How to Train Your Dragon star Mason Thames: ‘My driver, Niall, would tell me the craziest stories about growing up in Belfast'
Antrim
is a star. You saw quite a bit of its blasted coasts in
Game of Thrones
. You will see a good deal more in what seems certain to be one of the summer's biggest films. The upcoming live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon – a merry romp that sticks close to the 2010
DreamWorks
animation – shot its studio sequences in
Belfast
and its exteriors on the unforgiving North Channel.
It is easy to get blase about this. But it is not so long ago that the notion of such a huge production landing in the North would have seemed preposterous.
Mason Thames, the buzzy lead of the film, has, for a young Texan, an admirable grasp of what went before. Filming at Harbour Studios and Titanic Studios, he could easily have shut himself off from the rest of the city. He would not have been the first movie star to leave a location having seen the inside of only its hotels and sound stages.
'I got a lot of time in Belfast and I loved it,' he tells me. 'I love the people there. Every morning I would set out with my driver – his name is Niall – and he would tell me the craziest stories about growing up in Belfast. I heard a lot of the history about the Troubles. He would drive me around at the weekends and tell me about the history of every street. There is so much history that goes into Belfast. While I was there I was learning about all that. It was very interesting.'
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One thing has not changed in Ulster: the weather. We know that the digital boffins now add a fair proportion of the rain, snow and hurricanes we see in big-budget pictures. But there is no faking the skin-stripping torrents that met the cast around Dunseverick Castle and Tollymore Forest. That must, to Thames, have seemed more foreign than the accents.
'Yeah, I'm from Texas, so I'm used to heat,' he says, laughing. 'I'm definitely not built for the cold. It was freezing. A lot of the other characters are tough – they're strong. Everybody is shivering. So it was tough for them. They really had to push through it.'
Thames plays Hiccup, the callow Viking who, defying all traditions, makes friends with one of the dragons that his family and friends regard as a mortal threat to the community.
'With Hiccup I actually used the cold to help me, to make him feel little,' he says. 'Shivering was okay. So I had the chance to use that. But some of the days were really tough with the weather. But I think the beautiful views and sets and landscapes we had made up for it.'
Mason Thames and Nico Parker in How to Train Your Dragon
He is a polite young man. He'll go far. Now 17, Thames, a lanky character with a lolloping delivery, trained first as a dancer (his sister is a professional ballerina) before finessing his way into acting.
'Then, when I was 10, one of my mom's friends said, 'Hey, get him into some toy modelling,'' he says. 'And, after that, the agent back in Texas said, 'Let's send him on some real auditions.' Mom was, like, 'I don't know what any of this means.' It was a big, big leap for us. So we went to LA for about six months, and my mom was still figuring out this world. We are still very new to it.'
Thames, who was born in Dallas, cannot locate any history of performance in the family. Dad was in real estate. His mom essentially now works as the young man's assistant. His first professional gig was on a show that occupies ground somewhere between cult popularity and 'best series you've never seen'. Thames perks up when I mention that I am firmly among those evangelising for
Apple TV+'s excellent For All Mankind
. He had a juvenile role in the opening series of the epic alternative history of the space programme.
'That was crazy. That was my first job,' he says. 'Crazy, weird memories. Good memories. But a long time ago.'
Lord bless him. I guess six or seven years does feel like a long time when you are 17. Anyway, after that he went back into the audition loop and, in 2021, started work as lead on what turned out to be the smash horror flick
The Black Phone
. Directed by Scott Derrickson, the adaptation of Joe Hill's shocker took $161 million on an $18 million budget and put Thames in the spotlight. Good-looking with a quirky manner, he was just the sort of fellow casting agents fight over. Dean DeBlois, director of both the current How to Train Your Dragon and the 2011
animated version
, discovered his star at 30,000 feet.
'He was on a plane, and his husband was watching The Black Phone,' Thames says. 'And he looks over to Dean and he was, like, 'Have you seen this movie?' And Dean starts watching the movie. He sees me, and he calls Lucy, the casting director, and is, like, 'Hey, who is this kid? Why is he not auditioning? Let's get him in the room.' And, because of that movie, I got in the room.'
The Black Phone: Brady Hepner and Mason Thames in the 2021 horror film. Photograph: PA Photo/Universal Studios/Fred Norris
I would imagine great pressure must come with being the lead on a film of this scale. The Black Phone was not a tiny movie, but the production cannot compare with the behemoth that is How to Train Your Dragon. The original film, adapted from a much-loved book by Cressida Cowell, took close to $500 million. The
first sequel
made a fair bit more than that.
