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Justin Canning

desert]—but mostly because I wanted Porter to look as if he was SAS, and not just someone who was pumped up because he was working out in a gym eight hours a day. I didn’t want the character to look ‘buff’. I wanted him to look strong.” Macho types will doubtless appreciate the distinction.

Female fans (and they are legion; when Armitage, who’s single and lives in south-east London, made his romantic debut in North & South, BBC switchboards were jammed with heavy breathing) will just be happy their man spends a good part of Strike Back with his shirt off. A speck of lint on his blue jeans suddenly demands the actor’s attention. Is he embarrassed by his towering sex-symbol status, or just bored?

“Baffled,” says Armitage, shortly, but he follows through with a genuinely bemused smile, before explaining that the elaborate body-wound make-up applied for Strike Back mitigated strongly against gratuitous nudity. (“It took half an hour to get that shirt off.”) The produc- tion, he points out, was similarly sparing about the depiction of extreme violence.

“On the one hand, we decided that at no point must we make the violence gratuitous, or glorified, or any more elevated than it really is. On the other, there must be a point in a soldier’s career where he feels like he’s in a war movie. There is this state of mind which is called ‘berserking’. You get it in war and you get it in football crowds— where something triggers the adrenalin and there is a kind of surge mentality; you break through to a place where

everything suddenly becomes much more animal. I hope we’ve accessed a bit of that.”

Read more in the May issue of

Reader’s Digest

How does he feel about

his sex- symbol status?

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