Of Wolves and Men

Product Information

Today, the killing continues. Problem humans are using dynamite to blow up predator dens, and shooting them from planes and helicopters. They stake out dogs in heat, and then beat to death the wolves that mount them. Why? Why? Why?

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." The thing I found most interesting about this, for better or worse, was its relevance to modern genre fic tropes. I saw in werewolf stories the missing piece that explained what the Sith are in Star Wars, and by extension, what villains and mooks in comic books and fantasy are in general. They are the legacy of the embattled Christian worldview. Christians in 1100s Europe didn't, couldn't, see wolves as just animals going about their lives as God made them, and much less could they see the poor and afflicted as people. The Sith, villains in general, are incarnations of evil, servants of the Devil, because they are stories about good conquering evil: reenacting the central drama of our culture is their ultimate raison d'etre. When I read the scripts, I found it really hard to put them down – I wanted to get to the next episode but I was so frightened when I was reading them, I had to go upstairs and read them beside my sleeping husband because I was too scared to be sitting alone in the kitchen. I think Megan has done a brilliant job with these scripts, really skillful and it’s incredibly challenging to keep everybody's stories alive through six episodes but she has really kept us on our toes. Being able to play characters in these very extreme states was a big enticement as well.

Add your thoughts

WOLF has something for everyone, especially those who like a great crime thriller. It's got plenty of horror, plenty of crime and a lot of action. It's got great dilemmas, interpersonal relationships and lots of twists and turns - everything that you could want. WOLF is unique because the series follows two parallel, quite deep and complex cases. It manipulates time with one storyline happening faster than the other but the two gradually catch up with each other to meet in their final culmination. Some elements are quite fantastical and theatrical which juxtaposes against the grit, gore and the action. I think audiences are really going to enjoy it. The SONG IS ABOUT WILDNESS (OF WOLF AND MAN both). The song is well summated in the line "IN WILDNESS IS THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD". Rather than offering his own viewpoint, then (though it is not concealed and certainly emerges throughout the book), Lopez offers a panoply of myths, stories, and perspectives. The stories told by modern science (remembering that the book was published in 1978) ground our exploration, and surely Lopez's readers as a rule couldn't accept another starting point. But while we tend to want to trust this body of knowledge, and Lopez doesn't slander its epistemology and potential, it is rather thin and unsatisfying. There simply hasn't been enough work done for a complete picture of wolf behavior and ecology to emerge. When I first read the script, I read all six episodes in a day – I just couldn’t put them down. As I was reading, I would be thinking “I really want to play that scene” and then I’d read the next one and think the same. When I got to episode five, I read this particular scene and I just instantly thought, “right, I’m in”. I’ve been looking to play a different kind of character and I just loved Molina’s journey. It’s been nice to do the comedy, stupidity and lightness of him.

I very much agree with the opinion that this song is a representation of embracing your primal instincts that we all seem to have forsaken. I think audiences will be hooked on WOLF because you just can't see where it's coming from or where it's going. That is, for me, the definition of a great thriller. With some, you can quite often see perhaps who's being set up, who will turn out to be the killer or the wrongdoer. But here, you really can't tell. It is extremely thrilling.These guys give us a pretty bad time but not only that, they want to be heard and they want an audience. Honey has got a captive audience in us in the scene where the wonderful Juliet Stevenson, who plays Oliver’s wife, is hanging upside down while he trots out his opera performance from the Barber of Seville. On the surface, it’s a crazy, cruel comedic scene but it reveals how, on different levels, people can be and what they want from each other. The section on the Middle Ages was a little disappointing, in that Lopez (not a medievalist) seems to buy into popular ideas that they were a uniquely depressing, oppressive, and ignorant time, caught between the lights of Rome and the modern era. He may be right about how medieval culture in general viewed the wolf, but I am less confident that he really understands the context of the time. Still, he wrote this in 1978, when his view was more standard, I believe, and frankly medievalists are still fighting against that perception. The section of the book certainly isn’t bad: there’s a lot of good research into medieval bestiaries and other texts, and overall Lopez’s conclusions about the medieval view of wolves do help me understand the attitudes of later eras, since they are so closely linked. I am in a small cabin outside Fairbanks, Alaska, as I write these words. The cold sits down like iron here, and the long hours of winter darkness cause us to leave a light on most of the day. Outside, at thirty below, wood for the stove literally pops apart at the touch of the ax. I can see out across the short timber of the taiga when I am out there in the gray daylight.” I was chatting to Megan during preparation and there are almost points where Honey gets so wrapped up in what he's doing that he could do something really dangerous and regret it. To get into all of that was a real joy.