“overspeak”. If you had to describe the voice—or the man—in one word, it would be “thoughtful”. “On paper, it’s pretty obvious what kind of drama Strike

Back is,” he continues, “but the driving challenge for me and the scriptwriters and directors was to try to capture the emotional centre of John Porter. “How does a man become a trained killer and then

go home and put his arms around his wife and rock his baby daughter to sleep? How can a soldier not have a conscience about what he’s being asked to do? “When I was researching the character, I read a lot

of material on war and the nature of killing. There was a very surprising statistic—I think it was from the Napoleonic Wars—about the number of muskets they found on the battlefield that hadn’t been fired. And it still happens: when the call to fire comes, some soldiers either fire high or they simply don’t fire. It’s like conscientious objecting on the battlefield; some people, when it comes right down to it, won’t or can’t kill in cold blood. I was surprised—and slightly relieved—to know it.”

War films have come a long way from the era of patriotic

blockbusters such as The Dambusters or In Which We

Serve (the latter was put out as part of the British War Effort). “That blind patriotism isn’t there now,” says Armitage. “Our instinct, as civilians, is to question. Also, the nature of warfare has changed completely since the Second World War. There is still a front line—there are people on the streets in Afghanistan—but so many of the big decisions are taken by people pushing buttons in back rooms. “Strike Back really drives that point home. I worried for a time that John Porter was just going to be a tool for the manipulators back in Whitehall, but he’s kind of saved from that by his own political mind.” He also has the advantage of an astonishing physique.

Armitage trained hard with ex-SAS operatives to develop bullet-bouncing pecs and the appropriate body language: “A lot of the preparation for the character was physical —partly because I needed to get through the shoot [the series was filmed on location in the South African Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24