really wish I had as well. As an actor, he’s wonderful to learn off of. I felt that I benefited more being on set with Callum and watching him and feeling him as well. And we grew so close over this period and loved and still love one another. My birthday was last week and he came to my party with Nick Ralph who plays Herriot and the boys were there and I was like, it’s my boys. But I have a special connection with Callum, obviously, because we have to have one, that sort of transcends a relationship in that way because I love him. And then my character loves him in a different way. And what’s so wonderful is when the two combine, it creates magic, I hope.
Jace Lacob: It does, it does. I want to take a step back. Your first television roles were in a 2022 episode of Silent Witness, where you played the daughter of the slain UK health secretary. And an episode of The Chelsea Detective, where you played the daughter of a murdered psychotherapist with a penchant for —
Gaia Wise: A lot of murder victims’ children.
Jace Lacob: A lot of children of murder victims. That one, at least you had a penchant for poison pen notes and for throwing plates against the wall.
Gaia Wise: Yes.
Jace Lacob: What lessons did you take away from these experiences as a guest star?
Gaia Wise: It’s a hard business, it’s just hard. And it has changed so much and morphed so much. And the world as it was, I’m going to sound like Lord of the Rings here, the world as it was is not long… But I talked to my mum and it’s different than when she came up. And I’m not comparing myself to a Dame and a two-time Oscar winner, but I do sometimes go, mate, it’s so different and you don’t understand that. And getting those roles when I was younger, I was 21, 20, 22, I just turned 26 last week. And we were in Finland opening Dead of Winter, and they asked me, what do you want in your future? And I said, God, I just want to work. I love acting. Acting is the thing I love doing. And if I can do that and pay my bills and go on a holiday to France or whatever it is, and have some money to buy nice things for my parents and my partner and my friends, that’s all I want.
Jace Lacob: Was it always going to be in the cards for you, or..
Gaia Wise: There was never anything I was going to do. I’m third generation… I wanted to be a paleontologist.
Jace Lacob: Oh?
Gaia Wise: I love dinosaurs. I have a two meter tall dinosaur book.
Jace Lacob: Amazing.
Gaia Wise: But when you’re on set as a kid with your parents all the time, and that’s kind of your childhood, I would say, my childhood was on set. So I know not to step over the cables, like I know how it is to be on set. It’s like saying to the child of a butcher who’s in a butcher’s shop every day, why have you become a butcher? Or, your dad helped you become a butcher. It’s like, well, it probably did help, but also I was there every day.
Jace Lacob: So, I recently rewatched Dead of Winter and I love your performance as young Barb Sorenson. You only appear in flashbacks and a few scenes, but you ground that character so magnificently. It feels like a short film itself that this character swerves from the blush of first love to the loss of a child. What was it like creating this character in these short glimpses?
Gaia Wise: Mate, you were gonna make me cry. I’m so happy you saw it. It was crazy. Obviously, apart from All Creatures Great and Small, my favorite experience of all time was creating Barb with mum. And what I loved was for our first proper acting credit together, we were never on screen at the same time.
But to harken back to your question, it was the most remarkable thing. And as you said, I’m not in it very much, but I think the burden on my shoulders and on the shoulders of these scenes is the fact that you have to make people care about Barb and Karl’s relationship and about Barb herself, because it’s such a high paced thriller. And I did feel like I had to really bring a lot of emotion to those scenes, which was easy, because when Cúán and I did a chemistry read, he was the first guy, and I remember turning to Brian Kirk and I went, you don’t need anyone else. I don’t want to see anyone else, that’s my Karl. And to have a director, a crew around you who listen to that and are there is just beautiful.
Jace Lacob: So, my fingers are crossed that Charlotte sticks around for more All Creatures. But in the meantime what is next for you?
Gaia Wise: Well, I hope that Charlotte returns. I love her as a character so much. I love her relationship with Tristan. I think it’s very, very different to the other relationships that Tristan has had. I will drop everything to be in All Creatures. I’ve got quite a lot of audio things that I do. I think that from Lord of the Rings, I hope that people enjoyed listening to my voice. So I’ve got a couple of audiobooks coming out, but mainly focused on hopefully returning for Season Seven of All Creatures Great and Small.
Jace Lacob: Gaia Wise, thank you so very much.
Gaia Wise: Thank you so much for having me.
Next time in Victorian-era London, the unexpected becomes reality. Detective Phelps hires the services of Private Detective Eliza Scarlet to investigate a family matter.
CLIP
Clarence: So, I assume this case is highly confidential and no one must know that Inspector Phelps has hired us?
Eliza: You assume correctly.
Clarence: No one at all. Even if they are in the same line of business and we may feel compromised – – by our feelings towards them, even then….
Eliza: Clarence, if you’re attempting to give a coded message about myself and Inspector Blake at least try to be subtle.
Join us next week as we sit down with writer Rachael New to talk about this unexpected twist, and how she approached turning the tables in this episode of Miss Scarlet.