Universal Pictures is hoping the current project, co-starring
Gerard Butler
and Nico Parker, will function as one of its tent-pole releases of the young summer.
[
'How to Train Your Dragon': The franchise that inspired a generation of young animators
Opens in new window
]
'Going in, the pressure was already there, because this is such a well-established world in the first place,' Thames says. 'Stepping into those shoes already is a lot of pressure – from me wanting to please the fans and make them happy. But, at the same time, like, I really just wanted to make
me
happy. Because I'm such a fan of the original. I love Hiccup so much.'
I get the sense that Thames can handle the pressure. He seems enthused, but not overpowered, by the attention that is now coming his way. A sequel to The Black Phone arrives in October. Everyone is expecting How to Train Your Dragon to deliver a string of lucrative successors. Just look how well the current live-action update of Disney's Lilo & Stitch is doing.
We trust Thames won't forget his time in Belfast as work keeps rolling in. It sounds as if the Texan felt at home there.
'I saw similarities in Texas and Belfast as regards the people at least,' he says. 'Where I am from in Texas, you walk into a store and can just strike up a conversation. You can just talk to them for a little bit. In Belfast you can go into a coffee shop and, if there's a lady sitting down, you can sit next to her and have an hour-long conversation. I think that's the most special thing about places and people in general.'
Come back soon, wee man.
How to Train Your Dragon is in cinemas from Monday, June 9th
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Opens in new window ] Schindler's List, from 1993, secured his place in the firmament. It is said that, after many auditions for the role, Spielberg's mother-in-law eventually identified him as the only man for the job. 'I've been told everyone was chasing that role,' he told me. 'I know that Kevin Costner, who was a huge star, wanted the part and he would have been very good. I believe Robert Duvall was mentioned at one stage.' Duvall, maybe. But Costner? Such speculation is now pointless. There's a stoic gentleness to Neeson that was perfectly suited to the role of a playboy businessman who, against his everyday nature, finds himself softening to the plight of German Jews as the Holocaust gathers pace. He has the gangly integrity of Gary Cooper, but with none of that actor's ingenuous, aw-shucks naivety. Early years as a boxer and a brewery worker hardened his frame. Neeson knows how to be a serious man. 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The film won the Golden Lion at Venice, where Neeson picked up the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. Photograph: David James Neeson is from a long way north of Cork (well, what counts as a long way in Ireland). He was already a decade older than Collins at the time of his death. But Jordan stuck with his old pal and, whatever disputes there were about the film's political leanings, few questioned the worth of that lead performance. 'It was kind of terrifying because it was a film I wanted to make but to me it was just a film,' Jordan later said. 'I'd known Liam since he was in the Project Arts Centre in Dublin and when I was writing the script initially I spoke to him about it, and I said if I ever get to do this I'd like to do it with you.' Schindler's List surely helped that dream come true. In 2022 Neeson was asked why Michael Collins took so long to happen. 'Well, I think because of the war in Ireland,' he said. 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Barely a year goes by without him craggily rescuing hostages from a speeding train or hang-gliding into a narco-den. His most recent roles were Mike McCann in Ice Road: Vengeance and (no joke) Thug in Absolution. If you can pull that off at 73 then why not? His biggest challenge may, however, be getting through the press tour for The Naked Gun without another incidence of blurting. His history here is extraordinary. We have mentioned his non-retirement in 2002. Ten years later it was reported he was thinking of becoming a Muslim. 'Ah, now that was taken out of context,' he told me. 'I remember doing a picture in Istanbul. The five calls to prayer initially drove me crazy. But after a few weeks I absolutely loved it. I bought a CD so that I could play it when I got back to New York. So then I was becoming a Muslim ...' In 2018, on the Late Late Show, he said that the fallout from the Harvey Weinstein scandal had caused 'a bit of a witch-hunt' and noted that he was 'on the fence' about allegations concerning Dustin Hoffman. All of these disturbances were nothing as to the flak that landed when, a year after the Late Late incident, in a routine promotional interview, he told how, after a friend was raped by a black man, he went out ' with a cosh, hoping I'd be approached by somebody '. It got worse. 'I'm ashamed to say that, and I did it for maybe a week – hoping some [air quote gesture] 'black b**tard' would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him,' he continued. After the story broke Neeson went on Good Morning America and offered a convincing, self-lacerating gloss on the situation. The world moved on. Most got that he had simply chosen the oddest imaginable place to make a confession about a regretted incident. No subsequent blurt has attracted such attention. But his PR handlers will be chewing their nails in the lead up to the unveiling of The Naked Gun. Neeson is an absolute original. Almost entirely in good ways.
