But as is often the case with both Dickens and Knight, it’s more complicated than that. “I think Jaggers represents big-city life, and the ambition and greed that comes with it,” Thomas said in a recent interview. “But as we spend more time with him, we start to see the subtleties, what motivates him as a man, and who he is.”
In general, Knight said, Dickens “either loves, likes or at least forgives his characters,” because he understands the circumstances that occasion their behaviors. He added: “It’s why he is seen as a great social reformer, and it’s what I try to do with someone like Jaggers. I am depicting the awful things he does, but you come to understand why, and forgive them.”
The same empathy is shown to Magwitch, the convict who changes Pip’s life. “It’s easy to just play the baddie, but more interesting to get to the human being within,” Harris said in a video interview, adding that reading the writings of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung had fed into his portrayal. “Magwitch is such an archetypal figure, someone who seems to have broken free, be outside the law,” Harris said. “You get an idea of what he might represent for the boy.”
In Knight’s version of the story, Pip is a feistier character than the innocent of the novel. “It’s easy to play him as naïve, but he is flawed, has elements to his character that are narcissistic and destructive,” Whitehead said. “I wanted to show him as having some fire in his belly.” He added that Knight’s script shows Pip’s ambition, his desire to rise in social class, driving him “like a moth to a flame.”
As a counterbalance to the darkness, Knight offers the possibility of redemption to Miss Havisham, whom Colman plays with imperious verve. Her way into the character, she said, came from Verity Hawkes, the show’s costume designer. “Rot is growing up the dress, and gets slightly more moldy as the scenes go by,” Colman wrote in an email. “There is a canker that Miss Havisham has allowed, welcomed even, in her heartbreak and desire for revenge.”
