For Jack Farthing, starring in HBO and BBC’s new show Rain Dogs has been an exercise in exploring the nuances of entitlement. In Cash Carraway’s darkly funny series shining a light on modern class and sex inequalities, the British actor takes on the role of Selby - a self-proclaimed “classical homosexual’ with a hefty allowance (and a criminal record), who after a brief stint in prison comes back into the lives of his best friend Costello and her daughter to rescue them after they become homeless. Despite many advantages and a seemingly endless safety net, Selby is a deeply unhappy person whose loneliness leads him to addiction and violent outbursts - risking losing the two people that he cares about the most. Shortly after the show’s premiere, we spoke to Jack about Selby’s timeless charisma, the show’s depiction of a non-conventional family dynamic and the joy of acting with his co-star, Daisy May Cooper.
Left Top & blazer AMI Paris, pants Wooyoungmi, necklace Sweet Lime Juice
Right Full look Alexander McQueen
Why did you want to be a part of this project? What about Cash Carraway’s writing and vision spoke to you?
A lot of things! It’s the kind of writing that leaps off the page – the way it feels when you watch the show is definitely similar to how you feel when you read the scripts. It feels uniquely alive and alight, raw, truthful and confrontational in a really exciting, creative way. She writes these big characters that feel like mountains to climb for an actor.
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Your character, Selby, is certainly larger than life. How did you approach the process of building him?
Cash was very specific in the script – she introduces characters in a very chosen way. The first description of Selby said that he’s a “boarding school boy educated on Bret Easton Ellis and Jean-Luc Godard.” That gives you immediately this particular picture of the person and you have three points of reference as to who he might be. Then, along the way, there are just so many more breadcrumbs revealed. I loved the idea that he was timeless in comparison to Costello [the character played by Daisy May Cooper], who feels very much located in London of today. Selby has always felt to me like he’s somewhere else, like he’s from another time. So I looked back a lot to old charismatic movie stars and that kind of extravagant danger that people like, for example, young Peter O’Toole had.
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Right Full look Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello
Selby is in a very privileged position – no matter how recklessly he acts, he always has a safety net there waiting for him. What did you find most interesting about exploring this situation?
Materially, he’s very safe, but emotionally, he’s in great danger. He’s been given everything and nothing by his parents. He’s been given this allowance to leave his mom alone, she doesn’t want anything to do with him. So what was the most interesting for me was the fact that it’s a stereotype that’s broken down. He’s absolutely privileged, no doubt about it. But then you look into what privilege means in his particular circumstance and you see that there’s so much more going on and that he’s as bereft as he’s privileged. He has no idea how to love, he’s dealing with addiction. He’s got all sorts of demons that he’s fighting. In the same way that Costello is not just a single mom living below the poverty line – she’s the most unique and wide-ranging character.
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Right Full look Versace
What do you think is at the basis of this desire that Costello and Selby have to create a family together?
They’re somehow cosmically aligned. They are from such different walks of life, they meet at university, they fall in platonic love with each other and they just see each other so clearly. They share a cruel outlook on the world. They share their loneliness. But they come together and form an absolute cosmic attachment that is so intense that it’s toxic. From Selby’s perspective, he needs her so much that he hates her, his dependency becomes like a wound. He’s fighting not to love her in the way that he does because it’s controlling his life, but she is everything. She and Iris are his entire world. It’s an incredibly complicated and thorny thing that I don’t think either of them really understands. They just feel it.
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Right Full look Louis Vuitton
Daisy May Cooper is such a force in the show. What was it like to get to share this experience with her?
She’s a beautiful person to be with, but also a beautiful person to work with. I think we found really good professional chemistry and brought the right things out of each other. The show goes into some pretty dark and vulnerable places and I think it would be very hard to do it with someone who wasn’t looking after you. And so I hope that we both offered that to each other – I certainly feel like she did to me. She also just leads with humour – whatever the scene is, you know that there’s going to be joy and light with her. She doesn’t take herself seriously but she takes the work very seriously. I think what’s wonderful about Daisy in this show is that you are really seeing something different – of course, you’re seeing the incredible comedy expertise that she’s known for, but you’re also seeing something that is so spectacularly vulnerable. I think she’s fabulous in it. And I think that people who think they know Daisy as a performer will be surprised and delighted by what she’s doing on screen.
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Right Top, blazer, shoes AMI Paris, pants Wooyoungmi, necklace Sweet Lime Juice
The show presents a refreshing take on working-class stories - what to you makes it different from the way these experiences tend to be depicted on screen?
Something that Cash has said from the beginning is that she wanted this story to not be told with pity, but rather with joy and with a kind of punk and loud spirit to it. And I think the creators have really succeeded in bringing that. It’s also confrontational – I hope that people will have conflicting feelings when they watch it because that’s entirely the point. You are entertained and you are made to laugh, but you are also being presented with a very stark truth that is absolutely real.
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Interview by Martin Onufrowicz
Photography by Diego Hernández
Fashion by Steven Huang
Casting by Imagemachine CS
Grooming by Petra Sellge at The Wall Group
Stylist’s assistant Damini Rehal
