Mr. Jackson, in the new series The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, you play a 91-year-old man with dementia who suddenly regains all his memories thanks to an experimental treatment.

Would you say that this very emotional and dramatic role was one of the hardest of your long career?

no

Why not?

Because I read the novel the series is based on ten or twelve years ago and secured the rights to it.

So I've carried this story around with me for a long time - and whenever I wasn't busy with another project I've been thinking about Ptolemy Grey.

I've talked to makeup artists time and time again about how to make me look older;

I spoke to hair stylists about possible hairstyles for the role and to producers about why an hour and a half or two hour film isn't enough to tell the story.

When it finally came about that we were able to implement the project, I was better prepared than anyone else, and we had put together the best possible team.

You have experience with Alzheimer's in your family environment.

Didn't the role sometimes get too close for you?

You know, I'm not one of those so-called method actors, so my personal feelings don't play much of a role in my acting.

But what I naturally had through my experiences was understanding.

I watched my mother, but also my grandfather, my aunt and my uncle as they got worse and worse and lost their memory more and more.

Of course, those memories kept coming back to me when we were shooting scenes where Ptolemy is interacting with the people who care for him or standing disoriented in the street.

The look my mother had when she was trying to remember something stuck in my head.

Just like the learning process I had to go through,

that you simply can no longer ask certain questions and no longer have some conversations.

But it's not all just sad memories either.

What beautiful moments do you remember?

When my mother and my aunt, both with advanced Alzheimer's, sat together in my garden and had fun together like two children who have known each other all their lives - that is one of the funniest and most beautiful things I was able to experience.

And even if my mother sometimes sat in front of me and didn't seem to be there because she was so lost in herself, it sometimes broke my heart, but I learned to accept that at that moment she was working on someone else, for unreachable place for me but safe for her.

Of course, I tried to incorporate all these memories and experiences into the role so that the viewers can relate to them to a certain extent.

Especially when they may have points of contact with the topic themselves.

The character itself, this Ptolemy Grey, did you base it on a specific person in your life?