There’s a sensitivity to Barnes that comes across even down the line. Lockdown has been hard for my grandma,” he adds, “I’ve really wanted to visit her, but we haven’t been able to.” “We were able to give him a lovely funeral the week before lockdown in March. Just before the scene began, he had been looking at photos of his grandfather, who was dying of dementia and had only a few months to live. I was shattered, which I think helped my performance, because in the scene I had to be tired and upset.” “There were no chairs in the room, so I lay on this table with the blankets over me and fell asleep,” he says, “and woke up right before I had to go on set. They filmed it late, about 10.30 or 11 at night, and “a lovely costume lady called Martha” had given him some blankets. I ask him if he ever gets nervous, before the scene with Fiennes, for instance? Yes, he says. It’s been a strange year, as it has for everyone else, but whenever lockdowns have allowed, he’s been going to Warner Bros Studios in Hertfordshire to film a role in the upcoming reboot The Batman, in which he plays the mayor of Gotham’s son. “But I’ve really met Basil Brown.”īarnes is chatting to me over the phone from his home in south London, where he lives with his parents and two siblings. “I don’t think I’ve really met the proper Ralph Fiennes,” he laughs. Fiennes was the one actor that Barnes was nervous of meeting, having grown up watching him as Voldemort in the Harry Potter films and as M in the Bond movies, but he says: “The entire time, even the first day I met him, he wasn’t Ralph Fiennes. After it, Fiennes went over to him, Barnes tells me, and said, “Oh Archie, you should definitely be an actor.” It was a rare moment.
It’s a deeply moving performance from both actors. There are some things we just can’t succeed at. “When my father died, everyone said I had to look after my mother, and I failed…” the boy weeps. In one scene, 14-year-old Barnes goes toe-to-toe with Fiennes, who, as the self-taught archaeologist Basil Brown, tries to offer him some consolation when Robert realises his mother is dying. He had to hold his own with some of the giants of British acting: Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan, Ken Stott, Johnny Flynn and Lily James. Young Archie Barnes, who plays Robert, the son of Edith Pretty, owner of the land where the Anglo-Saxon ship burial was found, certainly didn’t have an easy task. Yet those who have enjoyed Netflix’s marvellous film about the 1939 Sutton Hoo excavation, The Dig, won’t fail to have noticed that Britain seems to have unearthed one of its own. or The Sixth Sense will attest, one of the things that leaves a lasting impression is the question of how America finds such brilliant child actors.
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