Owain Yeoman: From 'Mentalist' to Benedict Arnold
This story contains spoilers about Monday's Season 3 finale of AMC’s Turn: Washington’s Spies. Stop now if you haven’t seen it; just know this being a history-based drama, the information has been out there for, oh, 235 years.
After six seasons and change on the CBS procedural hit The Mentalist, Owain Yeoman was ready for something new.
“I wanted to make a conscious effort to do something very different,” he explains. “I don’t think you ever expect something to go that long, but the flipside of that is that you never want people to just see you as one thing.”
So he went from Wayne Rigsby, California Bureau of Investigation agent to Benedict Arnold, America’s most notorious turncoat on AMC’s Turn: Washington’s Spies, joiningthe cast in its second season.
“When someone says to you, ‘We think you’re perfect to be the nation’s biggest traitor,’ that’s an interesting sell,” he laughs, recalling the producers’ pitch. “I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.”
That wasn’t the end of the pitch. “When (executive producer) Craig Silverstein was first discussing the role with me, he said, ‘We don’t want Benedict Arnold to be Benedict Arnold. We want him to come in like Tom Brady.’ We want him to be a guy who rallies and inspires people and then we see that festering discontent.’ But at the beginning, to have the chance to show him as heroic was a real challenge that I relished.”
Arnold’s list grievances with the American side included being passed over by Congress for promotion, having other generals take credit for his victories and being denied thousands of pounds in compensation for his expenses. And then there were the crippling leg injuries he sustained in defense of his country.
“It becomes a question of how many times can a man be kicked it until he does something about it,” Yeoman says of Arnold’s 1780 offer to surrender West Point to the British. “He’s fighting with a ragtag army. By this point, you realize as a military strategist, the best move is to jump to the other side because they look stronger.”
'Turn' star JJ Feild on finale and André's hair
During his research, he learned that, “When Washington (who’s played by Ian Kahn on the show) heard that Arnold had gone, he broke down and cried. That was a historically recorded fact. He said something to the effect of, ‘If Arnold is lost, then everything is lost.”
Meanwhile, the mere physical act of changing costumes hit him hard. “It was also very strange to put on that red coat,” he remembers. “I felt like I was defecting from Manchester City to Manchester United,” says the Welshman. “That’s about as high treason as it gets!”
Feeling out of place didn’t require too much acting for Yeoman, who was now interacting with cast members with whom he hadn’t spent much time. “It felt weird to be on different sets around different people. I felt a little alien — a little bit like Benedict Arnold did, I suppose.”
In Monday’s season finale, Arnold ran to safety behind British lines, where he didn’t exactly get the warmest of welcomes. The British agreed to pay Arnold a fortune for West Point, which they didn’t get. Even worse, they lost their intelligence chief, Major John André (JJ Feild), who was caught trying to cross back to British lines after meeting with Arnold.
“I’d trade you for André in a heartbeat if my hands were not tied,” a hostile General Henry Clinton told Arnold. “But we do not trade defectors for it would discourage new ones.” (André was hanged as a spy shortly afterward.)
Alexander Hamilton gets his 'Turn' on TV
Before André went to the gallows, however, Yeoman and Feild got one juicy scene together. “It “was a really nice way of distilling what the essence of the show is,” Yeoman says. “Here you have the biggest turn in history happening and it was infused with so many personal as well as political problems. When you boil it down, it’s not just two men fighting a war. It’s two men fighting about a woman (referring to André‘s paramour Peggy Shippen, who married Arnold and is played by Ksenia Solo). To see it on that micro and macro level was really interesting. It‘s unpleasant but there’s this horrible need for them to be allies. In both their views, it’s the way to move forward and win the war.”
Sadly, both were wrong.
“History is the ultimate spoiler with this show,” Yeoman says. “It’s no secret that André was heading in a bad way. The challenge of the show is how to conform to those historical expectations, to find something that blends historical fact and entertaining television. We’re trying to be both historically accurate but make something that is still exciting.”
He admits Turn has deviated from history with some characters. “The real John Simcoe wasn’t a psycho,” he says but Sam (Roukin) has taken it to this next level where you almost don’t care he wasn’t like that because it’s so brilliant to watch.”
Speaking of Simcoe, if the show gets a fourth season, the head of the Queen’s Rangers will be spending a fair amount of time with Arnold hunting down American spies. “For Arnold, it’s a very underhanded way to work. There’s no honor in it. But the real history was that Simcoe and Arnold led a force against his old allies like Washington. To do that with Simcoe will be a lot of fun. There are so many stories to be told there and it’s fascinating to see these old friends become adversaries.”
And while we’re on the subject of Washington, Yeoman reveals, “I have an amazing video of Ian doing Christopher Walken as George Washington talking to Benedict Arnold. Hopefully, I’ll be able to release it at some point.”