I just came across this great little interview with Damien and Lauren O'Neil from 'London Student'.

Here are some excerpts from Damien but the whole article/interview is well worth the read here!

The two actors had spent the day in camera rehearsals for their upcoming NT Live broadcast. I asked if it became harder to act, knowing that hundreds of thousands of people, rather than the usual few hundred, were watching. ‘Cheers for that’, Damien said. ‘Yeah I’ve just bottled it, did you?’ says Lauren. ‘It’s exciting’ says Damien, ‘ but terrifying – and rightly so! This is a new technology and a new outlet for theatre and it means people all over the country and all over the world get to see it’. 

Both seemed very enthused by Anthony Sher’s involvement. Damien commented that ‘he was also doing broken glass on the west end. So we’d rehearse every day until 5 O’clock and then he’d go and do a two and a half hour show in the west end, getting in at 11 O’clock and then be in first thing in the morning. But you’d never know it’. Lauren nodded, ‘he’s absolutely amazing’. He’s so exciting to watch’, Damien added and ‘he gives you that confidence to give him something back. With him it was so real’

Being a ‘love letter to filmed’ as one critic called it, the production makes excellent and extensive use of film segments, thus requiring impeccable timing on the part of the actors. Lauren said that it essentially boiled down to ‘more variables to go wrong. But the tech people are amazing and the way it’s timed with them with the music and the films is like how have you done that’. She points out that the slickness of such transitions are ‘down to rehearsal’. ‘We had all that kind of thing’, the films, ‘in the rehearsal room so tech wasn’t as torturous as it would have been’. A triumph of the technical department, Damien told me how the ‘videos were all shot over four days and then edited within a week’ so that the actors could rehearse with them from the very beginning.

One thing Damien seemed enthusiastic about was the fact that this play was ‘about so many things’. He said that when he was sent the script he ‘looked though it, looking mainly for the narrative and the storyline. But then you read it again and think good god what isn’t in this play!’. ‘It’s epic isn’t it’ replies Lauren. They both agreed that the process of rehearsal was a ‘two-way thing, where both Nick Hytner, the director and Nicholas Wright allowed them to help form and ‘create the character between us’.